1. IR502 RESEARCH METHODS Literature review

2. What is a literature review?  A literature is a "review" of "the literature" on a topic. What does that mean?  In this case, " Review " usually means an overview summarizing major parts and bringing them together to build a picture of what's out there.  Different fields of study (and different professors) will have different standards on whether a review is supposed to be more of a straightforward summary or if it is supposed to have a deep analysis and discussion.  "The Literature " means the major writings - especially scholarly writings - on the topic.  Depending on your field "the literature" can include all sorts of things: journal articles, books, published essays, government reports, and so on.  The main thing is that "the literature" is the body of scholarly, professional information that is used by professionals and scholars working on that topic area  So a literature review is a summary of previous research on a topic.

3. What is a literature review?  Literature reviews can be a subsection of something bigger or can stand alone:  As a subsection, literature reviews are usually put in early in the larger work.  They tend to be after the Introduction but before the Methods section or any in-depth discussion and analysis of the issue.  They may be incorporated into a Background section, or can come just before or after the Background. Examples of literature reviews as a sub-section include:  A component in a larger research project or paper  A chapter in a thesis or dissertation  A mandatory section if you want to write and publish a scholarly journal article  The analysis of existing research performed before a research proposal  A component in the background or justification when applying for grant money

4. What is a literature review?  Or it can be a stand-alone bibliographic essay:  A literature review assigned for class on its own, to understand and write up current research on a topic  An analytical essay synthesizing an annotated bibliography into a formal paper  A "review article" that you write to publish in a scholarly journal  Literature reviews are different depending what their purpose is.  If the literature review is part of a Ph.D. dissertation, this review will be comprehensive covering all research on the topic.  But if the review is part of a smaller research report, you need to cover the major work that has been done on the topic recently, but it is not necessary to try to identify all research on the subject.

5. What is the purpose of literature review?  The purpose of a literature review is to convey to the reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic and what are the strengths and weaknesses.  The literature review allows the reader to be brought up to date regarding the state of research in the field and familiarizes the reader with any contrasting perspectives and viewpoints on the topic.  There are good reasons for beginning a literature review before starting a research paper.

6. What is the purpose of literature review?  These reasons include:  To see what has and has not been investigated.  To develop general explanation for observed variations in a behavior or phenomenon.  To identify potential relationships between concepts and to identify researchable hypotheses.  To learn how others have defined and measured key concepts.  To identify data sources that other researches have used.  To develop alternative research projects.  To discover how a research project is related to the work of others.

7. How to start?  How to do a literature search?  Developing a search strategy  Defining the topic - In order to begin your literature review you must first define your research question.  What is the purpose? What does it mean? What are the key words? Are there other words which could be used, such as synonyms, variations in spelling? What do you already know about the topic? What is the scope? Do you need everything ever written in English on this topic, or just the last ten years?

8. How to start?  Before beginning a search for information, it is important to develop a search strategy that will most effectively locate useful, relevant information.  This will often involve breaking down an essay or research question into: Compiling a list of keywords or key phrases  Analyzing the topic of an essay question or research topic usually involves making a list of keywords or phrases.  You will need to include all the key concepts or ideas contained within the essay or research question.  It might be useful to include alternative ways of phrasing and expressing concepts and ideas.  Think about both general terms and very specific terms for broadening and narrowing your search.

9. How to start?  The keyword or phrase is the basic unit of any search.  You may find it helpful to consult subject dictionaries and encyclopedias, or a textbook glossary for the common terminology of the subject area.  The use of an index and/or thesaurus is also advisable to establish the useful terms.  Entering your search into appropriate search tools.  Evaluating your results to determine whether you need to employ various strategies to broaden, narrow or otherwise modify your research.

10. How to start?  Identifying Resources - Information is available in a number of formats.  It is important for you to understand the significance of various formats so that you know what will best suit your information requirements.  When you know what types of resources you are interested in you can revisit the search tools or find more. What type of resources are most appropriate for your needs?  Books  Reference Materials  Journals  Conference Papers  Dissertations  Internet

11. Developing the review  Some questions to think about as you develop your literature review:  What is known about the subject?  Are there any gaps in the knowledge of the subject?  Have areas of further study been identified by other researchers that you may want to consider?  Who are the significant research personalities in this area?  Is there consensus about the topic?

12. Developing the review  What aspects have generated significant debate on the topic?  What methods or problems were identified by others studying in the field and how might they impact your research?  What is the most productive methodology for your research based on the literature you have reviewed?  What is the current status of research in this area?  What sources of information or data were identified that might be useful to you?

13. Organization and Outline  Once you have some articles that look good, read the abstracts to get an idea of what they say. You may want to skim over the best ones, especially if they have good literature reviews themselves. That will give you an idea how literature reviews are written on this topic!  Now, think about how the ideas in the articles you have might be organized.  One of the purposes of the literature review is to provide an overview and synthesis of information; grouping similar articles gives you a framework for your overview.  It is usually wise to move from broad to narrow.  Provide your reader with the most general information first, then building toward the specifics of your research concerns.

14. Chronological  Some examples of ways to organize a literature review include:  CHRONOLOGICAL : This is a common approach, especially for topics that have been talked about for a long time and have changed over their history.  Organize it in stages of how the topic has changed: the first definitions of it, then major time periods of change as researchers talked about it, then how it is thought about today.

15. Organization and Outline  COMPARISON TO PRESENT HYPOTHESIS : If your literature review is part of an empirical article or meta-analysis, where you intend to present a hypothesis and come to a conclusion, you can organize the literature review to show the articles that share or support your hypothesis, and those that disagree with it.  This gives a chance to show the strengths of the supporting research, discuss any validity/methodology issues with past research that disagrees with your findings, and explain how the past research leads up to and supports yours.

16. Organization and Outline  BROAD-TO-SPECIFIC : Another approach is to start with a section on the general type of issue you're reviewing, then narrow down to increasingly specific issues in the literature until you reach the articles that are most specifically similar to your research question, thesis statement, hypothesis, or proposal.  This can be a good way to introduce a lot of background and related facets of your topic when there is not much directly on your topic but you are tying together many related, broader articles.  CONTRASTING SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT : If you find a dominant argument comes up in your research, with researchers taking two sides and talking about how the other is wrong, you may want to group your literature review by those schools of thought and contrast the differences in their approaches and ideas.

17. Organization and Outline  MAJOR MODELS or MAJOR THEORIES : When there are multiple models or prominent theories, it is a good idea to outline the theories or models that are applied the most in your articles.  That way you can group the articles you read by the theoretical framework that each prefers, to get a good overview of the prominent approaches to your concept.  PROMINENT AUTHORS : If a certain researcher started a field, and there are several famous people who developed it more, a good approach can be grouping the famous author/researchers and what each is known to have said about the topic.  You can then organize other authors into groups by which famous authors' ideas they are following. With this organization it can help to look at the citations your articles list in them, to see if there is one author that appears over and over.

18. Organization and Outline  PROBLEM->SOLUTION : This approach groups quotations from articles first that introduce and describe the problem or problems being addressed in your research. Then group articles by types of solutions that are proposed in the articles.  PROCESS FLOW : If your literature review centers around part of a process, you may want to describe the stages in that process and group your citations by different stages or steps in that process.  Remember, a single article may have several quotes from different sections, each going with a different part of the process! That way you can use many articles' descriptions of your process, or compare and contrast different approaches to it.

19. MAKE AN OUTLINE!  There are many other ways to organize a literature review, and you can also combine organization methods.  In a doctoral dissertation your literature review may have multiple subsections to discuss several of the points listed above.  Feel free to organize it in any way that seems logical to you! If it works for the literature - and your writing style - then go ahead and use it.  Once you choose an organization (or organizations) make an outline.  You don't have to be controlled by your outline but it can be a good way to organize your ideas, articles, quotations, and references.  Pick the major sub-parts of your outline, based on your organization.  For example, if you're organizing chronologically, label the major time periods that mark changes in the history of your topic. Make notes from what you saw in the abstracts about which articles might go into which parts of your outline.

20. MAKE AN OUTLINE!  Now, as you start reading your articles, whenever you come across a really good quote you can mark it with which part of the outline it goes in.  Make a note of the author, year, and page number whenever you run across something in your reading that explains, supports, or falls logically into a subsection in your review outline! It can be a simple chart, such as: 1960s - OriginsTextbook chapter 2 Smith, 1962, p 36, 40-42, 47 Brown, 1963, p 132 Smith, 1964, p. 1-10 Jones, 2001, p 216

21. Writing the review  Identify the broad problem area, avoid global statements  Early in the review, indicate why the topic being reviewed is important  Distinguish between research finding and other sources of information  Indicate why certain studies are important  If you are commenting on a timeline of a topic, be specific in describing the time frame  Justify comments such as “no studies were found”  If the results previous studies are inconsistent or widely varying, cite them separately  Avoid long lists of non specific references

22. Developing a coherent essay  If your review is long, provide an overview near the beginning of the review  Near the beginning of a review, state explicitly what will and will not be covered  Specify your point of view early in the review: this serves as the thesis statement of the review.  Aim for a clear and cohesive essay that integrates the key details of the literature and communicates your point of view (a literature is not a series of annotated articles).  Use subheadings, especially in long reviews  Use transitions to help trace your argument  If your topic teaches across disciplines, consider reviewing studies from each discipline separately

23. Developing a coherent essay  Write a conclusion for the end of the review: Provide closure so that the path of the argument ends with a conclusion of some kind.  How you end the review, however, will depend on your reason for writing it.  If the review was written to stand alone, as is the case of a term paper or a review article for publication, the conclusion needs to make clear how the material in the body of the review has supported the assertion or proposition presented in the introduction.  On the other hand, a review in a thesis, dissertation, or journal article presenting original research usually leads to the research questions that will be addressed.  Check the flow of your argument for coherence.

24. You must cite!!!  A big part of the literature review process is making good use of quotes and paraphrases from the literature.  When you are synthesizing others' points you must remember to add your parenthetical citations (or footnotes if you use Chicago or another Notes style).  Don't forget! Even when you rephrase someone's idea in your own words, or combine multiple articles ideas into a summary sentence, you still have to give them credit. Mastering giving credit is an essential part of the literature review process.  Look at one of the scholarly articles you are working with. Notice all of the parenthetical citations in the literature review section? Sometimes in the introduction and literature review of articles it seems like every sentence has a parenthetical citation behind it. That is normal. It can feel a little strange when you start to write literature reviews, putting so many citations in.  But it's important that you do it anyway. Every time you quote or summarize from the articles you read, make sure to add your citation information immediately after.