Writing a Literature Review
Wiser workshop
27th January 2010
Overview
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What is a literature review?
Information seeking
Critical Reading
Synthesis and structure
Reflections on your literature review
What is a Literature Review?
According to Bell (1999, p90):
“Any investigation, whatever the scale,
will involve reading what other people
have written about your area of interest,
gathering information to support or
refute your arguments and writing about
your findings.”
Why is it important?
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Teaches you more about the subject
Shows you had read widely
Demonstrate critical analysis
Helps you refine your ideas
Develops your subject-related vocabulary
• Provides the context for your research
• Enables comparison between your results and
published research
What skills do I need?
• Information seeking
• scanning the literature efficiently
• identifying a set of useful articles and books
• Critical reading
• analysing texts to identify relevant, unbiased and
valid studies
• Synthesising
• putting ideas from various sources together to
build your argument
Information seeking
Where do I find information?
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Books – library catalogue
E-books
E-journals
Databases
Library Focus
Supervisor suggestions
Websites?
Information seeking
What do I do?
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Start broad then focus
Be prepared to go outside your subject
Mind map key ideas / themes
Records references and quotes
carefully!
Critical reading
Evaluating websites
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Who is the author?
Can you see bias or a vested interest?
How detailed is the information?
Does it say where the information is
from?
• Is it out of date?
• How does it compare to other sources?
Critical reading
We do not expect academic authors to be lying or
trying to swindle us
But there may be
hidden layers...
Critical reading
Academia is rarely about finding absolute
truths...
But is more often a case of discussing
Viewpoints
Interpretation
significance
Critical reading
Authors mean to be...
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Logical – but have made a mistake
Impartial – but have made assumptions
Honest – but have been mislead
New – but haven’t seen my evidence
Synthesising
What should I be writing about?
• What has already been written on the topic
• What has not been written on that topic and
problems with existing literature
• How your research addresses the 'gap', or
‘weakness’ in the existing knowledge base
• Don’t just reproduce/summarise!
• Show how the literature relates to the research
project.
Synthesising
Useful questions to guide you
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What is already known in the area?
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Where are the inconsistencies or
shortcomings in present knowledge?
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Why study (further) the research
problem?
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What contribution can the present
study be expected to make?
Synthesising
Structuring the Lit Review
When you have mapped out the contents, you
need to decide the order in which you are going
to write about them:
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general to specific
chronologically
according to different schools of thought
argument and counterargument
Synthesising
Tips on Structure
Group authors who worked on similar
themes & link ideas
Make clear links between ideas inside the
literature review and your own research
Synthesising
Don’t...
Just list all the books you have read and
write a bit about each
Keep making the same points
Put any of your data in the literature
review or discuss your findings
Reflect on your literature review
• What are you doing right?
• What might you be doing wrong?
• Have you had any feedback yet?
• What can you do to improve it?
Final suggestions
• Keep revising your work on the
literature review – it will be a work in
progress
• Continue reading around the subject &
adding to the review
• Re-read the literature review & keep
improving it