Doing a literature review is obligatory on every student if they want their degree in their hands. Students have to develop those skills and knowledge so that they can write an effective literature reviews. We have decided to provide the required help in “how to do a literature review”, just read on the following informational text and you will be done in doing a literature review in less than an hour.
The first thing that you should now before getting the answer of “how to do a literature review” is that in order to write a critical literature review, you don’t have to conduct a brand new research work, all you have to do is just select the topic of the literature and review it effectively. You should also know the objective of doing a literature review, the main goal of writing a literature review is to provide up to date information on the particular subject to the readers and forming the grounds for the further research work.
A critical literature review is based on the idea of writing original ideas, up to the mark references, good use of terminologies along with a neutral stance on the existing and previously done research work conducted by the other authors. In order to come up with an effective literature review, you just need to search for the relevant literature on the decided topic.
You can also go for short story, novel or any book and gather all the pertinent information about the topic. You can also consult libraries and different internet resources to collect information on it. Internet can prove to be very beneficial to gather information but you have to make sure that all those resources are authentic and credible.
Before actually doing a literature review, all you need to do is read all the material you have gathered so far. You can also devise an outline before writing a critical literature review so that your review would appear to be more structured. Your literature review will be starting with a thesis statement followed by the body and a conclusion.
Therefore, I hope the above told information on writing a literature review will provide handful knowledge in doing a literature review in less than an hour.
Let us first discuss what is a literature review?
Literature review is basically a very deep analysis of the research work already conducted the famous scholars and researchers. A literature review is generally part of an introduction of an essay, thesis or any report. Conducting literature review can be very interesting as you have to do an analysis on the work already done provided that it is of your interest.
Writing a literature review:
1. Conducting literature review research:
Do a thorough research work on what has been written up till now on the subject, search for as many bibliographical resources as possible to get the idea, like, textbook and journal articles and if you are still confused on what to write than ask your instructor. Consult the abstracting journals in your searching process. You can also go for electronic references libraries.
2. Note all the bibliographical details while researching:
Writing down all the bibliographical details will only save your time a lot but remember not to just write down each and every bibliographical detail otherwise if you will forget to note down the details while you are researching than it will be much difficult to search for them again.
3. Reading all the material collected:
You have all the material with you, now; go through it carefully without leaving a single point. Understand the concept of the material that is what it is saying and underline the negative and positive aspect of it as you move along the text. In order to get yourself a literature review help, answer the following questions:
Is your literature review general or deals with a specific issue?
Is it about a particular school of thought?
On what theory your literature review is based on?
Definitions that will be used in the review?
What are the arguments that will be utilized in the essay?
What is the concluding argument of the review?
4. Time to start writing a literature review:
Your literature review also has those three segments which are used in other type of literature review, like.
Introduction:
You introduction should comprise of thesis statement followed by the topic parameters that is what will be review be composed of and the basic purpose of choosing this topic.
Body:
When writing a literature review make sure the body paragraphs should contain the background of the topic with different perspective on the topic. It would be better if different approaches are also given in the review, like, historical, philosophical and empirical etc, methodologies and relevant discoveries etc
Conclusion:
Your conclusion would be containing a short summary of all the arguments discussed in the preceding literature review that will be also connecting back to the thesis statement.