Example of a Strengths Weaknesses and Gaps in Literature Review
What Is a Literature Review | Step-by-Footstep Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of current knowledge, assuasive y'all to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and periodical manufactures), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. There are five cardinal steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A practiced literature review doesn't just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When yous write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, yous will accept to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:
- Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
- Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
- Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Show how your inquiry addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
Y'all might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of enquiry and demonstrate your noesis of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will look slightly different in each example, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly of import skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Stride i: Search for relevant literature
Before you lot begin searching for literature, you demand a clearly defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you lot will search for literature related to your research trouble and questions.
If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone consignment, yous will have to choose a focus and develop a primal question to direct your search. Different a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. Y'all should be able to reply information technology based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Commencement by creating a list of keywords related to your inquiry question. Include each of the key concepts or variables y'all're interested in, and list whatsoever synonyms and related terms. Y'all can add to this list if you lot discover new keywords in the procedure of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Torso image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Use your keywords to brainstorm searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:
- Your academy's library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)
You tin can utilize boolean operators to help narrow down your search:
- AND: to notice sources that contain more than 1 keyword (e.g. social media AND trunk paradigm AND generation Z)
- OR: to notice sources that comprise one of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing certain terms (e.g. apple NOT fruit)
Read the abstract to observe out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to notice other relevant sources.
To identify the nigh important publications on your topic, have note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles go along actualization in your reading, make sure to seek them out.
What is your plagiarism score?
Compare your paper with over 60 billion spider web pages and 30 million publications.
- Best plagiarism checker of 2021
- Plagiarism report & percent
- Largest plagiarism database
Scribbr Plagiarism Checker
Step 2: Evaluate and select sources
You probably won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—you'll accept to evaluate which sources are nigh relevant to your questions.
For each publication, inquire yourself:
- What question or trouble is the writer addressing?
- What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the fundamental theories, models and methods? Does the research utilize established frameworks or take an innovative arroyo?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or claiming established noesis?
- How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its fundamental insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Make sure the sources you utilize are credible, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of inquiry.
You can find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a high citation count means the commodity has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.
The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you ordinarily only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might accept a long historical perspective (for case, to trace how a concept has changed in pregnant over time).
Have notes and cite your sources
As you read, y'all should also begin the writing process. Take notes that yous tin later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to go on track of your sources with citations to avert plagiarism. It tin can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile total citation data and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps y'all call back what you read and saves time later in the procedure.
Footstep 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review'due south argument and construction, you demand to sympathize the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you can wait for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): practise certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where practise sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that inverse the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This step will help y'all work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own inquiry volition contribute to existing knowledge.
- Most enquiry has focused on immature women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- Simply at that place is notwithstanding a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms similar Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.
Stride 4: Outline your literature review's structure
There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You should have a rough idea of your strategy before you starting time writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, yous can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply list and summarizing sources in order.
Try to analyze patterns, turning points and primal debates that accept shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For example, if yous are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant wellness outcomes, cardinal themes might include healthcare policy, linguistic communication barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.
Methodological
If you depict your sources from unlike disciplines or fields that use a variety of enquiry methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:
- Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
- Talk over how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Dissever the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You lot can apply it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of primal concepts.
You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine diverse theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step 5: Write your literature review
Like whatsoever other bookish text, your literature review should accept an introduction, a principal trunk, and a conclusion. What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should conspicuously establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Trunk
Depending on the length of your literature review, y'all might want to divide the body into subsections. Yous tin apply a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological arroyo.
Every bit y'all write, you tin can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
- Clarify and interpret: don't merely paraphrase other researchers—add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: apply transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
When you've finished writing and revising your literature review, don't forget to proofread thoroughly earlier submitting. Non a language expert? Check out Scribbr's professional person Proofreading & Editing service!
Complimentary lecture slides
This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you tin can utilize to teach your students about writing a literature review.
Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.
Open Google Slides Download PowerPoint
Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to behave a literature review at the get-go of a research project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current country of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that you're non merely repeating what others have already washed
- To identify gaps in noesis and unresolved issues that your research can accost
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the central findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.
Is this commodity helpful?
You have already voted. Cheers :-) Your vote is saved :-) Processing your vote...
Source: https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/
0 Response to "Example of a Strengths Weaknesses and Gaps in Literature Review"
Post a Comment