If you write an academic paper or dissertation, you will have to make a literature review and put your research within the existing knowledge. This part of literature review is usually included in the introduction. You may also be assigned to write a literature review as an independent paper. In these two cases, although the contents look slightly different, the process of literature review will follow the same steps.
Step 1: Collect, evaluate and select documents.
Before starting literature retrieval, you need to determine a research topic. If you are writing an academic paper or a literature review part of a dissertation, the paper you are looking for needs to be related to your research problem. If you are writing an independent literature review, the research topics you choose and the problems you find need to guide your next research work.
1, use keywords and citations to retrieve documents.
First, create a list of keywords related to your research topics and questions. Some useful databases for searching journals and articles include: school library catalogue, Google Academic, JSTOR, EBSCO, Project Muse (humanities and social sciences), Medline (life sciences and biomedicine), EconLit (economics) and Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science).
When you find a useful article, you can check its reference list to find more related resources. Pay special attention to articles that are repeatedly cited, which may not appear in your keyword search. If the same authors, books or articles continue to appear in your sight, be sure to find them. You can find out how many times an article has been cited in Google Academic. Many citations indicate that this article has great influence in this field.
2, evaluation and selection of sources
You don't have the time and energy to read all the articles on this topic. You can determine whether the articles are useful by reading the abstracts. You must evaluate which resources are most valuable and most relevant to your problem.
For each document, ask yourself: What is the problem that the author wants to solve? What are the key concepts and how are they defined? What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the research use an established framework or adopt innovative methods? What are the results and conclusions of the study? How does this document relate to other documents in this field? Does it confirm, increase or challenge the established knowledge system? How does this document help you understand this topic? What are its main viewpoints and arguments? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this research?
This will ensure that the sources you use are credible, and that any landmark research and major theories you read are within your research field. The scope of rereading will depend on your subject and discipline: in natural science, you usually only reread the latest literature, but in the humanities, you may consider it from a long-term historical perspective (for example, tracking how the meaning of a concept changes over time).
3. Take notes and quote your information.
When you read the literature, you should also start the writing process. Take notes while reading the literature. These words can be included in your literature review text later. At the same time, pay attention to the use of quotations to avoid plagiarism.
It is helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you can compile complete citation information and write a summary and analysis for each source. This will help you remember what you have read and save review time in the later writing process.
Step 2: Find contacts and topics.
To start organizing the arguments and structure of your literature review, you need to determine the relationship between the documents you read. According to your reading and notes, you can find that:
Trends and patterns (theories, methods or results): Will some methods continue to be used or be eliminated over time?
Title: What problems or concepts appear repeatedly in different documents?
Debate, conflict and contradiction: where are these contradictions?
Key Literature: Has any influential theory or research changed the research direction in this field?
Blank: What is missing in the literature? Are there any defects to be solved?
This step will help you determine the structure of the literature review and show how your own research will contribute to the existing knowledge.
Step 3: Plan the structure of your literature review.
There are many ways to organize the text of literature review. Before you start writing, you should have a general understanding of your strategy. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine these strategies. For example, your overall structure may be thematic, but each topic will be discussed in chronological order.
1, chronology
The easiest way is to follow the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, please be careful to avoid simply listing and stacking materials. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points and key discussions that form the direction of this field. How these processes happened and why they developed like this need to be explained.
2. Special topics
If you have found some recurring central themes, you can divide the literature review into sub-parts involving different aspects of the theme.
For example, if you are looking for literature on unequal medical insurance policies for immigrants, key topics may include medical insurance policies, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status and economic opportunities.
3. Methodology
If we focus on the various research methods used, we may need to compare the results and conclusions of different methods. For example, look at the results of qualitative and quantitative research; Discuss how empirical research and theoretical research explore this theme; Literature is divided into three sources: sociology, history and culturology.
4. Theory
Literature review is usually a theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss the theories, models and definitions of various key concepts. You may argue about the relevance of specific theoretical methods, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step 4: Write a literature review.
Like other academic papers, your literature review should have an introduction, a theme and a conclusion. What you include in each article depends on the purpose of your literature review.
1, Introduction
The introduction should clearly define the focus and purpose of literature review.
Literature review of academic papers: If you take literature review as a part of academic papers, reiterate your core issues or research issues and make a brief summary of academic background. You can emphasize the timeliness of this topic ("A lot of recent studies have focused on the issue of X"), or you can emphasize a blank in the literature ("Although there are many studies on X, few researchers have considered the issue of X").
Independent Literature Review: If you are writing an independent paper, give some background and importance about this topic, discuss the scope of the literature you will review (for example, the time of your source), and explain your goals. What new knowledge and research direction will you get from the literature?
2, the main body
According to the length of your literature review, you can divide the text into several sections. You can use subheadings for each topic, time period or method. When writing an article, you can follow the following suggestions:
1) summary and synthesis: summarize the main points of various sources and combine them into a coherent whole.
2) Analysis and interpretation: Don't just interpret other people's research results. If possible, add your own explanation and discuss the significance of the findings related to the whole literature.
3) Critical evaluation: Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your resources.
4) Write in well-structured paragraphs.
3. Conclusion
In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have obtained from the literature and emphasize their importance.
Literature review of academic papers: If literature review is part of your academic papers, explain how your research fills gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you can use existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research.
Summary of independent literature: If you write an independent paper, you can discuss the overall significance of the literature, or make suggestions for future research according to the problems you find.
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