Preparing Literature Templates

by admin · Published December 28, 2020 · Updated January 2, 2021

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GENERAL GUIDELINES FOR PREPARING LITERATURE REVIEWS

Introduction to literature review:

In order to qualify for doctorate or PHD, you are required to write an original research paper and publish it. There are hundreds of research papers published each month. While most research papers are written on different topics, there are similar papers that you can find too. It is possible that the topic you choose to write the literature is not new and scholars are writing on that same topic for decades. A literature review is the process of surveying and evaluating all the available papers and researches on a particular topic and then writing a summary that includes key concepts, similarities and differences in all of these papers.

Guidelines to prepare literature review:

1. Understand the purpose:

The basic definition of a literature review stays the same but the purpose and type changes with each time. For instance, you might need to write a literature review of your own research paper or thesis to establish its connection with existing materials and to point out the gaps that your research paper will fill. On the other hand, you might be asked to write a literature review of an existing content i.e. thesis, doctorial research paper etc and in your review, you talk about the strengths and weaknesses and the unanswered questions in the research paper. Before preparing the literature review, make sure to understand its purpose and use.

2. Find relevant literature:

Before starting to search for the literature, you should be able to understand the primary topic first. As discussed above, if you are writing the literature review for your own paper, you should look for relevant material i.e. thesis, research papers and other literature that is somehow linked with your paper. On the other hand, if this literature review is sort of an assignment, you should focus on a question that you want to answer.

3. Select sources after evaluation:

Keep in mind that it’s not possible to read and review each available literature on the internet and no matter how much time you spend, you can’t go through all of the thesis and research papers and doctorial researches. A pro tip here is to answer a few questions before selecting a source for review. In order to select the source, you should see how credible it is, what questions are answered by the author, how close it is connected with the primary literature and what conclusions the study has.

4. Spot gaps, themes and debates:

Once you have selected a few of the sources for literature review, next part is very crucial. This is where you review each of the source and try to answer vital questions i.e. what the connections between each of the source are and if each theory answers the questions in the same manner regardless of when they were created. Then come the questions i.e. questions that are similar in all theories, what are the disagree points where these papers have conflicts, among all the sources, is there a research paper that changed the entire direction of that specific field and if something is missing in the original research paper.

5. Select the structure of review:

Once above steps are completed, it’s time to actually start writing your literature review. There are different approaches to write the review including; chronological, thematic, methodological and theoretical. For instance, in chronological structure, you just start with the first paper and start writing development over time till the latest paper that you can find. On the other hand, when you use theoretical structure, you can write the literature review by discussing the theories and discussions from each paper on the primary topic.

6. Write the literature review:

Once you finalize the structure, it’s time to start writing the review. Regardless of the type of the review, each of them has three basic portions; introduction, main body and conclusion. Which portions gets most of the focus mainly depends on the purpose and type of the literature