What Is A Literature Review?
A Literature review is a recap of previously published work from various resources. It contains what the possible future research on a specific subject will be, based on the identified gaps. It provides the audience with an overview of previously published knowledge. We cannot neglect the review of the research in the dissertaion section because it is a very important step for getting it approved. Ideal literature must have good research questions and should use relevant theoretical methodology. Writing a literature review is an important part for postgraduate and graduate students. Conducting the right research and gathering relevant material for the literature analysis section is quite hectic for students. If you are also struggling with the review section of your literature, then you can follow the tips mentioned below to set the right direction.
Importance Of Literature Review:
The important function of a qualitative review of your literature is its focus on a research problem; it adds new knowledge to the topics you learned. It brings clarity to your research and builds up your finding inefficiently.
Tips For Approaching Your Literature Review
1. Broaden your search area:
The main goal of the research is to enable researchers to learn new knowledge on a specific topic. It improves the researcher’s problem-solving skills and helps them explore new challenges. Broadening your topic means expanding your research by using subject-relevant material. You can start the research with a broader topic and collect relevant resources. If you choose a topic that is too narrow, you will face many hurdles in finding relevant material on your topic. The rate of complexity will also be reduced by broadening your area of research because it cuts out details which leads to limitations and lost research opportunities. However, if you feel that you are unable to broaden the research, you may hire PhD dissertation writing services.
2. Search For Literature:
The literature search is done to explore published literature on a specific topic. The literature search aims to find scholarly articles on your topic. It is a critical component in literature writing because you have to present information in the form of evidence. It also tells you the complexity and scope of the problem and provides the best possible evidence on your topic. Without doing this, you cannot complete your literature review.
Steps for literature Search success:
The below steps will give you a good foundation in literature search:
- Make a search strategy which you will follow throughout the search
- Identify a database to search for material and information
- For good output, conduct your search in more than one database.
- Do not waste time searching irrelevant articles
- The literature search is a process but does not forget to organize your results at the end of the research
3. Make Use Of The Right Keywords:
One of the most common mistakes which most people make is that they start searching with irrelevant keywords. The right keywords are always in line with your topic. “If your topic is what are applications of Artificial intelligence, ” then your keyword is applications of Artificial intelligence. Keywords are very helpful for getting relevant results. The other way to find relevant data is to use double quotation marks on keywords. When you search by putting double quotations on keywords in any database, you can get more relevant data which you can use in writing a literature review.
4. Make Good Notes While Reading:
In writing an authentic literature review, you go through many articles and get many good pieces of information. It is very hard to memorize all the information, and you often miss some. So our suggestion is while reading an article, make notes if you find anything informative or anything which you will use in your review of your literature. You cannot use notes directly in your final work without rewriting, rethinking and restructuring them according to your needs.
5. Find A Logical Structure:
An unstructured literature review never grabs the reader’s attention. A good review of your literature always has features like introduction, methods, results and discussions. How does the researcher maintain the flow in the body of the review? The answer is that researchers can maintain the flow of the body by using mind-mapping techniques to create a flow in the information. A careful part of the review is making relevant diagrams and figures, which will give the reader helpful information about a topic.
6. Be Up-To-Date, But Do Not Forget Old Studies:
In most cases, researchers use current data in a literature review. They neglect old data. It is the wrong approach because old theories do not change with time. It is the information which gets updated based on those theories. Hence it would help if you did not forget old studies in pursuit of finding updated data.
7. Make use of feedback:
Feedback is a vital step in writing a good literature review. Feedback helps you to find out errors and mistakes in your review draft. You can also get your feedback by sending your review draft to some friends and instructors.
8. Proofread and Edit your literature:
When you complete the literature review draft, it’s time to proofread your literature. Proofreading means you have to remove all unnecessary information from your draft. You have to arrange all data in separate sections and ensure no mistakes are in the content.
Conclusion
The literature review is a hectic process, but if you broaden your research topic and choose the right keywords to research the data, you will get the desired data easily. I have mentioned some best approaches you can use to write a quality review. Try to complete it before the deadline, so you will have plenty of time to proofread it. Hopefully, this article will help you in writing your literature review.
