Literature
Reviews
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How To Write a Literature Review
An article entitled, The Literature Review: A few Tips on Conducting It (2007) , published by the University of Toronto has defined the “literature review” as, “an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars”. The same publication has stated that two skill sets are involved in the creation of a literature review: 1] information seeking--the ability to efficiently locate literature relevant to a topic; and 2] critical appraisal—the ability to apply analytical techniques to the task of identifying scholarly material that is unbiased and which exhibits validity.
The student who is about to embark on the task of writing a literature review would be well-advised to peruse Cooper’s (1998) Synthesizing Research: A Guide for Literature Reviews. This is oriented towards the social sciences, but much of what is in it has general utility and it contains invaluable tips on how to use information technology to facilitate one’s research.
It is important to understand the purpose of a literature review. What a literature review is not supposed to be is a random collection of books and articles that are only tangentially related to the subject under discussion. The materials covered should conform to the exact dimensions of the topic or problem with which the student proposes to deal. It goes without saying that this requires that the student should, before commencing the literature review, state carefully and concisely what his/her research is attempting to do. In addition to meeting the requirement of relevance, the University of Toronto’s publication that we have cited above lists three other things which a literature review should have. These are:
- A synthesis that informs the reader of the state of play respecting the topic, i.e., what is--and what is not--currently known about it
- Statements identifying points of scholarly contention concerning the topic
- Statements which point to areas in need of further research.
One of the fine points of literature review writing has to do with determining how exhaustive their coverage should be. There are some subjects which are so general that it would be simply impossible to find and discuss all of the things that have been recently published about them. In such cases one must educate oneself as to what the major fault line of disputation is concerning the topic and then ascertain who are the most eminent and creditable authorities on both sides of the line; the works of these people will be what is reviewed. However, if one has chosen to discuss a topic that is sufficiently narrow, one should make one’s selection of materials as comprehensive as possible.
References:
Cooper, H. (1998). Synthesizing Research: A Guide for Literature
Reviews. Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage Publications.
The Literature Review: A Few Tips on Conducting It. (2007). University
of Toronto.