literature review title page

literature review title page

The Impact of Literature Review in Research

1. Introduction

In the last few years, the role of literature review in the research process has become an increasingly elaborate issue. Some newcomers to research are not familiar with its importance and usually omit it. This results in a great loss of fundamental and profound knowledge in certain fields, such as medicine, which might assume it has included all essential evidence-based details due to abundant resources in the form of written texts, such as guidelines and expert opinions through seminars, etc. On the other hand, the common belief that literature review is only about “describing” others’ work by rearranging each sentence written by the author using synonyms has affected the quality of the literature itself. These are not surprising because literature review is a very complicated endeavor that requires the reviewer to possess wide and complex knowledge in a certain field. However, the efforts are always worthwhile, for a good literature review will aid the research process in multiple ways. Through this article, I will discuss the impact of literature review, its types, and what a beginner researcher should do to produce a high-quality literature review.

2. Importance of Literature Review

The amount of information available today is staggering. There are literally millions of books, articles, journals, and reference materials on every subject imaginable. Without some form of system to sift through all this information, many researchers would be inundated with information and a large majority of this would be irrelevant to the topic being studied. Consider the following analogy. You have a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that you want to put together. By only utilizing the pieces of the puzzle that directly apply to the topic/context of the puzzle, you have a much higher chance of completing it correctly. A literature review does just this. It provides a framework to organize the many different resources relating to the research topic. It is also important to be able to evaluate the various resources critically as this means you will be able to distinguish the relevant information from the irrelevant. This will make drawing comparisons between the resources studied easier and a higher standard of understanding can be achieved. Through evaluation, you also search for any unanswered questions on the topic. This is crucial to the overall research aims as it identifies any possible gaps in the knowledge of the subject.

Reviewing the literature about the research problem is the foundation of any investigation. It is the body of existing work that is relevant to a topic and can be instrumental in understanding the complexities and nuances of the field. Researchers are always looking for ways to understand and incorporate all the elements of the topic so as to come up with a well-rounded conclusion or solution to the problem at hand. Reviewing the literature is the best way to understand the various nuances of the topic as a whole. It is also an excellent way to further understanding about the topic with the use of secondary sources. For these reasons, literature is claimed to be the heart of all research.

3. Methods for Conducting Literature Review

This second method for conducting a literature review is the most common. First, it allows us to write up our search strategy so that it can be evaluated and improved upon. If a research team is working on the review, it avoids duplication of effort. Finally, using a priori criteria to limit and organize the search can reduce the risk of introducing bias into the review, thus making the findings more credible. Step one is to locate and collect documents. With the explosion of information in the past decade, the days of finding all relevant material by utilizing one or two databases are long gone. It is important for the literature reviewer to be comprehensive in their searching. It is recommended that the researcher start with reviews (both narrative and systematic) of the topic of interest. Then one should move on to a thorough search of the more recent literature, using at least two or three relevant databases. The specific databases to be used are determined by the subject matter of the review. Finally, Pearl et al. (2015) recommends searching through material at relevant organizations, contacting experts on the review topic, and searching the grey literature. At each step, it is crucial for the reviewer to keep a record of where and how the information was obtained. This will ensure the search strategy can be modified later, and that the review may be updated. A form of the GRADE method should be used to rate the overall quality of each piece of literature. I have been unable to locate the original article that describes this simple and effective intelligence, but I believe it involves evaluating and rating the quality of evidence and strength of recommendation in each individual paper or guideline. The GRADE approach has a tool for evaluating the quality of a body of evidence or systematic review for a specific outcome, and it is my experience that the quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses can vary greatly. Once a decision has been made on the quality of the evidence, the researcher should consider including higher quality studies/sources in a sensitivity analysis. This will weigh the effect of giving more credibility to the higher quality studies. Finally, it is important to take thorough notes. It has been my experience that being detailed and organized in taking notes can make or break a project such as an academic literature review. High quality note-taking is essential for abstracting, synthesizing, and finally writing up the results of the review. Taking notes in a word document can be effective for small projects but I find it very difficult to keep organized. Usually I use a spreadsheet with columns tagged by the specific information I want to take from the paper. This makes it easy to continuously re-organize the notes to best match the desired structure of the review. After taking notes on the information of each individual study, a form of data extraction should be used to catalogue every study and source used. This consistent organization ensures the review can be updated, using the same methods.

4. Common Challenges in Literature Review

Literature review is a lengthy and time-consuming part of the research process. Researchers must take time to understand the current state of knowledge on their topic before they can conduct the experimentation phase of their work. Thus, literature review is often a significant stumbling block in research. From historical articles that may be poorly documented but still relevant, to the sheer quantity of research available, to recent findings that may not yet be published in academic journals, conducting an effective literature review can be a serious challenge. More specific issues that can arise include the limited scope of some research databases. For example, while PubMed is an extremely useful tool focusing on medical research, not all biomedical information is indexed therein. Another common problem is the disparate nature of the literature. An entire topic may have a wide array of conflicting or otherwise confusing findings. This can leave the reviewer with the difficult task of deconstructing and categorizing information in a coherent manner, so that it can later be used as a reference that is easily interpreted by the study’s audience. Finally, it is very easy to accidentally plagiarize the words of another author. While this is never done with malicious intent, it can be difficult to ensure that the phrasing of your summaries does not too closely resemble the original source.

5. Conclusion

The literature review is a very important part of a research study. It helps the researcher get a wider knowledge about the topic or question they are trying to answer. It is not just irrelevant data that is available on the topic, it is written around the world and to the point. It helps the researcher interpret what is already done in the chosen topic by the help of which the researcher can state the relevance of the study. After interpreting through literature review, what is of utmost importance is the researcher must have a concrete understanding about the methodology he is going to use in his study. What is the design of the study, what sample is going to be taken, what statistical method is going to be used, are few questions the researcher should be able to answer after interpreting the literature. As all these things are already done by researchers around the world in any study, the researcher must be completely aware about what is good for his specific study. Coming to the statistical analysis part, the literature review actually helps identify the kind of statistical test which will be good for the data obtained. Based on the type of data, different studies around the world suggest different statistical tests for the same analysis. By using literature reviews, researchers can also note what are the current theories and models which are present on the topic. In nutshell, the literature review is the keystone on what the researcher is trying to build his study on. It is of utmost importance.