Purpose of a Literature Review Potential Research Sources Writing a Literature Review

1. Purpose of a Literature Review Potential Research Sources Writing a Literature Review

2. Purpose of a Literature Review A literature is a body of related work on a topic. A literature review is a systematic examination and interpretation of the literature for the purpose of informing further work on a topic.

3. Purpose of a Literature Review • A literature review has many complementary purposes, including: • Learning about what others have discovered • Identifying important research questions that have not been addressed fully • Identifying the data, methods, and research strategies that others have used to answer specific questions • Narrowing or focusing a research topic, and motivating and developing a specific research question

4. Potential Research Sources • Potential research topics may come from many sources: • Personal sources (your own experiences) • Nonscholarly sources (news media) • Scholarly sources (academic books or journals) • But only scholarly sources will be useful in satisfying the scientific requirement of relevance to the discipline

5. Potential Research Sources One of the most common questions students ask is, “How many sources are necessary in a literature review?” There is no magic number of sources. The number of sources depends on the purpose and scope of the project, as well as what is available.

6. Potential Research Sources Electronic databases like Web of Science, Google Scholar, or JSTOR will allow you to locate sources quickly and efficiently. Begin with simple keyword searches. Then search for work cited in the work you find. Reading article abstracts, book prefaces, and book reviews are also efficient methods.

7. Potential Research Sources To organize and write an effective literature review, focus on concepts, ideas, and methods shared across the literature. Identifying and writing about commonalities and differences may make for a more interesting and higher quality literature review. The goal is to integrate previous research along conceptual and methodological lines to explain how previous work fits together and how the current project fits into that literature.