excellent literature review example

excellent literature review example

Crafting an Exceptional Literature Review: A Comprehensive Guide for Researchers

1. Introduction to Literature Review

The literature review is considered as an analytical overview of relevant literature on the chosen area of focus, providing knowledge and findings to the candidate’s research. The overview contains evaluation, summary, and classification of the documents that are pre-examined, which considerably helps the candidates to substantiate the significance of the study.

In the context of research, primary research articles, theses, research reports, and academic and professional books are reviewed critically in literature review orally, experimental, or theoretical in nature. These documents, such as literature reviews, doctrine and philosophical documents, letters to the editor, editorial, academic points of view, book reviews, and news and views, are usually analyzed. In more complex work, the literature review goes over more than just a summary of the past research, providing a new explanation of each old or combining new and old interpretations. It is one of the most crucial components of the research design.

The literature study examines and synthesizes the historical and existing understanding of a particular subject to provide scholarly context. The purpose of a literature review is to: – Define a study issue to be investigated – Understand the issues in and to find relationships among various reports on related themes from a variety of sources and fields – Enable new work to be put into perspective – Ensure that techniques and theories not yield findings – Comprehend and evaluate the ways of the already conducted study – Identify the gap of understanding and issues – Fix methodological and theoretical defects

The current study’s aim and flow are also generally used.

2. Purpose and Significance of Literature Review

The literature review holds utmost significance in academic writings, to be more precise, within research. It sheds light on clarifying to the readers the approach being followed from a certain focus within the limited lens of the existing knowledge of the topic. The authors review the relevant published work of the contributors to contemporary knowledge within the focused context. Researchers carry out a review of existing literature to ensure either of the objectives: that their research questions have not been answered before, or to assess the gap within the existing knowledge base of a specific area, or to develop a strong argument based on evidence. In contrast to summaries that draw conclusions enclosed within a given study, literature reviews are methodically done reviews of published literature reflecting back on about 10-20 years of scholarly works.

In literature, generally, a reviewer tries to make an infrastructure for a line of argument (an article, paragraph, and section) by determining the issues and evidence. It relates and contrasts the published arguments, proposes different concepts, and reviews evidence and confirms to give an account of the accessible facts. It also reports the insightful readers about the challenges, explanations, and debates around a circle of questions or the research question, with the potential to develop innovative organization of the explored. Therefore, the literature review is the proof of a contribution to scholarship. It displays that the writer has a complete interpretation of exhaustive research and systematic studies, thereby making professional judgments amongst various theories, standpoints, methodologies, and conclusions.

3. Strategies for Conducting a Literature Review

Researchers require a comprehensive toolkit to approach and execute the literature review process. Various strategies and procedures should be routinely used to conduct a literature review, including: top-down and bottom-up searching, the use of systematic, scoping, and integrative review methods; following the Citation Tracking System and Frame-based reading techniques, as well as the use of software and coding for analysis such as NVivo or QDA Miner. Reading and reviewing literature necessitates a wide range of writing techniques, good note-taking, and effective citation and managing bibliographies. Bureau of KPWKM Malaysia (2020) states that the literature review is a supportive document creating insights that the development objective revolves around forming community sense, increasing community engagement, shaping social capital, or changing mindsets and values. The main purposes of a literature review, as revealed in all these studies, include setting a stage for the research, identifying research gaps, justifying the significance of the study, operationalizing key concepts, showing the relationship between the study and current knowledge, setting the conceptual framework for the study, showing the study methodology enables disclosure of data, ensuring duplication is avoided, and convincing that the research results are valid.

In general, literature reviews should include recent literature (five years or less preferably), existing literature, seminal work, or the most frequently cited work, most-cited articles or references, different literature, original studies, and replicated studies. The method of conducting a literature review is as important as the review itself (Armstrong et al., 2007 and Grant and Booth, 2009) because how the review is conducted and written is open to auditing and scrutiny. It is important to mention how the articles have been identified, searched, and databases used. This is important to show that all methods have been followed as there could have been an overlap of a variety of headings. IDENTIFY WHAT APPROACH OR REVIEW TYPE APPLIES (Expressio unius est exclusio alterius). Once the search has been carried out, the next challenge is to decide which articles or reports should be reviewed. Therefore, a clear understanding of what sort of review a researcher is planning to produce is important. Some of the more common reviews in the discipline of accounting and finance include the following reviews with increasingly systematic headings: Feature article, Contemporary Perspective, CQ Librarians’ choice, Advances in management accounting, Handbook for realist evaluators, and pclrurralist address.

4. Critical Analysis and Synthesis of Literature

The core ingredient that underlines a good literature review is critical analysis and synthesis. Once you have searched for the literature and gathered the primary sources, you need to analyze the key findings and synthesize the details that are necessary to include in your review. Through the critical analysis, go far beyond mere description of the material and provide a sophisticated and in-depth assessment of the source literature. For each piece of literature, describe what has been concluded or found, and then analyze the reliability of the conclusion: was the study accomplished scientifically, and was it reliable and valid? For each article, summarize the information and provide critical and analytical annotations. However, you should also argue different points of view, including your own.

Synthesis refers to combining all the reviewed literature into a single whole to produce new meaning. You will need to present a narrative account of the literature considering relationships between the various topics and the sources’ needs and exact points of view. It is important to indicate what details are needed in the synthesis. Make sure you are consistent with the requirements of your reviewers, and that you include details relevant to your research or review. The major problems addressed as you synthesize are the thematic organization, the argument or story line, and the worth or value of the literature. It is a good idea to connect the literature to your hypotheses and questions, in order to inform the reader logically.

5. Best Practices and Common Pitfalls in Literature Review

Best practices among researchers To align with common research practice, literature reviews are frequently started and completed in parallel to designing, executing, and analyzing new research. This is largely because researchers (and reviewers alike) expect some discussion of prior work or foundational ideas, not exclusively new data, methodologies, or discussions solely centered on new questions or results. We also believe that the creation of a comprehensive literature review can be used as a way to familiarize oneself with the background literature and begin making connections between the current work and past studies. This is especially true in interdisciplinary spaces, where at least part of the audience may not be regularly reading journals or attending conferences which would be considered “core” to a given topic. Finally, strong literature reviews provide a more holistic background of a given topic than an instructor, collaborator, reviewer, or practitioner would get simply by scanning titles of journal issues or search engine results.

Pitfalls The following list is meant to provide a brief overview of potential problem areas in crafting an effective literature review. The items below will be discussed in more detail following the list and provide a somewhat-structured starting point from which an author can consider their literature review process. While useful as a reference for self-reflection and iterative revision, a prescriptive approach to the process of conducting a review process presents two key challenges. First, the process, that is, the steps involved and potential outputs desired, will largely be a function of the domain of research, the research problem thus the research questions. Second, while useful as a guide, a step-by-step process to achieving the outcome does not necessarily align with how knowledge about a given field accumulates. That is, while strategic, the steps below are not necessarily linear or sequential; they are recursive and revizeable as an author becomes more familiar with the field into which they are writing.