Unit 3: Writing a Literature Review

Research Topic

There is no particular strategy for students and researchers to choose a research topic but there are three well-known reasons that researchers seek after. They are; experience, theory testing, and replication of previous research. Past experiences of professionals can be a strong inspiration for researchers. Researchers are mostly interested in negative experiences for the purpose of improving practices and making them better for next generations. Theories can be used to develop research studies. Even a single study can be the focus of a research to examine its implications. The replication studies refer to repeating a past research recognizing its methodological weaknesses to do a better one. A researcher repeats a study carefully so that the previous limitations will not be repeated.

Research Questions

Research questions may arise from various sources, such as

• Textbooks
• Scholarly literature
• Some scholarly articles that contain listings of particular groups of cases (e.g., war, conflict, crises, particular negotiations, etc.).
• Some scholarly websites which contain the databases you can explore
• Websites of respected international organizations such as International Monetary Fund, International Labor Organization; intergovernmental organizations such as United Nations and the World Trade Organization.
• Websites of governmental and non-governmental organizations.
• Websites of government agencies such as Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Presidency of the Republic of Turkey.
• Reference books such as almanacs and books that contain helpful listings of the related field.

Defining Variables

Political scientists define “the circumstances, topics, policies, or other phenomena that they want to understand as dependent variables” . For instance, when a researcher likes to investigate the reasons for a failing policy, the dependent variable of the study is “the failure of the policy”. Another study may attempt to find an answer why a specific country has suffered from several multiple coups, the dependent variable of the study is “the occurrence of several coup attempts in that country”. There exist multiple factors that influence the dependent variable of a study which is called as independent variables . Independent variables may cause some changes on the dependent variable. The supposition made on the relationship between the dependent and independent variables is called as hypotheses.

Literature Review

Literature review is the selection of available documents (both published and unpublished) on the topic, which contains information, ideas, data an evidence written from a particular standpoint to fulfil certain aims or express certain views on the nature of the topic and how it is to be investigated, and the effective evaluation of these documents in relation to the research being proposed The term literature review is referred as “the process of reading and reviewing published scholarship in the field” It empowers us to perceive how new investigations and research are fairly similar to building squares, which are laid upon the thoughts worked by others.

The Multiple Purposes of a Literature Review

The literature review helps researchers develop an understanding about the key concepts of the research topic and produce an original work by replicating the previous studies and avoiding mistakes.

Steps for Conducting a Literature Review

A literature review can be conducted following seven steps: identification of research questions, selecting the databases and sources, specifying the key terms, applying practical screening criteria, applying methodological screening criteria, doing the review, and synthesizing the results.

Types of Literature Review

Literature review can be explained in four categories (Feak and Swales, 2009, 2): Narrative reviews are typically found in theses, dissertations, grant and research proposals, and research articles. Systematic literature reviews are convenient when the reviewer aims to illuminate the existing literature and its potential implications. Meta-analysis is performed by statistical techniques through combining data from multiple studies that have analyzed the same research questions. Focused literature review defines the reviews that focused on a single aspect of the past research such as methodology.

Deciding the Keywords within the Subject Area

The first basic step in searching the relevant literature related to your topic is the specification of the keywords. After the research topic and keywords are identified, the process of scanning different data sources begins. It is possible to simplify your search by using the keywords searching techniques.

Literature Reviewer

Literature reviewer seek an answer to the following questions while reviewing the literature:

• What were the aims and objectives of the study?
• In what context the study was carried out?
• What approaches, methods and techniques were used in the study?
• What were the outcomes of the study?
• What was the contribution of the study to the field?
• Does it have any link to my question?

Sources of Information for Literature Search

Searching the Literature

Literature search refers to discovering useful materials that would be included in or excluded from a research project.

In a digital age, electronic sources increase rapidly. That’s why the literature search increasingly becomes computer based and digitalized. However, the students and researchers should not neglect the college libraries.

Selecting the Sources

One of the most critical issues in a research attempt is the appropriateness and reliability of the information sources. It is essential to reference the primary sources in the search for the literature. However, secondary sources are also useful. Secondary sources are a synthesis of previous primary sources of theoretical and empirical studies. Secondary sources allow a quick look at the recent developments on a specific subject. Primary sources are original research studies or writings. They are written by a theorist, researcher, or historian. In primary sources there is no instrument between the actual research and the reader.

The Internet material can be ranked as reliable, fairly reliable and unreliable in terms of their sources.

Ask an Expert

Asking an expert who knows the field can simplify your work by providing you the key sources and unique research information, and this guidance will save a great deal of time

Encyclopedias

The most comprehensible sources of reference are the encyclopedias for the selection of the topic as well as the preparation readings after the topic selection.

Statistics

One of the sources that are appealed in scientific studies is the statistics. The statistics utilized by researchers lose their up-to-datedness as soon as the new statistics are published. In every scientific work, the last statistics published in that area should be included. If the statistics on which a scientific research is based are not up-to-date, many theses are rejected by the jury for this reason.

Books

Even if books constitute a significant part of the sources, there are disadvantages as well as advantages. One of the main advantages of the books is that the printed material is generally important and high-quality. Besides, books integrate the other investigations in a way that will result in a consistent knowledge base. The main disadvantage of the books is that the material is not exactly updated because it can take several years between the completion of the work and the publication in the book.

The Internet

The Internet is a system that people all around the world can load information without quality and reliability assurance. Thus, internet sources should be carefully selected in academic writings. In an academic writing, the author should cite the references including the author and the date of each source.

The following tips may help you decide the scholarliness of the sources accessed electronically:

1. Level of detail
2. Level of discourse
3. Structure
4. Explanation of methodology
5. Footnotes and endnotes
6. Bibliography
7. Date of publication

Internet Search Engines

Internet search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex makes many sources available directly. Yet, most of the databases are not available without a pay or a subscription via institutions or universities. Google Scholar provides a practical alternative to search scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites.

Catalogs

Catalogs can be thought in three categories: Library catalogs, national catalogs and publishers’ and booksellers’ catalogs.

Bibliographical Databases

The term ‘bibliographic databases’ defines the “abstracting and indexing services for the scholarly literature”. Over the past decade, technological developments expanded the horizons of the bibliographic database from abstracts to longer pieces of texts.

University Repositories

University repositories are an ordinarily open-access database of the research and publication productions of an institution. The contributors are typically the academics, researchers, and university students. University repositories can be accessed via the websites of the universities or various registries, and associations which list archives on an overall premise. Repositories cover archived materials such as theses and dissertations, eportfolios, manuscripts, research reports, and book chapters.

Periodicals

Periodicals are more widely known as journals. They are the major information source of prior research literature. Periodicals are published a number of times a year and are sent to subscribers including the libraries. The journals which report the research findings are the most significant ones. The quality of journals varies greatly from journal to journal. The most qualified journals are refereed meaning that the publication is evaluated by editors and/or peers expert in their fields in terms of quality assurance.

Grey Literature

Grey literature covers the products “Grey literature is the unpublished, non-commercial, hard-to-find information that organizations such as professional associations, research institutes, think tanks, and government departments produce”.

Blogs and Wikies

Blogs are a prevalent type of correspondence, empowering individuals to express themselves on issues, add their sentiments to discussions, critique on the perspectives of others, ask questions, and to exchange knowledge and thoughts. The difficult question here is to what extent the students can utilize such a material in their academic writings. These platforms cover superficial opinions which lack rigor as well as very carefully evaluated postings.

A significant number of the issues examined related to blogs also apply to the utilization of wikis within academic circles. Wikis are progressively being utilized to empower students and scientists to cooperate on shared issues and to team up in terms of knowledge, research strategies, research literature, and the design of projects. There are issues about the publication control of wikis to guarantee the legitimacy of the material, and this is a factor which ought to be considered before utilizing such archives in an exposition. There have customarily been worries inside scholarly circles about the utilization of records. There are issues about the publication control of wikis to guarantee the validity of the material, and this is a factor which ought to be considered before utilizing such records in an academic paper.

Journal Databases

Full-text journal databases allow online access for particular publications. They are more suitable for searching individually but they are not comprehensive. Different databases will complement the missing content.

Ancestry Method

Ancestry Method refers to tracing the references of a paper like a detective which is relevant to your research topic. The traced references may bring you other sources that may be helpful to your exploration. This type of searching may be extremely useful in the development of theoretical and conceptual frameworks.

Organization of the Literature Review

In a literature review, a clear structure must be organized, this structure should be explained and the reason why this order preferred should be clarified, too. Literature preparation process includes three main steps: finding the relevant literature, reading them and writing up the literature review. A good literature review should have the following characteristics:

1. The problems and controversial issues related to the topic should be discussed.
2. The potential content that have not been covered in the literature review should be explained with its reasons clearly.
3. The literature review should concentrate on latest documents since they are likely the most pertinent.
4. The literature review should be long enough to persuade the reader that the literature was read extensively.
5. The gaps in the current literature should be revealed in the literature review.
6. The literature review should be more than a list of past studies. The works cited in the literature review should be critically evaluated.
7. Overall, the literature review should be presented chronologically.
8. The literature review can ignore the studies from different disciplines than your immediate discipline.
9. The literature review should explain the readers how your work might contribute to the existing scholarly literature and future research.

You should avoid giving details about the studies you have reviewed and it should be enough to explain their methods and findings. The following steps can be adopted:

1. Step one: Prepare summary sheets or article abstracts.
2. Step two: Review the summary sheets or article abstracts. Compare and contrast the keywords and themes you have found.
3. Step three: Decide how you can organize your literature review.
4. Step four: Begin writing your literature review using the analysis you made in the first three steps.

Common Errors and Problems in Writing a Literature Review

The inadequate training in conducting a literature review leads students learning by themselves, mostly by trial and error method, and this in a number of common problems and mistakes:

1. Uncertain purpose
2. Vague introduction and poor organization
3. Not enough information
4. Failing to connect to take-home message
5. be critical
6. Exceptions and counterexamples
7. Tell the reader where to go
8. Matters of style.