So, you’ve chosen your topic, hatched a rough plan of attack, now you need to conduct a literature review. But what is a literature review? put simply, it is an analysis of prior academic research so as to identify the who, what, where, and whys’ of the chosen topic area. You may or may not have conducted what some academics call a preliminary study – a brief search into the existing academic work in your chosen topic. After all, for some students carrying out primary research it’s vital that their work has never been carried out before and these initial studies are crucial when identifying a unique topic for research.

In some subject areas, it may be difficult, if not impossible to identify areas for primary research and therefore a preliminary study may not be necessary secondary research is usually carried out as a result. Whatever the starting point, the literature review forms one of the first major pieces of work in a dissertation. The first is to enable you, the author, to become absolutely clear on what it is you have chosen to research and study.

By understanding other academic literature you can gain an understanding of what has been and is currently being researched. This will help with your own work by identifying windows of opportunity and helping to cement your research questions. For some subjects you may find there has not been much prior research in your field of study, in which case your literature review will have to be less specific and the academic net in which you search will have to be thrown further. The second reason for carrying out a critical review of the literature, as it is often called, is to demonstrate that you, as the author of an academic piece of work, have a strong awareness and knowledge of your chosen subject. You need to build up your credibility, not just for your work, but for you as an author. Once this is achieved you can justify your research and explain where it fits in with other research topics in your subject area.

Many students use the literature review as a way of clarifying the aims and research questions of their dissertation, something that begins at the start of a research project. New research is continuously being published and as you delve deeper into your research topic, you should be prepared to add and update your literature review. See it as a work in progress throughout the length of the entire research project.

writing the literature survey paper

self study reviews increase reader's confidence in the researcher as well as the researcher's confidence in his/herself. Context reviews place the current project in the big picture historical reviews trace the development of an issue over time theoretical reviews compare how different theories address an issue. the purpose of the literature review is to document the state of the art science , with respect to a particular question or problem. It takes raw data the annotated bibliography and converts it into information a critical appraisal.

Pay to Have Research Paper Done

The review should:

be organized around and directly related to a research problem / question you are thinking of developing organize and synthesize the findings of previous researchers into a summary of what is and is not known identify areas of controversy in the literature formulate questions and require further research the review is prose, not a list describing or summarizing one citation after another. Organize the review into sections that represent themes or sub topics, or identify trends. One of the most important early steps in a research project is the conducting of the literature review. Why? because you're likely to find out that just about any worthwhile idea you will have has been thought of before, at least to some degree. I frequently have students who come to me complaining that they couldn't find anything in the literature that was related to their topic. And virtually every time they have said that, i was able to show them that was only true because they only looked for articles that were exactly the same as their research topic.

Importance of Doing Homework Essay

A literature review is designed to identify related research, to set the current research project within a conceptual and theoretical context. When looked at that way, almost no topic is so new or unique that you can't locate relevant and informative related research. Try to determine what the most credible research journals are in your topical area and start with those. Put the greatest emphasis on research journals that use a blind or juried review system. In a blind or juried review, authors submit potential articles to a journal editor who solicits several reviewers who agree to give a critical review of the paper. The paper is sent to these reviewers with no identification of the author so that there will be no personal bias either for or against the author.

Based on the reviewers' recommendations, the editor can accept the article, reject it, or recommend that the author revise and resubmit it. Articles in journals with blind review processes are likely to have a fairly high level of credibility. You are likely to learn a lot in the literature review that will help you determine what the necessary tradeoffs are. What should you look for in the literature review? first, you might be able to find a study that is quite similar to the one you are thinking of doing. Since all credible research studies have to review the literature themselves, you can check their literature review to get a quick start on your own.

Persuasive Essays on Greed

Second, prior research will help ensure that you include all of the major relevant constructs in your study. You may find that other similar studies routinely look at an outcome that you might not have included. Third, the literature review will help you to find and select appropriate measurement instruments. You will readily see what measurement instruments researchers used themselves in contexts similar to yours.