how to start a literature review

how to start a literature review

How to Start a Literature Review

1. Introduction

The idea behind Ploughing is to help you recall how you found some information and to get that information well organised into printouts and notes. In return this will save you hours of re-reading or reviewing material and prevent time wastage from losing your train of thought. Coming up with your three most important or linked ideas from your sources and creating a well constructed phrase or question on each will also aid you as these may later become content or subheadings in your writing. Using these phrases or questions as search terms and putting them through your library database will help to locate and keep relevant the information answering these questions. This helps to steer literature review writing more towards answering specific information, rather than the contextless compare and contrast of sources.

Starting a literature review can be a daunting task for any writer. It involves a lot of reading and researching. You must read through your sources in order to locate or pull together information, and then you’ll need to compare and contrast all this information, determining what is important or applicable to your topic. Often times the information review process can be a bit haphazard and it seems to build up to “I’ve read all this stuff, now what was that idea I had and where did I see that information?” This is not an uncommon scenario for the tasks involved in writing a literature review. But there is a smarter way to start your literature review. And it is found through a technique called Ploughing.

2. Identifying the Research Question

Identifying the research question is the first step in conducting a literature review. The research question should be a clear, focused question that summarizes the issue that the researcher will investigate in the review. It is the core of the study and will guide the researcher’s selection of data, extraction of data from various sources, and possibly the statistical analysis of that data. A well-defined question will help identify the scope of the review, which in turn helps the researcher identify the types of studies and evidence that are relevant to the review. This is particularly important in a literature review which often has a very broad scope. A well-defined research question will also make sure that the researcher stays on track and does not waste time and resources analyzing studies that are not relevant to the review. The PICO system is a useful tool for creating a well-defined question. PICO stands for: – P: Population or the problem to be studied – I: Intervention – C: Comparison (if applicable) – O: Outcome of interest

3. Conducting a Comprehensive Literature Search

Getting the right start is just as important in conducting a literature review as in any other project. The quality and thoroughness of your initial search can directly affect the final result. If you’ve conducted the search well, this should be apparent in the literature you include (or more importantly exclude) from your review. A comprehensive search ensures that you have enough material available to meet the requirements of the review, allows you to identify relevant key issues in the literature, build a solid theoretical framework, and minimizes the risk of drawing incorrect conclusions. To conduct a comprehensive literature search, you’ll need to be organized. Make use of lists and tables to keep track of your search efforts and document the keywords and terms you use. It is also useful to document the sources of the search terms, such as databases, the date, and the results. Duplication of effort might occur if your documentation is poor. If you can get access to a personal bibliographic database, such as Endnote, RefWorks, or Zotero, it can significantly reduce wasted time by allowing you to store and organize search results.

4. Evaluating and Analyzing the Literature

Once you have found the information you require, it is important to evaluate these resources. A good evaluation is a careful assessment of the value of a resource. To evaluate the resources you have found, first make sure they are scholarly resources. There are certain criteria that must be met for a resource to be considered scholarly. Do the authors have the necessary credentials to write on the topic? Are there conflicts of interest that may affect the credibility of the work? Is the research funded by an organization that may slant the findings? The best way to find out if a resource is scholarly is to look for peer-reviewed articles from academic journals. An additional way to help verify the resource is to compare the information found in the abstract, introduction, or conclusion to the information found at another source. If the information is unbiased and well-researched, it is likely to be scholarly.

5. Writing the Literature Review

Before you even write the review, you should state your conclusions at the review stage. This isn’t advisable. Your conclusions at the review stage will dictate whether you carry on to the next stage or have to return to the review question. And writing a review with continually returning to the review question will be a useful marker to the reader that the questioning review process has been reflected in the written report.

The results of the review In formulating a review question, you should try to answer a question that will be interesting and important with regard to the public or to other researchers. And its outcome is a review is expected to find evidence which can be integrated into a research method and fully assessed in addressing a review question. In terms of writing a review for publication, the objectives of the review should ultimately dictate the writing process up to the point of manuscript submission.

Thirdly, is the error of counting on secondary sources instead of carrying out a personal evaluation of the evidence within the study. If you’re writing a literature review, you should also consider whether the review should include all analytical components of the research. More on this later. Reviews, whether a full review or a short review, should include an objective, methodologically consistent attempt to locate and look at the evidence for its analytical findings. In practice, you will spend much of your time at the review stage, searching for and reading articles. This is the most time-consuming part of the review. In the light of the above errors, the relative ease of locating articles and studies using electronic sources such as PsychINFO or on the Internet will ensure you’ll find relevant material for your review. (Long-winded sentence).

Writing the review At the initial stage of your review, you need to decide what kind of review you want to write. If your review is extensive, choose a wide context. However, if the review is in the form of a literature review, you should select a narrowly defined topic. Whether your review has a narrow or wide context, you should always make sure you’ve answered the basic questions, such as the who, the when, the where, and the how of your review.