Unlike a book review or an essay’s summary, a literature review is quite complex, massive and needs lots of study and research because it contains not only a single book or a thesis as a source but a whole lot of material (books, journals, essays, thesis, surveys and reports) relevant to a specific topic. When you talk about literature, you are considering everything that you can have to research the selected topic and when you have to summarize it in a review, it should be systematic, appealing, concentrated and well planned as it is the most valuable part for the reader who is going to investigate that specific topic.
It is a common practice that when a review writer has to deal with such enormous details, he gets confused and this vagueness shows in his composition. For this purpose, we are listing here a few simple rules that will lead to write a balanced and systematic literature review without being stressed. It is thus recommended to go through these rules and plan your review according to it carefully. We hope you will have an everlasting mold to put in the information and get a perfect literature review every time.
When you will select a topic to research, you will definitely go to search for material which can be books, magazines, survey reports or thesis. When you are selecting the material, stick to the area of research you have selected. So do not let your attention get diverted to other books with additional topics. This way you will add many useless points to your material which can make your mind perplexed while composing literature review.
Do not leave any stones unturned while researching the topic. Gather all the material and do a comprehensive research. Consult library books through bibliographic search and read online abstract carefully. You can print out articles and online book reports if these are relevant to your area if research. Make sure that you do not have much time to waste on research only. There is lot more to do ahead so keep it limited to maximum two to three sittings. During these sessions, do not let your attention get diverted. The initial steps of literature review writing are quite important but there is a huge possibility of wasting time because while you are gathering material, you come across so many things that will catch your attention. Beware of these factors and avoid anything that wastes your time.
When going through books and articles, you have to strain a few things out of them that will help you to write review. First of all, go straight to the conclusions because you have to gather the results of all those relevant researches which you have collected. List out the results and findings. Secondly, you need to collect meanings of specific terms that are going to be used in your research. Thirdly, you also need to gather all those statements which go in disagreement of your investigation. Fourthly, there could be some missing elements which are creating a visible gap in your literature, you have to find those places and highlight that gap. And fifthly, there must be some points which call for a follow-up study. Note these points carefully to conduct a further research later and make your review even stronger.
These five points can be collected by the name of excerpts or extracts. Now after collecting these, compose them point wise and with the name of book and author. Take out a print of it when you are done.
After collecting all those extracts, the next step you will move onto is called literature coding. Just splint that collection into strips by cutting every excerpt and put them separately. After this you have to sort out these stripes and put them under a labeled envelop. You have to sort out the themes to with those collections belong. Make sure that every excerpt is placed under the right themed envelop. If you are confused about some, just put them aside and overview them later.
Now you have to do an interesting thing that will let your perplexed mind set to an eased state. Remember the code which you have selected with each theme at last step? You have to print out those themes as labels in large font, get them printed and cut them to make titles. Now you have to arrange a large table where you will do the rest of job to organize things. Place your labels there and put relevant content or extract under those labels. Try making connections between those slips, whether it is about proving or opposing some specific point, it must be placed near it. Keep swapping these labels and slips until you get to an organized conceptual diagram. When you are done, write it down instantly before things are swapped away or disturbed.
Now that you are done with sorting out all of the material and all is placed in front of you, you just have to write things down. Take a start from any theme and open all those envelops one by one according to the conceptual diagram you have settled down. Make one thing clear in your mind that citation is very important so you are not missing any of them. Create your review by following the written order and keep track of every step sealed with a citation.When you will complete all these steps, you will have a draft in front of you and you will literary be surprised to know that how simply and easily you have cleared a huge job just by splitting it into small steps. This program or work frame can be beneficial not only for literature review writing but also other writing jobs like article writing, blog post writing or essay writing.
