The Literature Review | What is Literature Review?

According to Arlene Fink

“A research literature review is a systematic, explicit, and reproducible method for identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing the existing body of completed and recorded work by researchers, scholars, and practitioners.”

So, what is a literature review?

The literature review is an account of published material on the topic by scholars or researchers. This can stand alone as a literature review research paper or a literature review assignment or can also be a part of a dissertation or thesis.

The purpose of a literature review is not to provide new information on a theme but to identify what has been experimentally done previously on the research theme.
A lot of students find composing the literature review one of the most difficult tasks.

For that, we have identified a few issues that a new researcher might face while researching for the literature review. This way he will be fully prepared to counter the problems. And you can easily make your literature review paper without the help of your supervisor,

1. Not all the experiments that are published are valid. For almost the entire research topic, so many studies have been conducted, by sources big and small; that it is difficult to figure out what is valid and what isn’t. Here, it becomes the duty of the researcher to differentiate between the two according to the authenticity of the publishing source and the relation to the topic.
2. The techniques and tools that have been applied to the experiment play a vital role in the literature review. Quantitative techniques are easy to explain and justify but qualitative experiments aren’t which makes it quite an issue during the literature review composition.
3. Sometimes, the literature review becomes under-researched or over-researched. Ideally, the literature review should not exceed one page. A problem that some new researchers face is that either their reviews are under-researched or they are over-researched. The over researching issue occurs when there are a lot of studies already conducted on the topic and the researcher elaborately explains them all which makes the review long and boring. The key to avoiding this problem is to keep the summary of each of the studies short and include an analysis of the study instead. Under researching occurs when the studies are simply summarized without any analysis to add the personal opinion of the researcher. The key to avoiding this issue is to make sure that the researcher includes an analytical statement with each of the studies.

Some others issues that a student can face are related to the formatting of the document. Using the correct format and composition techniques is very important for any research article. So make sure that you do not use any abbreviations in your literature review and use proper APA guidelines (or any formatting guidelines stated by your university) for your literature review. That will make your research paper’s literature review more effective.