Why do we undertake a literature review
- To identify key authors
- To identify keywords
- Use these keywords throughout your report
- To identify research trends
- To identify stable research findings
What to include in a literature review
- How other people have tackled your problem
- How their research approach supports\ informs your approach
- Highlight issues in research approaches and how they influence your approach
- Highlight specific knowledge to your topic
Steps in your literature search
Start with a textbook as they
- Give a clear overview of the topic
- Identify keywords
- Identify stable findings
- Identify key authors
- Identify key papers
Scholar search engines
- Indicates how many citations each paper has
- More citations indicate key paper and key author(s)
- Provides a list of papers which have cited the paper you are looking at
- List of scholarly search engines:
The title
- Is it related to the topic which you are researching
- It could indicate a possible approach (experiment design)
- Will help you to formulate your research title
Reading the abstract
- Indicates the researcher(s) approach
- Identifies other key authors
- Identifies arguments or supports a theory
- Indicates results
- Indicates if it is worth spending time reading the whole paper
- Identifies a list of keywords
Using your papers
- Highlight key\ points to make them quicker to find, when you are looking for them later
- Add comments, thoughts, and questions as you read
- Alternatively, you could
- Create a word document and break the topic into headings
- Copy and paste quotes under each heading (include a hyperlink to the paper)
- This will produce a semi-structure literature review
- It also provides a bank of quotes which can be quickly accessed and use at a later date