Archive for June, 2008

Some Explanations on the Literature Review

Is there anybody who is looking for some information about literature review? Definitely there is somebody, since you are reading the article about this exact assignment. And we are going to give some basic facts about the essence of literature review and the ways to write it. It is not difficult to guess that they can be found below.

What is literature review? The definition is rather clear and simple. Literature review is a piece of work designed to give a summary of the published materials on a certain subject. This paper can just summarize the sources or it can present a sort of debates concerning these sources. In other words, you have to interpret in your own way the information you have read on a certain topic.

Why literature review is important? The role of the literature review is underestimated by many students, and this is actually a wrong position. This paper can serve you as a guide to your topic. For instance, you do not have enough time on conducting a profound research. In this case you can always find the relevant literature review, which will contain all the necessary explanations on the topic.

How should you do it? In fact, the process of writing a literature review will be quite challenging without the help of your tutor.  Still, everything is up to you. If you want to make this assignment clear for yourself, you should not neglect the tutor’s assistance. These are some questions that you can ask your tutor.

•    What is the approximate amount of sources that should be included into the review?
•    What kinds of the sources you should use: newspapers, magazines, books, web-sites and so on.
•    How should you evaluate the materials: criticizing, summarizing?

The Literature Review that your Professor Expects to Get

A good research project is nearly impossible to make without a proficient literature review. However, it is important to know what your Professor expects from your literature review, what literature review will be considered as excellent.

That is why this article is dedicated to the presentation of the most significant features of a good literature review.

•    A good literature review should give the names of the writers who touched upon your research question. You should not provide the biography of these writers. Neither should you mention about the other works by them that are not closely related to your topic. You have to enumerate the writers the works of whose helped you in investigation;
•    A good literature review should present a complex analysis of the works touching upon your research question. There are books or journals where your research question has already been investigated as well as the works where your research question is mentioned about indirectly. You have to tell what angle your research question is considered from and what grounds made you come up to a certain conclusion;
•    A good literature review includes the quotations of the authors who had an idea about your research question. For example, “Professor Smith in his work “Fundamental Management” says that, “…”;
•    A good literature review is the one that is perfectly structured. Like any other piece of writing a literature review should be logically consecutive. That is what a structure in a literature review is required for.

Now that you know what literature review your Professor expects to get, you are able to make your own excellent literature review.

Tips on Writing a Literature Review

If you are beating your head out writing a good literature review, what you need is a piece if good advice. Your literature review should be done on the basis of background research. It means that you will have to find the works by the writers who have already investigated your topic or a topic that is close to yours and analyze them. While writing your literature review, you will definitely need to know what you should keep to and what you should avoid. That is why the tips given below can help you in making a good literature review:

Divide your literature review into passages. It is better to talk about each writer with a new paragraph. If you write a straight text, your literature review will be hard to read. Every writer needs see clearly what each of the paragraphs presents and what information it tells about;

Insert quotations. While writing your literature review, you will have to prove that the ideas are not contrived by you personally but taken from a certain work by a certain writer. Besides, you will have to inform on the year of the book’s publication and give a number of page where this quotation can be found;

Do not retell information but rather analyze it. A literature review itself implies analyzing the sources. That is why if you simply reproduce information, your literature review will be a complete failure.

Follow the tips given in order to write a successful literature review, and you will certainly make it properly.

Why Literature Review Is Important

You are working on your dissertation or thesis and have to write a literature review. Well, let me guess: it is the most boring and, perhaps, disgusting task for you, and you absolutely do not understand why you should do it if there is no necessity in it. At least, if I were you, I would have similar thoughts in my mind. Let me convince you in necessity of writing a literature review and explain you why it is important.

Every topic on every study has a certain pre-history. Researchers always try to find something new for investigation. Sometimes they just touch upon the problems but do not disclose them in their works. Someone just has to disclose these problems through their investigation. Can you guess who can be this person? It will be you, of course.

As soon as you start working on the topic chosen, you are becoming a part of the whole scientific world. So, now it is your duty to participate in discussion upon the problems found within certain research area. Besides, it is rather interesting to realize that you are becoming a researcher yourself, isn’t it?

So, writing a dissertation or thesis literature review serves for revealing the hidden ideas that already exist in science. You can call it a kind of your mission – to reveal these issues. You may be proud of yourself for becoming a researcher, for becoming a participant of the world discussion of the problems found within a certain area of research. Moreover, you make an attempt to solve this problem by yourself! Good luck with your attempts! Be sure, you WILL do it successfully!