When you are going to do research in any area of your interest and are writing a Literature Review Paper on a specific topic, You need a brief summary of any earlier research that has been done on that area worldwide.
In this way Writing A Literature Review Paper is defined as a summary of the earlier written research works on a certain area or subject and it is a systematic process of writing all these previous information in a structured way and can be used to describe an entire academic paper or a specific piece of academic work, like a book or an essay.
For Example: if your research paper describes an experiment on the mental health of research students, you will likely need to know about the work done earlier and a summary of earlier studies on this topic, and this kind of literature or published documents are often referred to as a literature review.
1. Search for relevant literature on your topic
In this context, literature just means any academic sources like books or journal articles relevant you’re your topic of research. First, you need to search in the right scholarly databases, so something like Google Scholar, JSTOR, and science direct. Search by putting your title and the title itself should indicate what we are searching, you can search your keywords with boolean operators which help you filter and refine the search results and explain how what we are getting from this search
2. Evaluate and select source of information for literature
Unless your topic is super niche, you probably can’t read everything that’s been written on the topic. Once you’ve got the sources from the relevant literature Search, read the abstract to scan whether an article is relevant or not, and also scan the references section to find other relevant sources of literature. You should also pay attention to the citation count on Google Scholar. If the count is high, the source is probably important and you should include it and come with an abstract just like a trailer of a movie from where you can get the whole analysis of the work
3. Identify themes, debates, and gaps in the literature
As you read all relevant literature, take notes, and pay attention to the connections between different sources. This way, you can organize your literature review’s arguments and structure a lot easier. Here are some things to look for: Trends and patterns, in theory, method, or results. Themes Debates or contradictions Influential studies and research gap
4. Outline your literature review’s structure
You can go about your literature review’s structure in a few ways. It all depends on what you found in the literature and what you want to emphasize. Here are 4 common approaches to structure the literature review.
- Chronological, that means from older to more recent publications.
- Thematic, so organized around several key themes.
- Methodologically, you can compare the different research methods being used across studies.
- Theoretical to discuss opposing theories or models.
And finally, get ready for writing a literature Reviewer structure!
Make sure that your literature review structure has anintroduction, the main body that summarizes and synthesizes the sources, and a conclusion, similar to other academic texts.
This is all about this article, and we sincerely hope that the steps, information, advice, and ideas we’ve provided will be useful to you as you are going to write a review paper in your journey of research and do literature searches. KressUp is an online learning platform that occasionally publishes new articles; stay connected to more updates
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