How to Structure a Literature Review?
Once you are ready to begin writing a literature review, it is necessary to think about how you will organize information. This helps avoid the risk of your work turning into a loose sequence of summaries instead of a logical and integrated analysis.
A literature review structure should be chosen based on the style used in your body section. Here are the major approaches you can use:
Thematic
This approach involves organizing your analysis around themes, topics, or issues. It is particularly useful when focusing on a single overarching subject and enables you to highlight critical debates within sub-themes.
Chronological
Literature reviews using this format organize studies based on when they were published, typically moving from older to newer works to explore the topic’s development over time. It is important to analyze sources by considering any debates and turning points that influenced the subject and offer your interpretation.
Methodological
This design focuses on the methods other researchers used. A review of literature using this layout considers the perspective from which a particular theme was examined or the procedures used to answer a specific question. It may use qualitative, quantitative, or other strategies within these two broad techniques.
Theoretical
A theoretical approach involves a systematic and critical examination of existing theories, models, and frameworks related to the research topic or question. This approach helps to establish the context, identify gaps, and provide a foundation for your own research.
How to Write a Literature Review?
If you are still wondering how to write a literature review for a research paper, thesis or dissertation, this guideline will help you get started. While you have learned about important elements such as structuring and organization, you may still need guidance on how to establish your foundation for creating your review.
The following sections provide easy-to-understand explanations on how to write a lit review.
Below are 7 steps you must follow to develop a decent paper.
1. Select a Topic and Narrow It Down
As you begin reviewing literature, it is vital to get your focus correct. Depending on your field of study, the selected topic must be:
Relevant and important
Explore a crucial concern in your field so that people will be interested in your work and you will have sufficient material to base your project on.
Interesting
This is essential because learning how to write a good literature review starts with being inquisitive since you can’t investigate something that doesn’t arouse your curiosity.
Well defined
this helps you include only relevant publications to make your paper helpful.
Narrow
Your theme must be specific yet researched enough to allow for an in-depth analysis. Broad issues usually necessitate a large number of studies, which will be impossible to explore meaningfully.
2. Search for Pertinent Literature
After having selected a topic for your research literature review, you need to search for studies. As you do this research, you’ll want to take note of the keywords and phrases that appear frequently in the articles. These keywords can be used to create a list of search terms that you’ll use to find additional articles on your topic.
To ensure that your search terms are effective, you should try to identify the most important keywords and phrases related to your topic. These might be the names of key researchers, conceptual frameworks, theories, or techniques related to your topic. Consider the headings that the documents have been tagged with and words occurring in abstracts and titles. You can then organize your phrases into blocks based on the main ideas.
Once you have identified the relevant keywords for your scientific literature review, it’s time to search for articles. To do this, you’ll need to choose at least two credible databases to search for good articles. Popular options include:
JSTOR
Google Scholar
PubMed
EBSCO
ERIC.
But there may be other databases that are more appropriate for your specific topic.
When searching across different databases, it’s important to use a uniform search strategy. This means combining your search terms using “OR” and “AND” to create a block of related terms. You can then type this block into the basic search box or use the advanced search feature, enclosing the terms in parentheses. This makes it easier to find specific articles.
For example, consider these keywords:
Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, adolescents, young adults, and management. The search term block would be “(Crohn’s disease OR ulcerative colitis) AND (young adults OR adolescent) AND management”.
Since the generated results may contain irrelevant or unreliable sources, ensure that you select only dependable ones. This is a key skill to develop when conducting a literature review because it allows you to choose the best articles to support your arguments.
3. Analyze and Choose Relevant Sources
After completing your search for articles and selecting databases, it’s time to review the sources and choose which ones to include in your lit review. Focus on studies that are relevant to your topic and meet any other inclusion criteria.
To determine whether an article is relevant to your project, you’ll need to read it carefully and grasp the arguments presented. Take notes as you read, recording interesting facts, main points, and any thoughts you have about the article. This will help you remember which author made which arguments, your impressions of the article, and any relationships you identified between different sources.
As you read, try to answer these questions:
What is the main argument of the article?
How does the author support their argument?
What is the research question or objective of the study?
What research methods were used, and were they appropriate for the research question?
What were the main findings or results of the study?
Were the results statistically significant, and were the conclusions supported by the data?
Are there any limitations or weaknesses to the study that should be considered?
Are the authors qualified to conduct this research?
Are there any conflicts of interest or biases that may affect the study’s findings?
Is the article well-written and easy to understand?
Are the sources cited in the article reliable and relevant to the topic?
Remember that you can only start to write your literature review after going through all your manuscripts. Therefore, creating a rough draft is essential as this gives you a general idea of the volume of available material available.
While conducting a literature review, you must examine the quality of all sources critically. This typically entails using a checklist or table to evaluate aspects such as methods, results, and presentation. An example of a template to assess sources for a literature review is provided below. It contains questions and criteria that assist in locating bias, errors, or flaws.
Template for Literature Evaluation
4. Group the Sources by Categories
To write a review of literature, you need to sort your sources. After reading and evaluating your articles, you should have a general idea of the main achievements, major debates, themes, trends, and outstanding issues/questions. The next step is to organize your sources into logical categories.
Good research literature reviews are systematic and consistent. You may choose to arrange your sources by topic, research methodology, geographic location, or other relevant criteria. It’s also helpful to use subheadings within each category to further organize your sources.
As you group your sources, be sure to consider how they relate to one another and to the overall research question or topic. You may find that certain sources address multiple themes or issues. In this case you’ll need to decide which category is the most appropriate for each source.
Remember that the purpose of organizing your sources is to provide a clear and coherent structure for your literature review. By grouping your sources into logical categories, you make it easier for your readers to follow your arguments and understand the connections between different sources.
Here is an example of how to group sources by categories.
