Literature Review and Research Approach

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Reviewing Literature: Using Mendeley

The review of the literature will provide the basic rationale for your research from which will emerge the statement of the problem, research questions or hypotheses, and design of your study. Therefore, we recommend that you begin work on Chapter Two, “Review of the Literature,” prior to writing Chapter One, for you will need to know the theory and previous research relevant to your problem.

The review of the literature can illuminate every aspect of a research problem by

(a) providing a historical background for it,

(b) describing its current status,

(d) identifying gaps in the literature,

(e) becoming aware of variables relevant to the problem,

(f) understanding the seminal studies widely cited,

(g) identifying the leading scholars relevant to the problem,

(h) proposing useful theoretical constructs for the study,

(i) understanding the application of appropriate methodological procedures, and

(j) observing comparative studies that assist in analyzing your data and interpreting the results.

Thus, a properly executed review of the literature becomes a potent unifying element through its interrelationships with other sections of the Report, dissertation, or thesis.

Conducting Review: Getting started with Mendeley

There are several search methods for finding literature. The three fundamental methods are called: chain search, systematic literature search and random literature search.

Before starting with review of literature it is important to use appropriate tools and techniques. An essential technique is to use reference management tools such as Mendeley, Endnote, Citavi etc to log your research queries and maintain an electronic database.

The use of Mendeley is highly recommended by the experts and in these short videos, a brief introduction to such techniques is provided and you will be given step-by-step instructions to use Mendeley.

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Search Techniques

Chain search

A chain search consists of finding suitable literature by letting one text lead you to the next, which leads to the next and so on. The strength of the chain search is that it leads from one good reference to another, and you will be able to follow the development of arguments through your literature search. Its weakness, however, is that you might lack references that present different understandings or raise objections to the text that started the chain. It is often best to start with the newest secondary literature by:

reading the latest issues of relevant journals
finding articles about a similar topic to your own
skimming it to see whether other, usable secondary literature is referenced
obtaining these texts. If any of them are interesting in regards to your paper,
continue this procedure using them.

Especially pay attention to whether the texts use different concepts and terms than you. You can use these terms in your further search. In some disciplines and fields, there are reference works listing the past decade’s research. There are also periodic, annotated reviews (journals) of the newest secondary literature within a given field. You could perhaps use these to start your chain search. You can also choose your texts on the basis of how many times they have been cited by other authors (if you conduct your search in Google Scholar, combine the title with “cited by” and it will show you who has cited the source.

The trick of the chain search is allowing authors to recommend each other. Preferably, the chain search must therefore begin with a good text. Starting with bibliographies from the texts recommended by your teacher or discipline is a good idea.

Systematic literature search

You should conduct a systematic, electronic literature search if you are looking for literature on a specific topic. Many people begin their search using Google, and in many cases Google will get you far. However, if you are looking for acclaimed and subject-specific literature, using Google is not enough. You should also use your research library’s website and the databases it provides access to. You will often need a password to gain access to the subject-specific information search resources found there. There will often be numerous options, so you must decide which and how many you wish to search.

Research libraries will often inform you about the strengths of the different search engines and which are biggest within a specific field or topic. If you want to conduct a systematic literature search, you should ideally try out different search engines and find out whether the same sources appear. From this you can decide whether you need to move on to the next. Always acquaint yourself with the content of a given database so you avoid for example searching for French sources from the 1980s in a database that only includes English sources from 1992 and after. Danish material cannot always be found on Google! This can best be found on bibliotek.dk, where all books, journals, newspaper articles of a certain length from the most recent decades are registered.

Adjust your search to find abstracts of the sources, so you can gain a quick overview of their content. Important information when searching is partly how many and partly which hits your search terms return. If you only get a few results, you can download or print out your search and at your leisure examine whether it contains anything relevant and whether you would like to read more than the abstract.

Random literature search

As the name indicates, you let yourself be guided by chance, follow a link, a hunchmand let yourself be inspired in a random literature search. It is particularly suitable for the initial idea phase, if you have come to a standstill or for finding a quirky angle for the paper’s perspective.

No one search method is superior; each has different strengths and weaknesses. However, there is typically one that is more appropriate for your particular needs at a given time in the writing process.

Articles and other material

Articles are an important and crucial supplement to books because

articles are more up-to-date: Authors write articles before they write books

many topics are too small to base an entire book on – however, a given topic can
easily result in 200 articles even if it does not result in a single book.

We see many papers purely based on books and which include no articles at all. Oftenmwe find that the employed literature is too unspecific in relation to the paper’s topic. You should especially turn to articles when writing bigger papers in the later years of your studies: final papers, theses, professional bachelor theses. In these papers, it is often not enough to rely on the basic literature of the field. The more scientific and scholarly your paper aims to be, the more it must build on others’ research – and the newest developments will always be presented in articles.

In different fields and subject areas an increasing amount of journals are published in printed and electronic versions. Electronic journals are often a protected resource, which you can only access if you are given special rights through your educational institution. You will typically be able to access these using your password on your institution library’s website. However, there is a lot of (academic) material freely available on the internet – including journals.

Search terms for literature searches for papers

Search terms are the key to which literature you will obtain and which paper you will end up writing, because the writer’s perspective and preconceptions of the topic can be found in the choice of which search terms to include and exclude. Search terms must be field terms and these must often be narrowed down. You use field terms to search for literature and write your paper (unless you intend to invent new field terms!). Broad, everyday words should be avoided in searches as these will return too many meaningless hits.

Find possible field terms by looking in thesauruses (lists of search words) from your field. Reading this will give you an impression of what people have previously written about, and which search words have been used in your field. This will in itself serve as an inspiration for what to write about. Similarly libraries use topic classification systems and here you can draw much inspiration for search terms and concepts.

Many of these lists of search words are even clickable, which means you can search the library’s material directly. And remember: Supervisors and information specialists (librarians) are the persons most likely to have and pass on subject-specific know-how about topics/search terms. Use supervisors and librarians as guides. Having a number of search terms ready before you sit down in front of your computer to search is always a good idea. You can also prepare related, synonymous words and translations of search terms into the languages you can and want to read in. Delimitations made in advance, e.g. only sources from the past decade; only from a specific angle etc., can limit the number of hits. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage.

Documenting your literature and information search

Including your search strategy in your paper’s introduction or method section will help demonstrate your method for approaching literature: “I have used the following search terms… in the following resources… on these dates…”. This is a highly recommendable form of documentation, which will allow the next researcher to replicate or modify your research on the basis of your described search strategy.

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Writing Literature Review

At this point, you have searched and reviewed the literature pertaining to your research problem. Now you are ready to begin writing the chapter. Chapter Two, “Review of the Literature,” has three distinct parts: the introduction, in which you tell your readers what you are going to tell them; the body, in which you tell them; and the summary, in which you tell them what you told them. In any given study, the headings and subheadings contained in the body of the chapter will usually be determined by the variables investigated and the research objectives in the study. Qualitative studies may be organized around themes or participants interviewed.

The Review of the Literature Chapter is often a lengthy chapter in a dissertation or thesis. Therefore, is it important to provide a structure that will help you organize and integrate the material you present. The following techniques can be used to organize your Review of the Literature Chapter: (a) organize your material in a funnel, (b) be selective,(c) make an outline, (d) write the introduction, (e) use headings, (f) use transitions, (g) write a summary, and (h) be careful not to plagiarize.

Organize Your Material in a Funnel

A funnel, a structural writing tool, has a wide portion at the top and a narrow portion at the bottom (Heppner & Heppner, 2004; Martin, 1980). The funnel provides a good analogy for the shape of the review of the literature. The idea is that the literature review is organized so that more general information is discussed first, and the information most closely related to the research reported in your thesis or dissertation is discussed last. Your literature review may have four or five sections, each with a heading. Each section (heading) may have one or more subsections (sub-headings). That is, divide your review into headings and organize the sections so that the most general material is discussed first, followed by more specific material related to your study. The subsections of the review should be organized in a funnel structure as well. Specifically, articles of historical interest or the articles utilizing different types of participants or methods than those utilized in your study are presented first. The more recent articles utilizing participants and methods similar to those you are using in your study are then presented. Each article should not receive the same degree of coverage. An obvious sign of a poorly conducted literature review is one in which all the articles/research reports are given the same coverage and something is said about the participants, method, results, and discussion of each piece of research. Here is a technique you might use in organizing your review. Divide your material into three parts:

(a) Material that will be described in detail, because it is highly related to your study,

(b) Material that will be briefly discussed, and

(c) Material that is tangential to your study, which may or may not be included in your literature review depending on the amount of information available in the literature directly related to your topic.

A common problem of beginning writers is that of providing too much information on a topic and not enough on the specific area that their thesis or dissertation will cover (Heppner & Heppner, 2004). Another common problem of beginning writers is that they frequently switch from the general to the specific and back again to the general. As you are writing your review, think funnel. Look at the shape of your literature review chapter. Do you see the shape of a funnel? Do you begin with material that is more general and then move toward information that is more specific until you are providing the research questions or hypotheses of your thesis or dissertation? Do the same for subsections of your literature review, again starting from the general and moving to the specifics.

What to add to the Review

As your literature review develops, references should become more specific to the topic, use more journals that are current, move from the general to the specific, and finish with a direct lead-in to your research questions or hypotheses. You need to adopt a critical perspective in reading and referencing the work of others. Sentences beginning with “Smith found...” should be kept to a minimum, because it shifts the focus of the review from your own argument to the work of others. A preferred strategy is to develop a theme and then cite the work of relevant authors to support your argument or to provide examples of your point. In addition, the overuse of quotations tends to limit your own authority. Restrict the use of quotations to provenluminaries on a given topic or that are stated in a unique way that is difficult to recapture (Rudestam & Newton, 2007).The literature review is not a compilation of facts or narrative, but a coherent argument that leads to a description of your study. There should be no mystery about the direction you are going. A good question to repeatedly ask yourself while writing the review of the literature is: Where am I going with this? State at the outset of the literature review the goal of the review and the structure of your argument. Similarly, each sentence in the dissertation must be there for a purpose. It should never serve as a filler (Rudestam & Newton, 2007). By the end of the literature review, the reader should be aware of the current state of the literature and what you will be doing to extend the state of that knowledge. Your summation of pertinent literature is a significant contribution to the knowledge base.

Although flow of ideas in literature review greatly varies depending on the research objectives, but generally a good literature review could have the following sections:

Introduction
Historical Perspective
Theoretical Underpinnings
Main Body (Describing and Relating Dependent and Independent Variables as well as defining the constructed Hypotheses)
State of the Art (Most recent developments)
Synthesis (Gaps, Trends, Themes, Practical Significance)
Summary in Tabular form

Make an outline with headings and sub-headings:

Make an outline of the major headings you plan to use in your review of the literature. Developing and following an outline while writing will accomplish two things:

(a) It will produce focused, logical prose, and

(b) it will help you avoid becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material to be covered in a lengthy review of the literature.

The Review of the Literature Chapter begins with a brief introduction, usually between one and three pages. The introduction should introduce the research problem, including the key variables examined in the study, and describe the scope and organization of the review. Conclude the introduction with a paragraph that describes the sequence of the literature you will cover, often referred to as an advance organizer, using the exact headings that appear in the chapter.

Divide your literature review into useful major sections (headings) and subsections (subheadings). Judicious use of headings and subheadings serves two functions:

(a) It helps readers understand the organization of your review, and

(b) it helps readers follow your transitions from one topic or subtopic to another.

Use transitions between paragraphs to provide connections between ideas. Use transitions within paragraphs to provide a change from one sentence to another or from one section of the paragraph to another.

Your Review of the Literature Chapter should end with a brief summary of the literature you reviewed. Thus, the summary provides an overview of the historical, theoretical, and empirical literature that supports your investigation. It makes the rationale of your study and its research questions or hypotheses apparent to the reader. You should draw on this summary when you are writing your statement of the problem section in Chapter One and describing the theoretical framework for your research questions and/or hypotheses, or set-ting the context of your study in a qualitative thesis or dissertation. It is for this reason that we recommend that you begin work on your review of the literature prior to writing Chapter One, for you will need to know what has been done and how it relates to your research problem.

Synthesize the conducted review to connect to your thesis statement

Depending on the approach used for the study, many different ways in which the literature can be critically analyzed to abstract key points that can be used to base your further argument and strengthen it.

The literature is more than a string of annotations. Annotations are brief summaries of the contents of articles. For example, “Smith found...,” “Jones argued...,” “Harris stated....”Stringing together several annotations in the body of the literature review may describe what research is available in an area of study, but it fails to organize the material. A good review of the literature is a critical synthesis. That is, you describe and analyze the literature to show how previous studies are related to each other and to your study. You can do this by using one or more of the following strategies:

(a) provide a historical con-text to help the reader understand a phenomenon,

One way of analyzing a body of literature is to provide a historical con-text that may be helpful to your readers in understanding a new construct.

(b) point out gaps in the literature,

Literature Another way to analyze a body of literature is to point out gaps in the literature.

Another way to analyze studies is to show how a study differs from a group of previous studies.

(d) identify themes in a group of studies,

In your review of the literature, you may find a group of studies that employ a similar theme.

(e) report practical significance,

As you provide the reader with a review of literature and as you look for significance and potential problems related to your topic, investigating practical significance of the reported studies is very important. You should consider reporting the type of study, the number of participants, and significance with effect size if applicable.

(f) reconcile conflicting theories concerning an important variable,

One way of analyzing a body of literature is to reconcile conflicting theories concerning an important variable.

(g) use tables to summarize research on a single variable,

(h) clarify inconsistent findings, and

(i) signal a continuing line of inquiry

In analyzing a body of literature, you may find an article that started a new line of research that has continued into the present, using additional measurement instruments.

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