Writing a Literature Review - What is Literature Review?
Are you looking for what is a literature review? If yes, you are at the right post. This post contains a basic idea of the literature review.
I am Saeed Ali, a BS scholar and researcher. The following article contains five steps in writing a literature review introduced by Creswell.
What is a literature review?
A literature review is written content present on any topic, which best describes the past and present knowledge of any study. Largely, literature is said to be the content published in journal articles. A good literature review, however, might also contain the information drawn from books, newspapers, government documents and conference papers. A researcher may cite articles that are both qualitative and quantitative in nature.
A literature review is an activity of adding new information to the existing literature. On the other hand, duplicate research material will not add to the literature.
Furthermore, conduct a literature review to convince a supervisor or other researchers that they need your study. And the need can be defined as learning new ideas and sharing the latest findings; also these practices can improve your productivity.
While conducting a literature review aids a researcher to improve or build research skills in using the library and being an investigator. Moreover, researchers may build their advanced techniques and skills to use search engines. As far as reading the literature is concerned it helps the researcher to learn how other scholars conducted research studies and aid you find productive examples and models in the literature for your research.
According to Deslandes and Bertrand (2005), a quantitative study discusses literature extensively at the start of a study. It serves two important purposes: firstly, it evaluates the importance of the research problem, and secondly, it delivers a rationale for the study and research questions or hypotheses. Furthermore, the authors also embody the literature review at the end of the study, comparing the prior predictions or expectations with the result of the current study.
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On the other hand, the literature review in qualitative study serves a slightly distant purpose. As previously mentioned that researchers conduct a literature review at the beginning of the study to discuss the importance of the research problem (Shelden et al., 2010). Nonetheless, the authors discuss the literature review extensively at the start of the study. In this way, participants utter the problem of being constrained by the views of others from the literature. In addition, researchers use the previous literature, in the end, to support the findings, as well as compare and contrast their study. Indeed, the researchers do not predict the finding in the qualitative study but they are interested in whether the findings of the study support the advanced in the literature.
Five Steps of Writing a Literature Review
As we discussed what is a literature review. There are common steps in conducting a literature review whether the study is qualitative or quantitative. These steps aid you to read and comprehend the research study. These five steps are typically interrelated while conducting a literature review. If you conducting literature for your personal use then the following four steps are applicable in this practice. According to Creswell, all these five steps researchers use to proceed with a literature review:
- Identification of key terms that you will use while searching for literature.
- Locate literature about a topic by consulting several types of materials and databases, whether those are available at an academic library or on the Internet.
- Critical evaluation and selection of literature for your review.
- Organization of the literature that you have selected by taking notes or abstracting the literature as well as developing a visual diagram of it.
- Write a literature review which is the result of the above steps, including reports summaries of the literature for inclusion in the research report.
