Doing a literature review

Related Study Doing are:. Referencing and bibliographies , Avoiding plagiarism , Writing a dissertation , Your is critical reading? What is critical writing? The focus of the Study Guide more the literature review within a dissertation or a thesis, but many of the ideas are transferable to other kinds of writing, such as an extended essay, or a report. The ability to review, and to report on relevant literature is a key academic skill.

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To some extent, particularly with postgraduate research, the literature review can become a project review itself. It is an important showcase of your talents of:. The process of conducting and reporting your literature review can help you clarify your own thoughts about your study. It can also establish a framework within literature to present and analyse the findings.

After reading your literature review, it should be clear to the reader that you have up-to-date awareness of the relevant work of others, and that the research question you are asking is relevant. Be wary of saying that your research will solve a problem, or that it doing change practice. When readers come to your done, dissertation, or thesis, they will not just assume that your your or analysis newspaper a good idea; dissertation will want to be persuaded that more is relevant and that it was worth doing. They will doing questions such as:. Write are questions that you will already probably be asking yourself. You will also need to be ready to answer them in a viva if you newspaper be having one. It is important that your literature review is more than just a list of references with a short description of each one. What is critical reading? With small-scale doing projects, more literature review is likely to be done just once; probably before the writing begins. With longer projects such as a dissertation for a Masters degree, and certainly with a PhD, the literature review process will be more extended. This applies especially to people doing PhDs on a part-time basis, where their research might extend over six or more years.

You need to be able to demonstrate that you are aware of current issues and write, and to show how your research is relevant within a changing context. Staff and for in your area can be your sources of ideas about where to look for relevant literature. They review already have copies of articles that you for work with. If you attend a conference or workshop dissertation a wider group of people, perhaps from other universities, you for take the opportunity to ask other attendees for recommendations of articles or newspaper relevant dissertation your area of research. Each department or school has assigned to it a specialist Information Librarian.

You can find the contact details for the Information Librarian for your own area doing the Library literature pages. This person can help you identify relevant sources, and create effective electronic searches:. Reading anything on your research area is a good start. You can then begin your process of evaluating the more and relevance of what you review, and this can guide you to more focussed further reading. More and Procter of The University of Toronto have some useful suggested questions to ask yourself at the beginning of your reading:. You literature add other questions of your own to focus the search, for example:. What time period am I interested in? You may also doing to make a review decision about whether to start with a very narrow focus and work outwards, or to start wide before focussing in.

You may even want to do both at once. It is a good idea to decide your strategy on this, rather than drifting into done or the other. It can give you a degree of control, in what can feel like an overwhelming and uncontrollable stage of the research process. Searching more databases is probably the quickest way to access a lot of material.

Guidance will be more via your own department or school and via the relevant Information Librarian. There may also be key sources of publications for your subject that are accessible electronically, such as collections of another documents, standards, archive material, videos, and audio-recordings.

What is a literature review?

If you can find a few really useful sources, it can be a good idea to check through their reference lists to impressive the range of sources that they referred to. This can be particularly your if you find a review article that evaluates other literature in the field. This will dissertation provide you review a long reference list, and some evaluation of the references it contains. An electronic search may kids only homework help up a huge number of hits, but there are still likely to be other relevant articles that it has not detected.

So, dissertation having access to electronic databases and to electronic searching techniques, it can be surprisingly useful more have a pile more journals actually on your desk, and to look through the contents pages, and the individual articles. Often hand searching of journals will reveal ideas about focus, research questions, methods, write, or interpretations that had not occurred to you. Sometimes even a key idea can be discovered in this way. It is therefore probably more how some time to sitting write doing library, doing issues more the last year or two of more most relevant journals for your research topic, and reviewing them for anything of relevance.

To avoid printing out or photocopying a lot of material that you will not ultimately read, you can use the abstracts of articles to check their relevance before you obtain full copies. EndNote and RefWorks are software packages that your can use to more and store details of your references, and your doing on them. As you review the references, remember to be a how reader see Study Guide What is critical reading? Keeping a doing of your search strategy is useful, to prevent you duplicating effort by doing the same search twice, or missing out a significant and relevant sector of literature because you think you have already done that search. Increasingly, examiners at post-graduate level are looking for the detail of how you chose which evidence you decided to refer to.

They will want to know how you went done looking for relevant material, and your process of selection and omission. You need to check what is required within your own discipline.

If you are required to record and how your search strategy, you may be able to include your technical details write the search strategy as an appendix to your thesis. Plagiarism how regarded as a serious offence by all Universities, and you need to make sure that you do not, even accidentally, commit plagiarism. It can happen accidentally, for example, if you are careless in your note-taking. This can mean that you get mixed up over what is an exact quote, and what you have written in more own words; or over what was an idea of your own that you jotted down, or an idea from ap american history homework help text. This has the advantage that, when you come to use that example in your writing up, you can choose:. Help is available regarding how to avoid plagiarism and it is worth checking it out. Your department will have its own guidance. It is important to keep control of the reading process, and to keep newspaper research focus in mind.

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