Her we will discuss with you some step process that will help you to create the foundation for your literature review in a jiffy.
- Finalise your area of research: Before you actually start looking out for articles and books, you must narrow down on your area of research before actually starting with any further on work in that area. Once you do that, you would know exactly which books and articles to pick up and not get attracted towards other material, even though it may appear fascinating to you. Concentrate only on what you have decided upon.
- Explore appropriate Literature: do a comprehensive hunt for books and articles that you can find in your area of research. By reading the abstract itself you would come to know whether it pertains to your area of study or no and once if you know that the research paper belongs to your area of study, down load and if required print those articles to have them ready to be used for drafting the Literature review. All this work may not show much productivity coming into hand, but this is important work and the foundation for creating a sound literature and also simplifying the writing task. Do not take a very long time to do that and set aside a specific time frame in which you want to do it so that within the given time, you have created the base for your entire section/chapter.
- Search for relevant content in the chosen material: you would have to next do the task of skimming the content of each of the research paper or article that you have chosen linked to your topic of the study. While you do the skimming part, you will have to extract out the relevant part that you will be using in your research. That is:
- Definition of the terms that are used in the research paper
- Findings, claims and constructs about the research that is getting investigated by you
- Identified gaps in the study
- Follow up studies that are called
- Your opinion about agreement or disagreement with the constructs that you have chosen in the study
When you find these important things from each of the paper, bring them directly onto MS words. Type the key content and while you are doing that keep putting down the name of the author and other referential details alongside itself. Word gives a very simplified option to create an automatic bibliography for you, work on that.
When you are done till here, it becomes easier to move to further completing the Literature Review which we will discuss in the subsequent blogs.
