How to Write a Literature Review (UCD Writing Centre)

welcome to the UCB Writing Center my name is Michael Pei and I'm a tutor here and today we're going to be running an online tutorial on how to write a literature review I'm going to take you through the specifics on how to write the review and the point of the tutorial is to give you the tools and insights that you will need to be able to create a review that is right for you your subject area and can be completed in a timely and efficient manner you will see as we go through the piece but there is no one-size-fits-all review type as such you can take borrow from or reject anything you see here today as long as it suits your needs so one of the first questions people generally ask is what are the literature review and there are many variations but the most basic answer is that it is a piece of writing that marks the current state of knowledge in your field in a way that allows you to put your own research into perspective so it allows you to gauge the field in a critical way by assessing major contribution it ensures continuous development of analytical and critical skills and this is particularly important as opposed to writing and reports or essay writings the literature review encourages you to engage with the primary materials but you will be placing your own research in we were able to position yourself in that regard it also allows you to practice your writing literature reviews sometimes written in a kind of rough and ready manner but I would encourage you to focus on creating a narrative in your review it just means that your ability to write academically and to think academically and analytically it just means you'll be constantly practicing that while you're also gauging the state of knowledge in the field so it can be useful beyond just actually mapping the field itself finally some the most obvious point is you cannot make a contribution to knowledge if you don't have a clear grasp of the major point of the field so the layout for this presentation is followers will begin with where to start how to search how to assess the source active reading strategies how to structure your review we'll have a look at a sample review some shortcuts you can use to make the process a little easier and a little faster and finally we'll have a list of other resources that you can use for your further further research into the review so where to start the first thing you have to think about our one of the major databases that have been recommended to me by my tutors and lectures a lot of people begin the review process by looking through Google Scholar with several quickly chosen keywords the issue with this approach is that you'll either get far too many results or far too few and they may not be specific enough to the questions that you need to answer in your review so you need to speak to your lecturer your colleagues your tutor whoever it is to ensure that you're getting the correct portals to search through and you're looking at the correct magazine book etc you need to consider central research questions and come up with keywords from these I generally come up with three or four central research questions what they do is they refer to the overall title of the review and by answering those three or four questions I can safely say that I have basically completed my objectives in in mapping a particular section of the field what I want to look at in the literature review you should always talk to your colleagues and classmates when you're doing a literature review it's very easy to do a literature review in isolation and it's always better to talk to people to point to the different things that you've found the different points that you'd like to address see if they've come across them see if they can recommend any other critiques or articles that might improve your position or where you're coming from should always title your literature literature review angle towards your objective as such don't simply write a literature review called the post-colonial studies literature review for example you'll want to title particularly angle towards the objectives of the review and will be going through this later in this in this tutorial and also you should draw up your bibliography it's one of the first things you should do a lot of people get slightly intimidated by this because they are always there are obviously so many different sources to choose from so we're going to have a look at some software that's available to us to make this process a little bit easier a little later in this tutorial so how to search create your three or four central research questions according to what you want to achieve in the review and pick your keywords very very carefully keywords once you want your keywords to be subject specific you want to make sure that you're picking words that are adequate to your areas if you forget a particular theoretical term or terms up useful to addressing the issues that you want to dress you won't be able to get the correct resources so you need to make sure that your terms are carefully chosen you can use the wild-card function and lots of search engines it's usually a star and this basically means that for example if you type in the word run it will also search for words like running etc so it won't be limit your searches to the very precise parameters of the word it'll open up the parameters slightly this can be useful if you're getting far too few results if you're getting far too many your keywords are probably too general and you need to need to refine them ensure that your search portal is appropriate and that you have a list of journals that you need to look at for example again if you're doing a post-colonial studies literature review and you don't have the journal of Commonwealth literature listed as one of the journals you need to look through there is a good chance that you will miss a pivotal intervention or article that will allow you to map the state of the field so you need to have a list of journals and portals the Taylor & Francis online portals JSTOR project news whatever they are to have access to these journals your lecturers your tutors will generally know about these and they're usually accessible by a library website in your university or institution you can also check if the article is cited a lot on a lot of search portals this is really useful if an article is quite recent has a lot of citations it might be quite important in terms of where the field is going it's good to make a note of that and generally you should make sure that the article is peer-reviewed ulrichsweb comm is a service that allows you to check for this but it's not always available through your institution if you go to the About section of a journal online usually it will explain whether or not the article itself is peer-reviewed which is important the peer review process just very briefly is basically a way of ensuring academic originality and integrity with articles that are written articles are submitted checked by experts for ferocity whether they fit the journals expectations and if they're making in a written original contribution to knowledge and then it goes through a whole editorial process before it's sent out so that's basically what the peer review process is assessing a source usually it's not enough to just read the titles of an article you should also have a look at the abstract and maybe the first two lines of the introduction run this against your keywords and central research questions and if they match make a note that you will possibly be using it in your literature review piece at this stage remember you're just assessing what sources we want to use so just to make a note of that you should then check if the theoretical framework is adequately conceptualized you can generally get a hint of this by reading the first few paragraphs of the piece and if you feel that the framework doesn't quite live up to what it should in terms of the objectives of the articles that you're reading just make a note of this also in qualitative studies in particular environment check if there is any indication that the results may have been tampered with in order to fulfill a research expectation a lot of the time these sorts of things are unconscious we all have our biases and researchers and academics of course are not are not immune to this also make sure that the sample size is adequate if you are citing results that have an inadequate sample size obviously the conclusions of the experiment might over determine important if the sample size is too small just to be aware of all of these things make comments make footnotes just make sure you don't take take something out it's exact we're at the point of the literature review to be completely on a little consistently analytical you're always questioning the work as you're going through and again is the article or book cited a lot it might mean that it's a pivotable in pivotal intervention so we've spoken a lot about how to assess sources had find sources for keeping track of them is a different story and we're looking but there are some programs available to us that make this process a lot easier so I have two examples here Zotero and Mendeley I personally use Zotero it is a add-on that you can use with Google Chrome and basically it allows you to note all your sources with a click once you download Zotero and use it as an add-on a new image will appear and you can click it and it will save the bibliographical information of any articles that you think might be useful it means that you don't have to go to the trouble of switching between documents on your on your laptop or writing them down if you don't want to write them down just with a click of the mouse you can allows the article the information stays live forever it's in the cloud you can access this from any location it's very useful because it means you don't have to be overly discerning with the pieces that you're picking if you feel like a piece might be relevant but you're not sure just click it if you don't use it you don't use it it's law of forever it was only a clicks on meds it's not too much trouble so now we move on to picking the sources that we're going to use specifically for the literature review so you found X number of key facts and X amount of other relevant works I should point out now there's no set amount of sources for a literature review generally if you're using 40 or 50 you're probably a bit on the iSight usually something around 20 to 30 is adequate again it's something you should discuss your lecturer which user depends if you're a master students PhD students we're going to feel first the more reviews you do within your own subject area you should look through Zotero pick out key articles so this is where Zotero becomes particularly useful they'll have all the articles window you can have a look again at the titles any comments or notes that you've made about them and you begin to discern which ones are particularly relevant for the review check out the articles feature your keywords see if they're written by stop the scholars obviously you'll need a certain amount of those to show that you're aware of the major contributors to the field and you can also make use of already with existing review articles you'll often find me some peer reviewed journals where someone will have written an article about three or four books recently published research results where they basically try and map the current state of the field for the contributions of particular authors they can be very useful shortcuts to allow you to kind of gauge the state of the field without perhaps having to do it completely in the dark on their own it's always worth thinking about who wrote the review is it a graduate student isn't an established academic what kind of things might affect the way they approach the piece it's a framework of their analysis relevant to your objectives all of these things are worth considering so now that you've picked your sources leading them adequately is obviously very important so this is active reading so you're going to want to read analytically you don't want to read possibly you constantly want to think about what you're looking for and what your objectives are in the review so how your keywords in mind unmarked the margins with them write notes in the margins compared to other pieces as you read so as you've read three or four different articles you might begin to discern the different schools of thought in a subject area particularly peril better in the review piece write that in the margin constantly trying to cross-reference you're constantly exercising your brain to think in an analytical way to try and gauge what's going on in the field particular time and the McGraw Center recommends that you don't highlight make a note instead many times people bring literature reviews into the UCD Writing Center and they might have a selection of articles that have many many highlights on them but no notes and when the students then try to take the information to create the review they haven't written any notes so they don't really know why they highlighted the section because you can't remember so that the trick is to write down instead of highlighting write down why it's worth highlighting that way you'll know what you're doing when you return to look at the work a week or two later or what or whatever it is and again talk about it with someone you're looking at a particularly interesting article or report talk about it with your lecturer your tutor your supervisor your colleagues anyone who might be interested constantly thinking about validity its relevance to your review piece structure you should use subheadings it allows you to break up the review and makes it easier to navigate the essential research questions that you come up with can act as subheadings at the beginning you'll know what bit of information you want to push in a particular section of paragraphs if your instructor doesn't want you to use subheadings in your literature review you can just delete them at the end and hand it up and we'll just slow as a piece of work with different paragraphs you can do that kind of editorial stuff at the end but particularly while you're doing the review it's a good idea to have subheadings you can also use a color code which can make it a lot easier to recall information we'll see in the review sample that I'm going to show in a few minute how a color code recalls particular research questions within the review itself and cross-referencing you should keep everything connected constantly bring up other critics other positions try engage how critic rub off each other the particular ways that they might look look at a subject in comparison to other critics that's the point of the review you're comparing and contrasting in order to position yourself in the field you should only use essential quotation this is particularly important a common mistake is up people use lots of block locations and their argument is that the critics work is too complex to be bore and down in two paragraphs and that's understandable but the issue is that you simply won't remember or really understand what the person is saying if you're just using block quotations if you can't put it into your own words the odds are you don't have a great understanding on us so you need to just slow down read a chapter set yourself a challenge give yourself three sentences to summarize the chapter in relation to the other work you have done that's the stuff that should go in the literature review particularly important quotations you should include and I'll show you as an example of this again in a couple of minutes when we move on to our sample pieces of literature reviews you should use footnotes and commas as I said earlier Commons and footnotes just allow you to kind of consider the sources outside of the literature review if you feel that methodology isn't adequate if you're concerned about the particular bias ease of a particular researcher just the comments just while you're doing the review you can delete it at the end or you can keep it for yourself just for your own little little notes outside of the review parameters you should have a bibliography as well as a work cited your work sizes can be the work that you specifically analyzing the review the bibliography are the larger work that you might come back to if you want to improve the review in any way if you want to double-check a source or read a source that you decided not to use in the review the first time but that you think at this stage of your research career might actually be worth having a look at so our first sample is from a post-colonial studies literature review you should always do an abstract at the beginning of a literature review the point of an abstract is to basically gauge what the review is about what are the main points you're going to address and what is the conclusion that you're going to demonstrate at the end it's not like an introduction which lays out what you're going to do it's much more complete than that and it's usually about 100 to 150 words so this is a sample abstract this literature review seeks to clarify the different approaches to post-colonial studies and literature looking at the field through methodologies of Marxism hybridity subaltern studies and eco criticism to review demonstrate have these different approaches of particular strengths and weaknesses in their historiography as well as their modes of aesthetic and formal analysis ultimately the review concludes that the four approaches are distinct which share certain features about particular areas are more suited to certain texts over others this suggests a championing one particular approach might risk doing violence to a particular text and then I followed this up with keywords that I used in my search parameters again you may not be allowed handle a literature review piece with keywords just delete them I mean my approach literature reviews is the piece that you hand off is all very well and good but the more information you have when we're looking back over a literature review whether you're traveling to a conference or about to discuss a paper with a colleague the more information the better you can see here that the abstract uses the correct terminology in the case of post-colonial studies it tries to address what the author considers of the four main areas some of the fields it uses it uses vocabulary that may not be overly familiar to the non expert but is assumed familiar to the person leading reading the review your introduction so you should give an overview of the research topic for example here qualitative approaches to consumer psychology generally focus on or political realism is principally informed by it is used in order to and then you just fill out those those those gaps you should then point out the precise parameters within the topic that you are going to research and then I would also list the subheadings and explain very briefly the general focus of each subheading so those three or four subheadings discussed earlier just list them under the introduction you can delete this later if you want just to keep you focused while you're actually doing the review piece you can refer back to that when you're actually doing the writing in the paragraphs and you set forth your overall aims with regard to the central research questions which will evolve while you're doing your research so that aim section you might want to return to it near at the end so here we have four sample subheadings with a color code if you've Marxism in red hybridity in blue subaltern in purples and eco criticism in green she can see that the questions are very specific to what I want to address in a particular section of the review you can see as well that I've listed the main names in particular subfields of post-colonial studies all of this basically allows me to very rapidly recall information if I'm looking over the review again it's all about making sure that you can recall things when you're dancing through this to make it as clear as possible to signpost at the whole way through the color code also just exercises other bits of your brain that reading in black and white don't so can be very useful for recalling information so here we have a sample paragraph from a literature review in this case post-colonial approaches to Scottish literature I want you to notice this has some of the names are highlighted according to a color code about two names are in bold to signal that they're from another literature review so now what we're seeing is cross-referencing between different literature reviews they're all speaking to our own overall understanding of subject areas you're beginning to increase your own pool of knowledge you're getting more comfortable with talking about work in your field so I'm just going to read through the piece now in his introduction to scholars literature and post-colonial literature the first comparative collection of its kind michael gardner claims that by learning the lessons of the post-colonial english literature departments teaching scottish texts will prevent issues of celtic labels ism to scottish grapes and count information in the english style the end investigation suggests that the collection is one of common authors in the post-colonial framework perhaps in an effort to call to mind of stability through familiarity which does not really exist in post-colonial studies still a hugely contentious field as liam call suggests the academic capital of post-colonial theory resulted in Scottish literary academics applying post-colonial models to Scottish literature and culture to widen interest globally particularly in North American universities yet Scottish post-colonial interventions do recognise the importance of we'll history and provide provocative reading particularly and refining the colonizer colonized dualism in Scotland as will now be demonstrated so you can see this is a paragraph that sets up the next paragraph you can see that there is an essential quotation on the third line lessons of the post-colonial the reasons you might want to leave a quotation in art because you think it particularly particularly captures something in a book or article that you're reviewing so you can see there that you can actually summarize positions in a couple of lines over a paragraph that's how the review should work it should be that quick so now concluding the review what are the major trends and who are the major contributors just make a note of that and most importantly what gaps do you feel can be exploited or require more analysis can you contribute you need to establish this in your computing section just to show what was the point of the review in the first one and finally you need to ask yourself is to review worth continuing and updating or are you happy that any further research would require a wholly new approach if by the end of your review when you've concluded this say you've taken three or four weeks if you're still not happy about it you need to talk to your supervisor don't just try and fix it on your own if you already and a substantial amount of time out of you might need a bit of guidance they might recommend that you get rid of some critics incorporate others maybe a new subject area to look at that sort of thing so you should just talk to your supervisor if that happens so some useful shortcuts don't read everything take a short note of an abstract with a footnote that's going back to how we take notes using Zotero take little notes while you're using Zotero particularly useful points only lists the principle authors below your subheadings it's just very useful for looking over notes quickly before going into meetings before going into conferences you just want to refresh everything set a time limit generally no more than four weeks in a couple of hours most days if it's getting out of control talk to someone and you should also look for reviews in major journals book reviews or review articles that take on a couple of articles or a couple of books charge trajectory in a particular field field of a topic that sort of thing I just want to show an example of that now in this book review Ireland's and eco criticism towards the trajectory now whether or not you're in this subject doesn't necessarily matter you'll see reviews like this in peer-reviewed journals as you can see four books are listed at the beginning and if you read the opening paragraph it's a it's a review piece that much the trajectory so even if you disagree with the finding even if you disagree with the methodology you might find that this particular piece is useful it probably has people other other articles that might be of interest to your own work and it will show you particular directions that the topic is going in that you can look at so now we just have some other resources that you can have a look up to improve your own literature reviews some of these are subject specific but they're all very useful in their own ways and the last the last resource at sample literature reviews for subject specific areas so you might find your own subject in that particular website so thank you very much for watching the UCD Writing Center presentation how to write a literature review without melting down I wish you the very best of luck in your writing

Channel: Real Smart Media

Views: 349,140

Keywords: literature review, UCD Writing Centre, UCD School of English, academic writing advice

Id: ouY2FH0BKkQ

Length: 25min 38sec (1538 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2017