The anatomy of “Literature Review”

 Courtesy: Md. Hafiz Sikder

Have you ever written a thesis paper or research white paper? If yes, you probably have done the most boring and most important task of writing a research paper “The literature review”. But if you are thinking about starting a research paper or your thesis, do not get disheartened. Because with this article I am going to make your journey smoother and trust me it’s easier than it looks. All you have to do is follow a few tricks.

Researchers have mastered these tricks after years of experience and expertise. How do I learn them? Well let’s just say, from leading researchers of the country and by doing literature review.

Before jumping to the main topic, let us first get introduced with the term “Literature Review”. The term “Literature” refers to previously published research works. These papers have been accepted, evaluated and published. The term “Review” refers to analysing these papers. So, literature review is nothing but critically analysing the previously published research papers. According to Jeffrey W. Knopf “a literature review summarizes and evaluates a body of writings about a specific topic.” (Knopf, J., 2006)

We need to do the literature review to find evidence for our work, reference to do it better and to find the research gap that seems to be a problem to us. To be honest, to solve “the problem” we are doing new research. So how do we do it?

Firstly, we need to find our research topic. Once you’ve done that, you have now come to the most boring task of a research work - reading the research articles. This might seem boring at first but, once you have started it, you’ll find how much you have to learn about your topic to solve your problem that you are working on. So this brings us to the second step.

It is time to find the papers and collect them. You can search several article search engines, but the most popular one is Google Scholar. There are other engines too like ResearchGate and Academia. Try searching with your research keywords. That will help you to get specific research works.

In the third step, it is time to relate our work with found papers. To do this easily, you can look into the abstract, result and conclusion section of the paper. You can read the whole paper if you want. (But that is time consuming and I personally do not do it). The shorter your screening time the better. Read specific sections and note down their findings.

To note the findings, I use spreadsheets. You can use any text editor you want, just make sure you can organize it. Here is a demo of my spreadsheet for taking the notes. You can always customise it according to your needs. In the first column, there is “serial number” to track the counts of the papers. Then there is authors name and the specific publication year. We are going to use this to give reference in our writing later. After that there is a title column. In this column, the title of the studied paper is mentioned for referencing purposes. Following that, there is the most important column (other columns are important too) “Findings”. We need to write the findings of that particular study. By study I ment the research. 

Followed by the column mentioned previously, there are a few more columns. These columns are there to help you decide whether this paper matches your research or not. I simply mark whether the paper matches my research questions or topics or not.

You can add more columns as per your need. For example, study type- to mention the style of the research, n - to mention the number of subjects tested in that study. By subjects I ment the number of targeted people or objects participating in that study; and so on.

Congratulations!, you just have done the most difficult part of your work. Now using the findings you can write a review easily focusing on why that study is important for your work. The research questions columns are here to decide once again whether you should mention the paper (we call it “Citing”; originated from “Cite”; doing it is called “Citation”) in your work or not. The style of your writings can vary according to the journal you are planning to publish your research in. Read a few papers from that journal to get inspiration for the style. 

I described a general way of doing or writing literature review, it can be varied according to the research methodology you are using. What is Research Methodology? Well that is another story but not for today. Now fasten your seat belt and start your bumpy ride of research. Welcome to the world of possibilities.

 References:

1.     Knopf, J. (2006). Doing a Literature Review. PS: Political Science & Politics, 39(1), 127-132. doi:10.1017/S1049096506060264