How to ‘critically’ review the literature sources for a research?

A carefully crafted review of literature includes the identification and analysis of previous research documents pertaining to the present research problem. A preliminary analysis of literature will help in clarifying and identifying the research problem.
Although reviewing literature sources is a time-consuming task, it is a rewarding task as well. It helps you to justify the research, set a theoretical framework and ensures the originality of the work. However, reviewing literature sources isn’t an easy task. Once you have identified several literature sources, the next thing to do is to critically evaluate the sauces.

Knowledge doesn’t exist in the vacuum. The study will be significant only if it is similar or different from earlier studies. The main objectives of the literature review are:

1. To summarise the current knowledge.
2. To generate and refine the research ideas.

Importance of conducting a literature review

Improves research methodology – It helps you acquire methodologies used by other researchers to find and solve research problems similar to the ones they are investigating.

Lays focus on research problem – Review of literature helps you shape the research problem.

Contextualises research findings –  How do you answer your research questions compared to what other researchers concluded? What is the contribution of your research work? How are your findings distinguished from that of other researchers? To answer these questions, you need to review the literature.

Ensures novelty – By reviewing the literature you can ensure the novelty of your research work.

Know how to evaluate the literature sources before including them in your thesis:

1. Identify the key issues and major work done previously in your research area. Evaluate the previous research and discover new research opportunities.
2. Define a research question. Demonstrate how your study fits into established research. Develop your own ideas for accepting or rejecting arguments.
3. Reveal the areas of interest and which areas have been investigated and which are yet to be investigated.  Divulge the common findings and inconsistency among the studies. Evaluate and compare the data, methodologies, and results between the studies. Identify the factors that were previously not considered.
4. Examine the gaps that exist between the two theories and develop the hypotheses.  

Stages at which evaluation of literature sources is necessary

1. An early review is required to establish the context of the study and to confirm the choice of the research focus.
2. During the process of study, review the sources to ensure that you remain updated about the ongoing research in your research domain.
3. At the final stage, reviewing sources is necessary to identify the implications of the research and to relate the findings of present research with that of the previous research.

Now that you know how to analyze the sources, carefully review the literature sources, establish the gap and place your own work.

In an attempt to create a successful Literature Review, most of the researchers target to connect their work to the diverse literature that they read. That diverse literature could be as varied as, from research papers, policy documents, blogs, websites, articles, books etc. Scholars, sometimes even go further and incorporate cartoons and films. So literature should be considered as something plural, because, though it is a single entity but it couldn’t be created without compiling content from multiple ends and directions.

The primary objective behind reading a literature is, to gather lots of relevant information about a topic. It helps to confirm ones opinions about what he already knows. When you read varied literature on a particular topic, you categorically come to know what is known to you and what is not. The researcher, who is in the process, or at the stage of evaluating existing literature, gets an open perspective and looks at it from a critical point of view, so that beneath the knowledge on the surface of the literature, what is the view point, can also be understood. Eventually, when you have lots of literature with you, you are able to compare, contrast and then ultimately develop a perspective, which can be combined as common characteristics or approaches.

Researchers who don’t have an in-depth understanding of what is the core objective of creating the Literature Review, create it with the only sole purpose of text summarization, making lists of results and arguments. You must remember, this is just the first step in the creation of the literature review. You must rather have an evaluative perspective and not just listing down or compiling content. The job of Literature Review should be completed, to do justice to your research, as well as, to all the effort you make in collecting information and compiling it. The task is complete only when you have mapped the entire field. You should be able to clarify what has been the explicit contribution of the research, and its relationship with the prior research that has already been done.

Once you have done that, you unambiguously bring out the gap that is unfilled and still needs research. So you can end your Literature Review highlighting very clearly, that thorough analysis of existing literature brings out some gaps, and filling of those gaps is the objective of your research

The key basis for any of the research study is the question that is there in itself. If your research question is vague or lacks clarity and specification then what follows in forms of objectives and hypotheses of the study will also not be clear. If you so intent to develop the right question for your study, what is required is a very strong and solid review of literature.  A good understanding and exhibition of literature depicts the amount of expertise you have in your topic and you are able to justify and validate the question that you put up in your literature review.

All of this is easier said than done and sounds very good on paper. But from the glut of research that is available in the academia at the moment, it becomes a challenge to identify how much is enough. If you take the opinion of your supervisor, most likely he would tell you that you shouldn’t run after quantity but rather focus upon the quality of the content. It surely is valuable guidance, but still it may become a challenge to be able to decide how much of content sufficient content is.

There are some simple rules that apply here:

1. There is a strong connection between the breadth and depth of your literature review. The area of the study that you choose will have some amount of history attached to it in terms of previous work done. If the amount of work done previously is limited then you would have to go more in depth of that limited work available. However, if lot of work in your field is already existing then you would have to do wider study going back in to the history as much as possible. Keep the chronological arrangement structured and avoid gaps if any in the chronology.

The effectiveness with which you select your keywords will determine the quality of your work. If you choose too many keywords then you would be buried under the results for a long time and if you choose too few then you would bear the risk of slipping over a relevant theory and important paper that could a lot of weight to your paper.

Decide the length of your literature review on the basis of you’re a lot of reviews that you read.  Feeling confident about the length of your content will reflect in the feeling that it is enough to add weight to your study.

Having discussed the foundation of the literature review in the formative blogs, we can further discuss the important components of a good literature review.

Create sub heads of the collected content for the LR:  you must know the main themes that you will be breaking down your literature review into.  Whatever material that you have collected, you must stack it up under the correct subhead. There may be some content that you wouldn’t know where to place that is ok. Keep them aside and leave them for the ends rather than discarding them. At the end of this task you may be able to place them better. When you finish segregating all the content into its relevant stack you will get the idea of how much weight you have allocated to each sub theme and whether it is worth it or no.

Design your conceptual schema: all the sub heads that you have created in the previous stage must be organised in a sequential manner, they must go well with each other for which you need to put up ideas that go together under one head and ideas that contradict each other at a more appropriate place.  Sequencing out the sub heads is going to help you to create the chapterization pattern to add a sense of connectivity between the ideas and as the reader goes through the chapter from the beginning to the end, he is able to graduate in his understanding and learning of the concepts in a smooth manner.

Start paraphrasing:  when you have put up each thing to where it belongs, you need to now give it your writing so you got to actually start beginning to write your literature review. You can start from any of the subheads, it won’t matter. In fact it is always better to start from a section you are most comfortable with or the one that excites you the most. At this stage, you must not forget to put the citations while you are paraphrasing the content. If you procrastinate the citation work for the end you aren’t doing anything but inviting trouble for yourself.  After you have completed the paraphrasing task of all the sections, you have accomplished a big stage in your literature review

By the end of this stage you would have completed the first draft stage of your literature review. Congratulations it isn’t any less than a milestone.

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.