What Is A Literature Review In A Dissertation Or Thesis? SIMPLE Explainer With Examples

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in this video we're gonna look at the four most common questions that we receive from students about the dreaded literature review. we're gonna be looking at: one what exactly is a literature review what does it mean. two what is the function? what's the purpose? what is the literature review supposed to achieve? if we understand the why then we'll make life a lot easier. three we're gonna look at how do you find the right articles, how do you find the right resources to cover in your literature review and four how do you structure/what are the structural options in terms of your literature review chapter. so grab a cup of coffee grab a cup of tea whatever you like and let's get into it. hey guys welcome to another episode of Grad Coach TV where we demystify and simplify the sometimes seemingly bizarre world of academia and research skills. today I'm gonna be talking with Kerryn Warren, one of our very own grad coaches. Kerryn's a seasoned researcher, she has been published in various peer-reviewed journals. she's contributed towards textbook chapters she's got a PhD and MSc a BSc. basically she knows what she's talking about when it comes to research. so today we're gonna pick her brains and we're gonna unpack all things literature review related. so let's get into it Karen welcome to grad coach TV it's awesome to have you here and look forward to you dropping some knowledge bombs on us today. Thank you it's a pleasure to be here and I'll try my best. awesome so so let's start with the basics. we we get a ton of students coming to us all the time and probably the most common question that they ask is "what is a literature review?" I've been told to do a literature review I don't have a clue what it is. do I just summarize everything that I've read? what is a literature review? so let's start there. yeah I see what you mean. a lot of clients end up asking that exact question and I think generally speaking it's easier to think of the literature review as kind of being two things. the first thing is the the process of the actually reviewing of the literature and then the second part is seeing it as a literature review chapter in your dissertation that is looking at the literature. so the two things are essentially: one going and hunting down the literature finding all the articles that you're going to review and then to compiling that in some way into the chapter that fits into a dissertation or thesis. is that about right? exactly exactly and in that first part there's quite a lot of work that needs to be done. obviously you're going to be looking through various databases or using Google Scholar to search for various literature pieces of literature you'll go into the library and look for books if you have access to it in non covid times and yeah and you'll just be looking through and reading and collating and organizing these various pieces of literature as you read them into hopefully an organized space, such as a spreadsheet or in a reference manager and this will really help you out in the second phase which is the writing and the collating and the synthesizing of this literature into that chapter and that chapter is essentially foundational in that it shows what what you know about what's already been researched and established right right so that second bit that that chapter the actual piece of writing and one compiles that's essentially a synthesis of, bringing together of all that literature in relation to whatever the students researching right? exactly exactly and and there are many different ways of of doing a literature review but ultimately it's about that synthesizing of the background research the stuff that has already been done that fills in where you end up coming in for your research. right right. so something that I often explain to students is that research is is built on existing research. a lot of students come along with the notion that they need to essentially start from scratch and that's not where that's not how good research takes place but instead it's to quote from Newton, it's about standing on the shoulders of giants it's taking what's already been researched and adding to that. so I think that's a useful way for students to understand the literature review it's about going and seeing what's already been said about whatever your your research topic is whatever your questions are and then saying, okay how can I take this further? yes exactly and and that's ultimately what you're wanting to get out of the literature review chapter. you're wanting to showcase that you you know about the giant on whose shoulders you're standing and that you know exactly where your information is fitting in. so research as you said is not done in a vacuum. you're coming in and you're presenting something new but something new within the context of a lot of different things that have already been done over hundreds of years. so it's very important to show that you know where you fit in. I mean that's one of the things that you want to achieve from the literature review. so to wrap this up to answer this question of "what is a literature review?" essentially we can see it as as two things, or at least two parts of a process. the one is the actual reviewing of the literature, reviewing what's being done in the past and the second is writing up the literature review chapter in which you kind of bring together all that stuff Is that a good answer to the question of what is a literature review? yes yes and I think the the useful part of seeing it as two processes is that you ultimately can be a little bit more gentle on yourself in the first part you don't need to know it until you've read some things. you don't need to be able to sit and write as you read. you should be able to digest and learn before you get into the writing process. this is helpful because I think a lot of people feel like they don't really know where to start and the answer really is actually the first part is the starting. the learning is the starting. so in simple terms read before you write or at least give yourself license to read and absorb information before you even think about writing. I think something that I've seen with students as well is that they initially have an idea of what their research topic is and and what direction they're going to take things then as they start reviewing more and more of the literature that research direction changes a little bit. they become more familiar with what has been done what hasn't been done, where are the gaps. and so I think it's quite natural for for the literature review in itself to to even change the direction of what a student might be thinking about in terms of their research topic. of course and in good research you want that. you want you want to be informed and you want to be able to be a little bit malleable, provided that a lot of the practicalities aren't affected. but yes you want the literature to inform you as well it should be almost like a give and a take scenario. you need to be a little bit flexible while you're going into that literature space. awesome so I think we have done a semi-decent job of answering the question "what is a literature review?". all right, so onto our next question which is "what is the purpose, what's the function of the literature review?" our viewers are probably watching and thinking Derek why are you asking such a mundane question. My answer is that in my mind (this is something that I say to students all the time) it's really important to understand why you're doing something before you go in and do it. understand the purpose of any section of a dissertation or thesis or a research project. understand what what this thing is supposed to do, then your chances of actually doing it well are gonna be much better. as Simon Sinek says, start with why. So let's start with why and and let me ask you what is the purpose, what are the functions of a literature review generally speaking? yeah actually the why as you said is such an important part of this. if you're thinking about who's going to be looking, who's going to be reading your dissertation and who's going to be evaluating your dissertation, or any piece of writing really, what you really want to make sure is that you're ticking a whole bunch of boxes and you're ultimately then able to pass - and so the why is actually a really important question because you're wanting to make sure that you're ticking those boxes. in the context of a literature review it's important to know the why because it actually seems otherwise quite vague. so what you tend to see is that everybody thinks okay the literature review is me just sort of splurging out every sort of thing I've happened to come across on Google scholar. Then you sort of see these people or see these dissertations where so every single paragraph is showing that they really read this piece of literature they understood it and that's really not what you're trying to do. you're trying to show that, yes you've read the literature but more importantly I think the main purpose the first purpose of a literature review is to show that you understand the literature. you understand the themes, the arguments the models that have been proposed and you're coming in from this angle of truly understanding and engaging with those arguments, models, theories that have previously been done. which which makes perfect sense because as we as we touched on in the last question this is about building on other people's work or it's about standing on the shoulders of those giants and so it makes sense that that a really important function of the literature review is is to show you that you do know what those people said. you didn't just go and skim read them you actually went you actually and engaged with the literature you understand what these people have said. you understand what the strengths and weaknesses of their their approaches were, and and I guess quite frankly that you know your stuff right? exactly exactly not just that you can summarize a paper. you took two or three sentences, but that you really understood where that paper or where those papers fit in together and this can be very overwhelming initially, but there are ways and means to go about synthesizing this a little bit more easily. but the idea really and my general advice when it comes to sure casing that particular purpose is to actually just once you've done some readings, not look at them and kind of just jot down hey what was I actually learning what was I actually reading really. and then you could really get those theories. Okay cool so what are the other functions of the literature review? there there are two others that and I'll focus on the second one because the second one is also really important for this particular chapter is that in showcasing your knowledge of the literature you also want to showcase what the literature doesn't say, if that makes any sense. you're wanting to show the yeah exactly you want to show the gap and the important part about showcasing that and highlighting that you know that is that ultimately, well hopefully your research is fitting into that gap. That your literature or your your piece of writing your thesis your dissertation is gonna somehow be looking into that gap, peering into the deep if you will. but you want to kind of show that there is that sort of building that framework around it, that right literature around it and of that there it is - that's the gap. So in simple terms it's about showing that there's a need for for your research, showing the exactly one you've you've gone and read what others had to say and and two that you you found where the holes are where the potential missing pieces of the puzzle are. Perhaps you know the context changed and now there's a there's a new gap that didn't exist previously. So it's essentially a justification for your own topic. it's really really important in terms of arguing that your topics original right? yes, precisely and and this could be done in many ways. it could be the situation that this has been explored in other contexts but maybe not in your country or in your hometown or at your university. or it could be that it has been explored using other methodologies but not the methodology that adds this extra little bit of insight in some way. so you're wanting to show that's where the gap is and here I am merging these two things - the context and the piece that I'm wanting to know, essentially. so what's the what's the third golden rule of the literature review? what is the third function? well the third function is actually really practical I have a saying that I say to clients and students is that at the end of the the literature review, you don't want to leave everyone on a cliffhanger. you don't want them to think Oh what are they gonna do next? you actually want it to be pretty obvious what your methodology what your next step is going to be because you would have to essentially sort of covered it in some way. so the third important part of the literature review is to essentially somehow showcase the methodologies that have been done and showcase which ones might be more practical in terms of perhaps evaluating that gap. so it's not that you're going to be doing a complete review of the of the methodology before you've even done it it's just showcasing that you understand where you are needed in this bigger picture, but from a more practical perspective. in some ways this has sort of two components. you're going to be doing the readings anyway and you're going to be seeing the methodologies all the various methodologies that have been used in the past to answer similar questions that you have, so it's important to see what people have done to know what has been successful, to know what hasn't been successful and to ultimately be able to justify why perhaps your next steps will be done the way they are, using that literature and also quite practically is that your methodology isn't going to be coming out of nowhere and testing nothing. it's going to be testing a series of hypotheses or and perhaps a conceptual or theoretical framework which you already needed to have proposed, if that makes any sense. yeah so it's it's essentially, in a similar way that one uses the the literature review to sort of justify the topic, to show the gap in terms of topic, you can use the literature review to justify your methodology, and and I guess that can swing in in two potential ways. it could be that there is a gap in the literature in that a certain methodological approach hasn't been used and therefore there's value in potentially doing it that way. or you could potentially argue it in a different direction which is to say that this is the most sensible methodology to use in this area of research as has been demonstrated by previous studies. So I guess it could swing in either way but the point is you need to be paying attention to methodologies in the literature review and that needs to inform what what you do with your own methodology right? Exactly and to bear in mind that you're not writing a thriller or a crime novel or something like that that, even though there might be an element of dryness to this approach, is that it should be really obvious what you're about to do and why and and you don't want people having way too many questions at the end of your literature review. I always advise students if you want to write well, write with the objective of holding the reader's hand. don't assume that they're thinking what you're thinking. don't assume that they understand that your argument is. hold their hand and walk them through the process of your thinking and walk them through help them understand sort of where you've been and where you're going and if you take that mindset of making no assumptions about what the reader knows then that generally makes for much better reading. I totally agree and you know what, if you do end up over describing, if you do end up being a little bit repetitive at some point you could always edit that down. it's far easier to just whittle things down than to have to re-expand re explore more literature find extra pieces. you're right - hold their hand and guide them. Just one one extra point on this concept of methodology and how that fits into the literature review the more practical component is also that when you're reviewing quantitative studies, quite often they will share the scales and the measures that they used and that can be used very often verbatim. these are these are scales and measures that have been tested, that have, you know, they are they are quality tools to use in your own research and so you can essentially sort of "steal like an artist" in terms of you using tools that have been tried and tested already, as opposed to trying to develop your own measures which probably won't be hugely successful, at least not the first time around. and quite often even if you were to use your own methods or your own measures or your own techniques, you'll have to justify why you do so and if there's already these things in the literature, you have to back them up! you can't just sort of ignore them you have to say well there are these perhaps there are these survey instruments and they tested XYZ, but they're not quite in line with my particular need. as long as you're able to justify that then it's fine, but you really do have to at least somewhat engage with the methodology and this actually goes to the reviewing process of articles. a lot of students and clients would have asked me, should they read every word in every single article. I'm like oh no, please don't. because that'll just be a waste of time at best and quite boring and very stressful at worst. I think one of my techniques when it comes to reading is to actually read the abstract that's always the trick right and it kind of just hop through to the methodology to kind of see if they kind of were doing what you kind of need them to do, or if they're doing with something that you wanted to do and then kind of just to evaluate that as a quick second step. that's not to say don't ever read the full article. it's just to say that if you want to see what people are doing and and where you might fit in that's a nice second step to do cool so to recap this this broad question of "what is the purpose of the literature review?". the first purpose is to show that you know your stuff. show that you have read and you have engaged and you understand what the state of knowledge is with within your realm. the the second point is that based on what you've read you then need to use that to justify your research gap, to justify your area of research show that there's this gap and that you're going to fill it. then the third function as you spoke about was methodology. that you should be drawing on the methodologies that were used in all the studies that you're reviewed to inform your your approach and ideally if you're doing a quantitative study you should be able to borrow some of the the instruments and and the tools that are already tested and tried out in that environment. so I think we've done a decent job of answering that - on to the next one. all right so on to the next question which is a question that we get very often which is quite simply "how do you find the right literature for the literature review?" we've spoken about the need to go and review all the pertinent literature, but how does a student that's fresh into research, how do they actually go and find the literature that's needed and how do they assess, you know, whether something is relevant or not? what's the starting point for a new researcher? I think actually if you're starting off really fresh, then I want to tell you something that you didn't technically hear from me, but don't be too shy with actually just starting on Wikipedia. Kinda just seeing what articles have been referenced on the topic already, this essentially helps you by showing you that you're at least have the broader picture. the very basic probably really crude viewpoints of the topic. but when you want to formally get into it, when you want to actually do this properly and seriously, you should use either a search database or and and this is one of my favorites - just go into Google Scholar. using Google Scholar in particular is incredibly important because it just allows you to look at everything everything has been published, everywhere that it's kept and essentially is just it's a search engine it just allows you to just see everything that's out there already. so Google Scholar is my first good go-to, if that makes any sense, higher quality go-to, if that makes any sense. it makes sense because the the academic databases, although they are rich with information they just don't have the, I guess the, search engine capabilities that Google has quite literally. Google's this massive search specialist company - they understand search - so I often find that it's just so much easier to find something with Google Scholar using a few keywords, as opposed to the database from a university which might be quite frankly pretty dumb you know you in doing keywords and sometimes they just throw absolute rubbish at you. so its great starting point. to just jump back to to your previous comment about Wikipedia thankfully yes it's not bad I think Wikipedia gets a bad rap in academic circles because the mistake that students make is they go and reference Wikipedia as a source and of course Wikipedia is not a particularly reliable source. but what it is good at is exactly what you mentioned is to use it as a starting point for seeing what are the sources that I should be looking at this Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is pretty good at listing out what all the sources are so on any given topic it's probably going to link to the key academic resources and articles in that space. so yeah we won't slam Wikipedia, but we will slam referencing it. It makes sense Wikipedia and Google Scholar right. yeah exactly exactly just just to make sure that you kind of know maybe the language. I think I think that is a big thing for a lot of students and it was a big thing for me if I have to remember some of my first reading for my PhD. luckily I'd done a master's before, so I kind of I knew this was gonna happen, but I didn't think I understood a single full sentence of the first paper that I read. so what's really nice about using Wikipedia or in my case also used a biology textbook, was that it kind of just brought me up to in terms of the terms, the terminologies, the way that it's collated how to correlate it simply. so it was just a really just dirty overview but kind of sometimes just need that dirty overview just to kind of yeah I just find your feet and then then you have the words and the important thing about having the words is that you can pop them into Google scholar. The nice thing with Google Scholar is it'll give you a higher quality literature. so once you come to terms with the terminologies, the phrasing the maybe just a little bit of the lingo the jargon, then the searching part actually becomes a little bit easier. That makes a lot of sense because because academics do love using big words and they're not always the ones that you would think of right. you can find I know I know when I was was writing my dissertation on organizational trust, what I was looking at was what are the the drivers of trust what are the things that tend to cultivate trust yeah and the words that were used were drivers of trust antecedents of trust, sheesh, any number of words which basically meant things that create trust. if you don't have that, if you don't try out all those keywords, you just you might think okay well I have scratched at the bottom of the barrel and there's just nothing but actually there's still loads of stuff, it's just that in that space perhaps you know the seminal research used a certain word and then everyone just carried with that and then for some reason everything is known as the antecedents, instead of just you know a simple word. so yeah it is really really important I think when when we're talking about this thing of how do you find research, how do you find literature first find out what are the keywords the people used to describe what you're researching. yes that's that's exactly it. sometimes you just don't know and as you say it's something like you would imagine that in your case the word was the words of choice would be easier or more straightforward than the word that was necessarily used in the literature and there might be multiple reasons for that in terms of slight or subtle differences in meaning that perhaps just aren't really that important when it comes to everyday language, but because I important when it comes to the tedious slogging of writing academic pieces, and with that, once you have those those little bits and pieces of language and phrases, then that searching part just becomes so much easier. you can hone in more specifically more directly into what you're looking for and once again something like Google Scholar really helps with that and and then Google Scholar will pop out sometimes tens or hundreds or thousands of articles with those words. of course at that point you're probably quite overwhelmed, it's it's easy to think oh every single thing that is being shown to me is important and it's really not. but the value there is that at least the first five or six or seven will show that that yes you are on the right track when it came to perhaps the words that you did put into the search engine because it's kind of told you a little bit more about your about your topic of interest. it's sort of taking it a step further - obviously we've spoken about using search engines whether that's that's Google Scholar or or the universities database or whatever the case may be once you once you've found the sort of core literature, you know the big five or whatever the main articles are in your area, another thing that I tell students is every journal article is just loaded with references. some students don't even look at it, they want to save on printing paper they don't even print their reference list, but really the reference list of any journal article is a goldmine for students - that's really where you can just go and snowball it and you basically just with every article you read you you've just been given, handed on a silver platter, a bunch of additional articles that you should look at. so I think that's also an important thing for students to understand is that it's not just about finding things in a search engine. every article you read is a gateway to two more articles on a related note. naturally some topics have more written about them than then others do but a common challenge that that students face is that it's just a lot that's been written topic they they they know what they want to research there's just loads and loads and loads and loads of journal articles and as we know not all journals are created equally. there's this differences in quality and obviously if you're undertaking research you want your your literature review and in fact your research to be built on on good quality literature. so what are what are some of the just the easy to spot things that that students can can pay attention to to ensure that whatever literature they're looking at its quality or on the other side if they're if they're seeing loads and loads and loads of literature and they want to optimize their reading how can they sort of filter down filter out the noise and just focus on the stuff that matters what are the quality indicators to look out? yeah that's actually an incredibly important question because if you're reading a whole bunch of a whole bunch of junk really you're not going to really get it okay so - what you're wanting to achieve but it's not the right shoulders right different giants and in this case what you're wanting to look out for are a couple of things the first is really relevance it's very tempting to just read everything that comes up but you really want to make sure that it's actually kind of within the ballpark of your of your particular topic but the quality of the article itself can be determined by several things the first is at least at an initial space the first is citation it's the number of citations especially if you wanted to figure out how foundational this piece was in terms of of where you are and maybe perhaps that those sort of knuckle discipline in which you're sort of inserting yourself that's the first step and it's an important step if you have if you're just wanting to sort of get the good broad overview or good piece of seminal work that is probably from which you're going to be you know sort of just jumping off yourself essentially so that's step number one this this is a bit treacherous in some respects especially if you have a very narrow focus or if you have a very specific context in which you're very interested in for instance perhaps you're interested in a very specific small town which nobody is really spoken about before so that's where where you're wanting to be relevant really fits in but the citations the number of citations is also really important the nice thing about about using citations well broadly is is that you can also kind of see what people were writing about from that article yeah because if the people that were using the article we're also heading in a very similar direction to you then you can actually then you know that it's foundational for your particular topic so numbers of citations is one and there but spotting the number of citations would be just using Google Scholar right up in the article name the Scarlet tells you how many how many they are right exactly Google Scholar has made it super easy for everybody thank you yes thank you yeah you don't really need to go back into people's random profiles on the academic Profiles anymore like we used to so it's a little bit more straightforward now it'll just say excited by and then it's got a number and and you will get there'll be a high level of variability there you'll get some some articles which are cited in the thousands and some Adso that are only cited in the tins and discipline dependent in the tins is pretty good but some really foundational pieces are often cited in the hundreds and thousands this is also important when you're thinking about about sort of where do I start you're kind of wanting to start there at the very least and this brings me to the sort of second point is perhaps be a little bit picky about the journals or the sources from which you are citing you're wanting to cite from journals that potentially once again subject topic dependent have a relatively high impact factor that's usually how journals are judged if you will so a high impact factor journal in the sciences the journal science and nature are very high impact journals they tend to have incredibly novel potentially far-reaching articles written in them that are quite frequently at least some point in the future foundational to a certain direction of the discipline right and so you tend to find a little bit of a correlation there between citations and the kinds of journals in which they're written and I'm sorry to jump in but how do we find out what the impact factor of a journal is is there some website that we can look at oh yeah I just usually just google it that's that's the easiest for me and almost all journals say they're very quick - in fact if you google the journal the impact factor will come up with the journal so you don't even have to put in their impact your yeah so yeah I guess that's that's pretty straightforward a good year to be honest the this is very dependent local small local journals will have lower impact factors purely because they're at a local level that doesn't mean that they're a bad journal that means that there are specific journals so quite often if your research topic is specific or reaching into a specific context make sure that you are thinking about the journals that are specific to your context even though they might have lower impact factors because theirs are important for you right so basically it's quite quite logical that the more niche a journal is the more specialized that is around a certain topic exactly the lesser audience that has the lower impact score it's going to have but it could have the greatest relevance for you so so I guess the lesson is don't don't don't be superficial don't judge a journal by its impact that is the takeaway for this video right so so to recap how the question how do you find journal articles starting point is Google Scholar get started on Google Scholar and potentially also hand-in-hand with Wikipedia to give you an idea of what are the sort of key pieces of literature in that space dig into Google Scholar you can then if you can't get access to those articles through Google Scholar you can try get access to them through your University once you've read some of the articles pay attention to the reference lists and snowball that out and then to judge the quality have a look at citation score or yes or number of citations and impact factor but don't be too judgmental on the impact factor alright pretty much yeah awesome so let's get on to the next one okay on to our fourth and final question for this episode this is probably the question that we get asked the most and it's promptly a question that you're not really gonna like the answer to we don't have a great answer for you so this question is how do i structure the literature review I've got all this literature I've got of synthesizers that I have it all in my mind I know I know what I want to say but I just don't know how to structure I don't know how to put it down onto papers so yeah tell us how does a student decide to structure the literature oh yeah so yeah as you said this is it's not going to be the satisfying answer but this is really the case of skinning a cat there are many different ways to do this it depends the worst kind of odds and the only kind of odds you usually get from academics but but I think there are some some broad things that you can do the first the first way that we see relatively frequently and this probably just helps in terms of making collating your ideas into little sort of easy digestible packages is to theme theme the literature theme your theme what's important so for instance I think earlier we spoke about methodologies maybe have a little methodology section or or a variant or various themes that have inspired the piece of literature or maybe a collated overview of the different fields from which your piece of research is being inspired so if you sort of theme it that it's nice because there instead of just you know if you've read hundreds of articles instead of like using hundreds of articles all at once if you kind of say okay well these kind of fit under this theme these kind of fit under that theme and it really helps you in terms of organizing your thoughts another way and I also like this wave because it has a narrative style to it a few her is to is to actually do it chronologically talk about the history talk about where this where this idea has come from in a sort of chronological way this is nice in terms of figuring out or collating or synthesizing the debates that have happened before perhaps you're entering into this debate right so maybe you'll say something like oh in the 1980s this was the topic at hand this is kind of what person X said but person Y disagreed because of that then persons it came in with this information but you're I am and I actually think person X was right all along right i sir you know you can kind of if you structure it that way there's a little bit of a dorama - don't be too dramatic in a lot of geography but it's a little bit easier to read in that case there's a narrative right there's a narrative the story unfolding yeah exactly yeah this is kind of sometimes a little bit nicer to write as well just from depending on on you as a person and also depending perhaps on where you're what kind of thing you're doing in terms of your literature something's really some some pieces of research really don't lend themselves well to this so you kind of just went to to think about what suits you my two things that I like to do in terms of not just writing a literature review I've written my fair share of dissertations but obviously in terms of writing more broadly one of the things that I like to do is to start off broad and then narrowed in the focus that is hopeful for several reasons because it it firstly allows you to get all of those things that you read that you thought were pretty important or oh you don't want to actually not references present because there's a foundation on the field for instance and it just gets them out of the way if you ask like okay well this is where the field really is right and but but let's move in a bit and then you can kind of move in a little bit further and then move in a little bit further still and this this works well when it comes to perhaps thinking about the broad overview the meaning the overall purpose of perhaps maybe not the discipline as a whole but this area this niche of research as a whole and then kind of figuring it out perhaps into the context that perhaps you're interested in maybe you're interested in in a particular question but applied to South Africa then you're kind of wanting to sort of hone in the research into the South African context as you go right from sort of international down into exactly the national context right exactly so that's that's nice one rule of thumb though is is that I like to to to say or to encourage is to you is to know that you need to end the literature review once again without too many surprises you're kind of wanting to yeah to to to set the scene but at the end of the literature view you want to say and this is where I stand this is where my piece of research fits into the broader picture or this is where this is where we are and now we're going to jump off into into the methodology into into my area of research so you're wanting to end in a way that essentially reaffirms highlights and hones in to where you are and where your dissertation is going and that's and even whether whether you do it from starting with broad to ending or specific year or whether you do it in terms of themes themes themes but yeah I am collating the themes then that's fine however you do it as long as you end off with that in mind and then that's good and what's really helpful in all of these different approaches is to make sure that your definitions are defined as early as possible because what the big words mean precisely right if you're using a piece of jargon start off explaining what that jargon is I see this play out in in varying ways sometimes quite bizarrely sometimes people will use the jargon and let me explain it later and which is which is which is it's just a little aggravating but it's a as as strange the second approach that you four sometimes have which is to use a completely different word and then suddenly halfway through the literature of you decide to change the word completely and use the piece of jargon which is which is unusual and then of course throughout the nice room to hop between I think part of the reason it's so difficult to answer this question of how do i structure in my literature review is is because the structure needs to flow from the I guess the research questions and look for whatever it is that you're researching so there's no one structure because there's no one research question there's no one research topic so it really does depend so much on what is the area you're researching what is the the the the thing you're trying to find out and in answering in in attempting to answer that question the structure should emerge from that nothing one one one potential practical tip that might be useful for students is that if there have been other dissertations that have been written that are similar to yours oddly similar to your topic or asking similar kinds of questions there are loads of disappeared dissertation and thesis databases online that you can go and you can download those and you can take some inspiration from them there's exactly nothing's ever going to be a perfect fit but you can at least get some practical inspiration and you can see how or one what the different options are in terms of structure and to how that plays out when you read through the literature you can see a couple did this work well or doesn't work well was I lost as a leader so so you can't take some inspiration from from other dissertations and perhaps even from journal articles you can see how there the topic outright all right so I think that's about as much clarity as we're going to get to our fourth and final question of how do you structure a literature review hopefully you got some guidance from that but that's pretty much all we have time for today thank you so much for your time and for dropping them knowledge bombs on us today Karen really appreciate and I hope I was helpful too to some of you guys out there it's a pleasure chatting Derek well that wraps up this episode of Brad coach TV for those of you watching remember that Karen is one of our super rock star grad coaches who helps students just like you every day with their research so if you're struggling through a dissertation or thesis when it's a research project head on over to grad coach come I'll link to that below this video and you can book a free consultation with any of our friendly coaches just like Karen so there you have it in this video we've covered what the literature review is what the purpose and the function of the literature review is how to find high-quality articles and resources for your literature review and of course how to structure your literature review if you'd like some more information on the literature review or on anything research related be sure to check out the grad coach blog that's at grad coach.com /blog i'll also include the link to that below this video if you've got any questions about anything we discussed today please do leave a comment below the video if you enjoyed the video please give us a thumbs up it really helps equally subscribe to the channel you'll probably find the rest of the content pretty useful if you're writing a dissertation or thesis or any sort of research project so from me Derek this is the grad coach signing out you you
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Channel: Grad Coach
Views: 28,743
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Keywords: what is a literature review, literature review, what is a literature review in research, what is a literature review in a dissertation, what is a literature review in a thesis, how to write a literature review, dissertation literature review, thesis literature review, definition of a literature review, why is a literature review important, how to find literature to review, what is a systematic review of literature, how to structure a literature review, literature review structure
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Length: 49min 45sec (2985 seconds)
Published: Tue Jul 14 2020
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