Archive for December, 2007

What You Can Get from Your Literature Review

If you stile do not know for what you should write a literature review, this article will give you the last chance to improve the situation and will tell you what you can get from your literature review.
 
So, first of all, it is necessary to mention when you should write your literature review. In your project, your literature review should take place after the introductory part. It presents the information not only about the sources, used in your academic project, but also describes your personal point of view on the problems, which become burning.
 
You may write a literary review, when you prepare whole project. It will be your last step, which help you finish your work. When you know for sure which sources will be more interesting for readers and you will try to describe them in your literary review. Make this process catching and interesting.
 
Also, when you write a literature review, you pay attention to the necessity of your work, to its significance. You should remember once more the methodology of your work and describe it in your literary review.
 
With the help of literature review authors demonstrate their awareness of a subject, either of chosen topics. Authors present their personal standpoints and prove them.
 
Your literature review should be too long; it should be short, but informative. Professional writers should be able to present the most interesting information in the shortest way. If you want to become a great author of academic works, you should start practicing and literary review writing is one of such occasions.
 
I wish you good luck and you should know, if you need some help, you may ask your tutor to help you, even with your literature review!

Literature Review – Is It Necessary?

Very often, when students write their academic projects, they are interested to know whether literature review is really so important, or it is possible to omit this chapter.
 
Our answer is following. If in the requirements for writing your project, there is a point to write a literature review, you should write it without any doubts. If you do not find a concrete point, that you should present a literature review, you may omit it. Nevertheless there is always one more “BUT”. If you want to write an excellent piece of work, you are to do everything in an appropriate way.
 
You should pay attention to the next factors: whether you have enough time in order to write a literature review, whether you have enough information to present an interesting literature review and, finally, whether you have enough desire to make your literature review perfect.
 
If all your answers are “YES”, you should write a literature review. Even more, I am absolutely sure, that you can perform this task at high level.
 
You need some hints on writing a literature review – no problems! We can help you. You should start writing your review with some general facts about your project. Then you should develop your ideas. Make it correctly, paying attention to all factors.
 
You should also remember one more fact, if you want to impress your tutors and to attract their attention to your personality – to write a good literature review is one of the ways. It is not a kind of flattering, just the way to demonstrate your abilities and your knowledge. If you have a chance, you should use it without any doubts!

Literature Review Format

If you want to present a good literature review, you should know about literature review format, in other words about its structure. This article will describe you the general structure of your work, and point out the chapters, which are necessary for each literary review. So, arm yourself with possible patience and start reading and remembering.
 
Literature review should have its introduction, a kind of overview of the topic. In the main body of your literature review, you should divide several chapters:

  • The statements, which require certain explanation;
  • The very explanation, which requires some factual evidence;
  • The points, which differ your work form other works;

As any logical piece of work, it should be finished by the conclusion, where you point out whether your work is complete and whether you have managed to describe everything you wanted to describe.
 
In order to create a good literature review, you should pay attention to such points:

  • Make a research, which will help you to find necessary information and necessary literature sources;
  • Try to analyze the information, you have gathered;
  • Make the evaluation of the received information and point out the most interesting facts;

As you can see, a literature review becomes an integral part of any serious academic writing type. When you write a thesis or a dissertation, you should present an interesting literature review and you should know for sure its format.
 
Logical connection between all chapters, correct word order in the sentences, certain meaning of each word – theses are factors should be taken into consideration, if you want to write a good and even high-level literature review. If you follow such way, you can get the possibility to achieve certain success.

Literature and Literature Review

If you want to know more about literature review, you should read this article and clear up all points, which cause some misunderstandings. We will try to help you explaining the most unclear issues.
 
Do you know for what you need a literature review? Well, a literature review is written in order to present the most crucial points from your work on a particular point: you describe the literature. Used in your work in order to enlighten the topic.
 
Literature reviews are connected to literature due to its nature: they present necessary information about used sources – primary and secondary.
 
If you have a necessity to tell how exactly some literature sources helped you, you should do it in your literature review. I think, that literature is worth being mentioned in your project, as without an appropriate literature you could not create a good piece of work.
 
It is not very difficult to write: think about the most interesting sources, which you used, and describe how exactly they influenced on your work. You may write about the writers and their impact on different sciences; about whatever you want, just pay attention to the sources.
 
Literature review work with Literature, so you should be sure that all names were mentioned correctly and you did not miss any significant facts. The ides in your literature review should be presented logically and you know how to do it.
 
You should also remember that your literature review is a part of your project and this part should be logically connected to the whole work. Do not forget about it.
 
Literature helps you not only to find interesting material, but also gives you some examples how to improve your work!

How to Perform a Literature Review

In order to present a good work, you need to pay attention to each part of your project. This time we will describe you one of the ways for writing a good literature review: what should be done for this and in what order.
 
Literature review presents the main information about the sources, which were used during the writing process. When you write a literature review, you write your personal opinion on the problem, you have raised in your work, underline the importance of the topic, describe the sources, which helped you in writing and show your awareness of sources, which turn out to be significant for this type of work.
 
If you take these factors into consideration, you get a chance to write a good literature review. When you start writing your literature review, you should demonstrate that you:

  • Know the structure and know how to use it;
  • Are able to present your ideas logically and according to the topic;
  • Are aware of the sources you have used;
  • Distinguish primary and secondary sources;
  • Analyze your work and compare it with other existing works;
  • May use the works by other authors in order to improve your project;

In your literature review you should also follow the structure:

  • Make an interesting introductory part in your literature review;
  • Present an informative main body with all necessary information;
  • Finish your literature review with a smart concluding part;

Everything should be logically connected and perfectly structured. The literature review may be a part of your project or it may be presented separately. Nevertheless, all information should be clear and intersting! Good luck!

What Is the Literature Review?

A literature review is a description of the information on the particular topic (or the information connected with the particular question or problem) contained it the literature. More often the literature review is written as a part of some academic writing, such as essay, or research work, or dissertation, etc.

The literature review is written in order to describe the results of the previous researches on the topic, which you are going to research. It helps your readers to understand the problem and to find out its pre-history. It also helps you to study over the object of your research.

Remember that you have to refer the sources which you have used during the literature review. It is also desirable to use in-text citations and quotes.

If you are asked to write a literature review, that means that you are expected to demonstrate perfect information seeking and critical skills. To be more precise, you should prove that you are able to identify useful information, to make it suit your own ends, to analyze and to evaluate data, to fix the research object’s weak and strong points.

Remember that the literature review has to be closely related with your research topic. You are not allowed to use the information which is not connected with your topic in order for your own purposes.

The literature review has to be concluded by the brief summary, which is reflecting the level of knowledge on the topic. It also has to point the direction for further research.

Tips on Doing a Literature Review

The literature review doing process presents some difficulties for students. It is considered to be the one of the most complicated parts of the research paper. In order to ease the literature reviewing process for you we created this article, which contains several tips which should turn to be very helpful.

Create a list of key words and phrases

Before you will begin to seek for the background information for your research, you had better fixed the words and the phrases which contain the main idea f your research. It should be some special words or terms which identify your research topic. These words and phrases will help you to find the information on your topic.

Make notes

While doing the background reading, you are encouraged to note the most significant information. Then you will copy it into your literature review. Note that it is very important to be precise while describing previous researches. Besides, you should mention the sources containing this information. This will help you to ease the list of sources completing.

Write an outline

You had better outlined your literature review. It will help you to keep to the line of thoughts. Besides, you will be able to see if you have missed to mention something important.

Do not write your point of view

There is no place for your opinion in the literature review. You just have to describe the previous researches and respectable opinions of scientist. Your point of view should not be mentioned in this part of the research paper.

The Purpose of the Literature Review

The literature review is not a separate piece of the academic writing. It is a part of a bigger assignment, such as essay, term paper, coursework, research paper or dissertation PhD.

Why do students have to include the literature reviews in their academic papers? In this article we will try to explain what the reasons of it are.

First of all, the literature review allows your readers to find out if the problem which you research was well-investigated before, or it was not, as the literature review has to present a brief overview of the previous researches on the relate topics.

Secondly, the review of literature gives the background information about the object of your research (problem, question). It helps your readers become familiar with the topic of your research, so that they would not be confused.

The third reason which conditions the necessity of doing the literature review is that the information contained in the literature review gives the directions for the further researches and the topic development. That means that the researches who will investigate the topic after you will be able to get acquainted with the previous openings if they read your literature review.

Finally, doing the literature review is necessary in order to develop your researching, information seeking, analyzing and evaluating skills, which may appear to be needed in future. You have to be able not only to find the information on the topic, but also to evaluate it and to decide if it is useful, or not. You should also develop a skill of combining the information. And all of these skills will be demonstrated in your literature review.

Parts of Literature Review

The literature review is normally a section of some academic assignment (such as research paper or PhD dissertation), which introduces readers to the previous researches on the topic. It also helps to emphasize the significance of the research.

The literature review has to contain some basic components.
The literature review has to begin with the formulation of the problem which you are researching, and pointing the field of science which is covered by your research.

The next part of the literature review has to describe briefly the previous researches on the related topics, and list the most significant of their results.

Then the time of the analysis and of the evaluating of the data which you have found comes. You have to fix the achievements of the previous researches, and to point the direction for the future investigations.

Finally, you should conclude your work and write a brief summary of you literature review.
The literature review is divided into parts, but it does not mean that you have to write each part of your review separately. The division is relative. It was created in order to help you to organize and structure your literature review. There is no division, indeed. Of course, you had better devoted a separate paragraph to each part of your review in order not to confuse your readers, and to put clearer the idea. But there should not be any special division, such as headings for each part of the review. The literature review has to be presented as the integral text.

How to Do the Literature Review?

Every student writing the research paper or the dissertation faces the necessity of doing the literature review. In order to ease your work we created this article which describes the literature reviewing process.

To create an excellent literary review, you should know the stages which you have to go through in order to complete the literature review process. We will list these stages and give you some tips on these stages completing.

The first stage

First of all, you should identify the literature review topic. This topic has to coincide with the topic of your research, or it may be a little wider. However, you may narrow the topic while doing the background reading. In this case the topic of your research will have to become narrower, too.

The second stage

The next thing to do is to create the list of key words and phrases. You have to fix some basic words and phrases, which contain the main idea of your research. It will appear to be very helpful while looking for the information.

The third stage

This is the final stage of the literature reviewing process. You will have to identify the sources containing the necessary information. Note the most important ideas which you may use in your research. Do not forget to mention the source bibliography information, which will be needed for the list of references.

After completing these stages, you will have to describe the most significant openings which were done previously. It would be very good if you mentioned the current situation of the problem. In the end, you will have to conclude your work and to point the direction for the further researches.