By Ah! Finally, you have reached your final year, now it is time for you to write a dissertation.
But, do you know? The merit of your dissertation depends on the quality of your literature review.
The common perception of the literature review is that it is a mere documentation of summaries of the sources related to the research.
No, it is where wisdom enters your dissertation. You make sense of all the researched information, you identify gaps, and present how your work responds to what’s already out there.
A well-crafted review can enhance depth and depth and credibility of your dissertation, while a poor one can derail a strong research paper. It proves that you understand the academic research of other authors, and you know where your research fits in.
Yes! A Literature review might look like a mountain you never signed up to climb.
Don’t worry! In this blog post, we have presented practical, de-stressing tips to help you write a literature review for dissertation writing.
1. Define The Focus Of The Literature Review
Ask yourself, what is the focus of your review? It is time to define the rationale for conducting the literature review.
First, you must determine guiding questions for your literature review. These research questions or hypotheses will guide your research. So, be mindful! A vague question can result in an unfocused literature review.
The second step in defining the focus is to construct criteria to distinguish relevant from irrelevant studies. This criterion must be detailed and comprehensive, so you could have a clear sense of distinction to identify valid subsets of articles.
Moreover, the ambiguities in the criteria can misguide you, and could omit an article inadequately. A recursive pilot-testing of the criteria might be time-consuming. But much less than restarting the research,
After data has been painstakingly collected and analyzed.
Students! Patience is the key; to create inclusion and exclusion criteria, you need a trial-and-error approach.
2. Search For Relevant Literature
Now, you have criteria to focus on, start researching, and collect all exhaustive, semi-exhaustive, representative, or pivotal sets of relevant articles.
Beware! There is a chance you might get drowned in the sea of knowledge. When you feel you’ve reached the point of saturation, stop collecting information.
We know, it happens to all of us. When we have concluded our research, the light of a new article dazzles us. Unless the new article is critically important, leave it out.
3. Classify The Types Of Literature
You have reached a stage where you ask Hamlet’s question, “To be, or not to be.”
Don’t get us wrong, it is a point where you have to decide which retrieved information should be included in the review.
This can be confusing, but if you have followed the first tip, you should know the focus and goal of the literature review. Then, everything will be simple and easy. The practical tip is, as you evaluate your data, keep classifying the types of literature extracted and the process used. Or you can even consider taking Dissertation Help Dubai or consultancy.
For instance, you might find some articles with qualitative data, while others may present policy statements about the issue in question, and still other types of data might describe projects surrounding the issue. The key tip is to evaluate and record simultaneously.
4. Analysis & Interpretation
Summon all your critical and analytical senses! It is time to make sense of all the information you have. This is a stage where you synthesize valid retrieved studies. It depends on the type of your research data; a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods synthesis will be performed. Analysis and interpretation a tough things and take immense time, and that is where you can take help from any Assignment Help Dubai to ensure its perfection and quality.
5. Public Presentation
Now, it is a stage where you apply editorial criteria to separate important from unimportant Information. Literature reviews are commonly organized historically, conceptually, or methodologically.
- Historical: In this format review is organized chronologically. It is preferred when the emphasis is on the progression of research methods or theories, or on a change in practices over time.
- Conceptual: This is a format that maps out the key concepts, theories, and relationships relevant to your research question
- Methodological: This format structures the review around a central theme or research question.
6. The Five ‘C’s Of A Literature Review
Here is a pro tip for Literature review: Author and educator Jamie L. Callahan published a paper titled “Writing Literature Reviews” in the journal Human Resource Development Review. She suggested the 5Cs framework to structure the review.
- Cite: Citation is vital for a literature review because it credits other authors and gives a time frame to validate the relevance of the source.
- Compare: Identify similarities between various studies, arguments, and theories.
- Contrast: Examine multiple sources and see what is different in their findings.
- Critique: Evaluate the credibility, strengths, and limitations of the research.
- Connect: Explain how the reviewed literature relates to your own research question
Common Mistakes In Reviewing The Literature:
In their book, Educational Research: An Introduction, authors Meredith Borg and James Gall pointed out
The most frequent mistakes made in reviewing the literature.
- Uncritical acceptance of another researcher’s findings and interpretations as valid, rather than examining critically all aspects of the research design and analysis.
- Does not take sufficient time to define the best descriptors and identify the best sources to use in the review literature related to one’s topic.
- does not report the search procedures that were used in the literature review
- Reports isolated statistical results rather than synthesizing them by chi-square or meta-analytic methods
- Consider contrary findings and alternative interpretations in synthesizing quantitative literature.
Final Thoughts:
Students!
Now you have practical, de-stressing tips to write a literature review for dissertation writing. Start with a rationale for conducting the review, questions to guide the research, and then construct criteria for collecting data. With an explicit plan for analyzing and presenting data, you can craft a literature review that can turn it into the backbone of a strong, persuasive dissertation.
Take one step at a time, remember you got this.
