literature reviews examples

literature reviews examples

The Art of Crafting a Comprehensive Literature Review: Examples and Guidelines

1. Introduction to Literature Reviews

In the study of artificial systems, few disciplines have had such a pervasive and enduring presence as research in cognitive science. It spans engineering, neurology, psychology, and several subfields. In most of these areas, abstractions developed to signify human cognitive processes have played a central role in engendering not only broad theories but also an understanding of facets and functionalities of the systems in question. These signifying constructs have been developed based on human cognition and social science research, leading to interdisciplinary debates about the underlying models of human symbolic cognition and its dependencies. These debates are far from resolved. A great amount has been learned in a rather short span of time about actual human cognition and knowledge transfer through the construction and iterative improvement of artificial cognitive systems.

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2. Key Elements of a Literature Review

Undoubtedly, the process of choosing the right scope of the literature to be included for representing a phenomenon is the earliest and primary basic key element in crafting a comprehensive literature review. The problem is that most academicians or researchers have been criticized about their literature reviews whether as being too one-sided, not critical enough, too narrow, or overly limited. As Freeman and Beach point out, one-sided studies are bound to produce skewed results. To remedy this common pitfall of researcher bias, they suggested that literature reviewers cautiously choose recent, as well as landmark, articles published in top-tier journals across the disciplines. Besides that, not critical enough happens usually when the researcher only presents the theory or publications but does not provide or add a critic or comment. O’Toole and Feeney added that poorly taken for granted is not professionally appealing, especially when there is no single citation spreading it, but there can be author citations which exceed ten times or more with various layers of citations such as duplicates. This obviously is a flag that indicates the updated work had just re-assembled old pieces without highlighting the transformation. The common source of a too narrow literature count often came when all the underpinning publications focus on a particular task. Connor argued such focus made little contributions and needed to be backed up by originality.

3. Types of Literature Reviews

In contrast to the traditionally used review method, the systematic review method is focused on reducing bias in the results. The replication method for the systematic review ensures the final paper’s providing a detailed indicator of a comprehensive search of the literary evidence. In turn, questioning the probable bias found by the creator or the writer. The aim of a systematic literature review is to access the same and compare numbers of the field by using the same methods. This proscriptive guide is one of the major original practical materials in the subtitle. The systematic review is also known as the systemic review. While there are numerous versions of a systematic review, they are sustainable over time and share a set of characteristics. Each method has issues that make them unique approaches to the systemic review. In their project speeches, authors of systematic reviews and researchers have reported their ideas and practice that require special attention.

Systematic Reviews

These literature reviews are often used to assess the state of a particular field (a subject area) and examine gaps in the literature. Traditional/narrative reviews provide an in-depth discussion on the existing knowledge and discussions rather than a summary of the existing literature findings. To perform a literature review, they employ a ‘best evidence approach’. Review authors sometimes choose this approach because their intention is to describe the content of the existing science.

Traditional/Narrative Reviews

Different literature review types are used to address different research questions and conduct studies at varying levels. This is why classifying these reviews is, essentially, a guide to describe and categorize them for selection. Despite various classifications, the types of literature review can be broadly divided into three categories: traditional/narrative, systematic, and meta-analysis reviews.

4. Examples of Well-Structured Literature Reviews

In order to make this exploration, we use personnel policies information provided by California employers from the Employer Surveys of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Due to the fact that our labor market sample is comprised of establishments that reported they used some form of external search both for nonsupervisory workers and for supervisors, before looking at the survey evidence, we set out in the following subsection a formal statistical, dynamic model of the hiring, wage-setting processes.

When a firm decides to create jobs, does it decide on a wage for such jobs and then look for employees, or does it hire people that are willing to work at existing wages and, simultaneous with this act of hiring, set the wages for such jobs? As with many questions in economics, this one is too broad, with the answer presumably varying according to the details of the case. Economists have not been able to fully explore this because most wage equations, even at the most disaggregate level of data, do not have sufficient variability to begin any clear investigation of the wage-setting question. Similarly, most studies of employment decisions, which normally are based on labor flow data, do not have information on the wage. Here we make use of a labor market survey of California employers to explore some aspects of this question. As we will see, the bulk of the evidence supports the notion that firms primarily post wage offers and search for workers. On the other hand, somewhat consistent with the way we portray the two extremes, firms with high human resource management practices are more likely to announce their motto to favor “internal” job search than firms with lower practices.

Hiring and Wage Setting in Firms: Survey Evidence

5. Guidelines for Writing an Effective Literature Review

Guideline 5. Avoid a detailed review of the literature contributed by each of the multiple authors of a particular subject area because most of their collective efforts provide conclusions, models, and ideas for framework considerations and operationalization in the articles previously published.

Guideline 4. Elaborate as much as possible on an expansive conceptual framework that may not be, but that has the potential of being, operationalized and empirically tested within the field or with data not yet available to the general research community or the readers of recognized scientific journals.

Guideline 3. Present a picture that reaches beyond the immediate discovery or documentation of precise empirical relationships by the authors.

Guideline 2. Assemble information presented in different fields to illustrate specific analytical observations, not evident within the original discipline, especially if these observations are associated with fundamental principles or concepts.

Guideline 1. Revise existing conceptual design or statistical models based on new primary data sources or upon application of increasingly accepted estimation or testing methodologies.