So, you have been tasked with crafting the literature review of an academic paper. Your palms have become sweaty, your heartbeats have increased, and you constantly feel chills of anxiety rushing down your spine.
Believe us when we say it’s a simple and trivial endeavour. A literature review isn’t as complicated as the name seems. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to come up with anything original. To deliver an exemplary literature review, it is crucial to simply offer a brief yet clear summary of writings on the given topic to establish the reviewer’s position in the relevant field of scholarship on the topic. It needs to provide readers with a solid look at previous discussions before the one you will be making in your assignment.
So basically, all you need is a keen sense of comprehension, a knack for writing, a detective’s skill to put two and two together, and you’re all set to go! Still not convinced? No need to fret. Today’s comprehensive post aims to walk you through the significance of crafting a remarkable literature review along with certain essential do’s and don’ts that you need to remember to nail your literature reviews like an academic champion.
Ready? Let’s get started, then!
Literature Review: A Brief Overview
If the words of stalwarts who offer urgent assignment help are anything to go by, a literature review implies a survey conducted on remarkable scholarly sources on a certain topic. It offers a detailed overview of current knowledge, thus helping you determine relevant methods, theories, and gaps in the existing research. You can easily apply this later to the topic of your assignments.
Have a look at certain key steps to crafting an excellent and relevant literature review-
- Look for relevant literature
- Assess sources
- Determine debates, themes, and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Craft your literature review
Always remember an excellent literature review never summarises sources. It synthesises, analyses, and critically assesses to offer a clear image of the current state of knowledge on a topic.
The Significance of a Literature Review
Including a literature review in an assignment can never be overstated, as it offers structure, direction, focus, and coherence to assignments on a certain topic. It also enables effective communication among students by helping them to decide the significant issues. Furthermore, it permits the student to locate his/her work within the existing knowledge body.
The literature review offers an opportunity to-
- Exhibit your familiarity with the subject and its scholarly context
- Establish a theoretical framework and methodology for research
- Locate your work about other eminent theorists and researchers
- Demonstrate how your investigation addresses a gap or contributes to a discussion
- Assess the present state of research and exhibit your profound knowledge of the scholarly debates around a subject or topic.
Writing A Literature Review: The Do’s and Don’ts
To aid our readers in crafting the best assignment literature review possible, we have provided certain essential ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ that can enable you to turn the tables in your favour with your assignments. Not only that, but it would also help you to revamp your writing game by notches.
Take a look-
DO’S
- Search For Relevant Sources of Literature
Before you start looking for the literature, it is significant to have a clearly defined topic in your hand. If you are crafting the literature review for your assignments, look for the literature related to your research questions and issues.
- Create An Extensive Keyword List
Begin by creating a detailed list of keywords related to the assignment question. Incorporate each of the key variables or concepts you’re intrigued by and ensure to list any synonyms and related terminologies. As you discover new keywords in the literature search process, you can add these keywords to your list.
- Look For Relevant Sources
After creating the list of keywords, use them to start locating credible resources. You can use the below-enlisted remarkable databases to look up articles and journals-
- The library catalogue of your university or college
- Google Scholar
- EBSCO
- JSTOR
- Project Muse(for assignments of social sciences and humanities)
- EconLit(for assignments in economics)
- Medline(for assignments in biomedicine and life sciences)
- Inspec(for assignments of engineering, computer science, and physics)
Ensure to also make use of Boolean operators to narrow down your research. Further, when you find a helpful book or journal, you can look at the bibliography for other relevant sources.
- Figure Out Themes, Gaps, and Debates
Ensure to comprehend the connections and relations between the sources you have gone through to start organising the argument and structure of an assignment literature review. When you take notes, you can begin looking for-.
- Patterns and Trends-Did you see certain theories, methods or results becoming more or less famous with time?
- Themes- What theories or questions recur across the literature?
- Gaps- What are the crucial aspects missing from the literature? Do you think some weaknesses must be addressed?
- Conflicts, Debates and Contradictions- Understand where the sources disagree
- Vital Publications-Determine if some influential theories or studies altered the direction of the field.
- Explore Connections
Before writing the literature review, you must decide on the argument and the segment’s structure. To achieve this, exploring and determining the connections and relations between different resources is necessary while crafting the abstract.
Here are a few crucial aspects you must be aware of while crafting the literature review-
- Rising to eminence– Concepts and theories that have acquired reputation and supporters over time.
- Continuous Evaluation- Theories and methods that constantly went under assessment
- Conflicts and Discrepancy-Both contradictory and supporting concepts for the topic of an assignment are taken into consideration.
- Gaps In Knowledge-Aspects it failed to address and ways it can bridge them with further research
Once the dots are joined between previous research works, it will become incredibly easier for you to draw a conclusion and determine your contribution to the existing knowledge base.
DON’T’S
- Write Irrelevant Content
One of the crucial reasons most students fail to score high in their literature review chapters is as they fill the paper with irrelevant content. Once after going through the review, if your reader tends to ask, ‘so what?’, there is a high chance your paper isn’t focused as it should be.
Hence, ensure to stay on the topic from the start. To do this successfully, take another close look at aims, objectives, research questions, and then reassess your theoretical framework to understand if it relates to these crucial components. Doing this can often enable you to circle back to research questions, objectives and aims to ensure that your study of the existing literature review is on point.
- Provide Descriptions
Perhaps one of the greatest issues in writing a literature review is to offer descriptions. Usually, students concentrate on outlining what researchers claim and write a review that becomes less comprehensive. However, you need to do a lot more than explain.
The literature review of your assignment requires the integration of countless existing research and should demonstrate how all pieces exactly fit together. Thus, do not think twice about mentioning the areas and missing chunks that simply do not fit together. You should also offer reasons why you believe that researchers possess conflicting opinions on those areas.
It is only by incorporating a mix of perspectives in work you will be able to show that you did considerable research that not only offers a balanced review but also offers a clear view of the current knowledge on a topic.
- Put Faith In Low- Quality Resources
While writing a literature review, never commit the mistake of relying on mediocre resources, like opinion pieces, news articles, and daily blogs. When you do so, your professors will end up rating your work incomplete or unsound academically. Thus, you need to be sceptical when it comes to choosing resources.
Always remember the right resources will help you develop a strong theoretical framework. Start considering peer-reviewed articles for research. You can also go through books crafted by academically recognised writers who are stalwarts in the area you’re researching on.
- Make Stylistic Errors
When writing a literature review, it is significant not to make certain stylistic and writing errors. To do this, ensure not to use emotional phrases in your work. Your objective is to present current and classic research on a topic. As you mainly depend on the information that exists already, you will not have room to incorporate emotional terms in your writing.
Also, ensure not to present your personal opinions on a subject. Literature reviews require being objective and based on facts drawn from already existing research around the topic.
- Incorporate Extended Quotations
Always remember, the literature review of your assignments is a synthesis and evaluation of investigation in your own words on a certain topic. Most ideas can be and must be paraphrased. Educators often consider undue faith in quotations as intellectual laziness. But, if you feel it is crucial to use quotations, try to do so sparingly.
Well, that’s all for today, peeps! With this lucid guide on the do’s and don’ts of writing a literature review, you can nail the next assignment like never before. Put on your thinking cap, go through the essentials mentioned above, and remember the dos and don’ts to sail through your assignment literature review writing process like a champion. Here’s wishing you all the luck!
Author Bio
Charles Richardson is an eminent author and active blogger. Presently, he works for an eminent website called MyAssignmenthelp.com, where he is known for his logisim simulator assignment help solutions. When he isn’t writing, he can be seen engrossed in books and painting canvas with bright hues of colours.
