Guideline On How To Do A Literature Review

Most of the students have a question in their minds that is “how to do a literature review”, well doing a literature review is not a very big deal, and all you have to do is to have good knowledge on what a literature review is basically and how to do a literature review? If you know the answer to the told questions than you are ready to write a literature review and trust me it won’t cost you much amount of time as well.

First, you should remember that doing a literature review doesn’t require you to conduct a new research work on any subject, rather you just have to write a review on a research work already done by the other author. The basic goal of doing a literature review is to provide the readers with up to date information on a particular subject. The main essence of a critical literature review is all about ideas with proper references plus the current information along with a neutral stance on the subject.

Doing a literature review involves a proper selection of a subject matter on which you would be doing your review. For this purpose, you can go for short novel, book, essays and stories and gather all the research material written by the authors. In order to get the latest information, you can also consult different libraries and over the internet. Internet can be a great source for finding information that is up to the make, but you have to make sure that the websites you are using to get information are authentic and reliable.

Now, that you have all the material in your hands, go through it so that you have the required knowledge before actually writing a literature review. You can also devise an outline for doing a literature review, in which you will note down all the chapters so that you keep yourself within the boundaries of the topic. A better literature review always starts with a thesis statement, followed by the body which can also be sub-divided into categories depending on the nature of the literature review, then comes the conclusion to wrap up your literature review.

Therefore, the above told guideline on “how to do a literature review “will surely help you to come up with a good piece of critical literature review.

Writing A Literature Review In Five Easy Steps

Let us highlight the definition of a literature review before studying in detail how to conduct a literature review; mostly it is done to provide the background information about the researches and the work done by the profound scholars. When it is about scientific research related review than it is used to outline the similar form of research work done and some recommendations to a do a further research work. Whatever the type of the literature review is, no research work is completed without it.

Conducting a literature review:

First, understand what literature a review is all about:
Above told is just a very little definition of literature review, you have to do a thorough research about it. Internet can be the best medium for this. Just type in Literature review and you will get thousands of websites defining it. To make it clearer, I must tell you that a literature review is not a review of any book; rather it is background information about a certain topic.

Determine what type of literature review you will be conducting:

If it is being done on a particular topic than find a topic that is of your interest and start writing a literature review but if you are doing a scientific research paper, than find a particular topic and search for the best literature on it.

Determine the scope of writing a literature review:

Ask yourself, what the scope of your literature review is? A literature review can be done to provide the summary of the background information or the evaluation of the sources on a specific topic and also recommending sources or highlighting the intellectual progression of any field or the amalgamation of the old and new ideas.

Incorporate the text in the literature review:

Gather all the information about the topic you are conducting literature review on but while collecting all the details, make sure the sources you are using are credible and also give high preference to the scholarly sources.

Literature review style:

The style and breadth of the literature review will totally depend on the type of literature review you are conducting, so make yourself very clear about what will you doing for the literature review.

Therefore, the preceding literature review help will be very helpful in properly conducting a research work.