Literature Review

hi there my name is Shelly atiyah I am an assistant professor at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at leas University and I'm going to talk how to do a literature review for master and PhD students a literature review is a very important topic and you have to start with it and as a nation initiative of my sustainable building design lab I opted to design this little module to teach you how to do a literature review well first of all why do we do a literature review it's very important to keep in mind that the literature review is mainly meant to improve your understanding it has to prove that you understand the literature and that you can follow your work based on this understanding also it is based here to build your expertise in a specific field in the PhD in particular sometimes the THD students he or she sometimes is more knowledgeable about the topic than his own supervisor because you are expected to be an expert by reading and going through several literature and manuscripts well another important reason why to do a literature review is to demonstrate knowledge so this is very important when you are defending your master's thesis or your turf or muscling your dissertation one of your components that you should present and show to the jury a new committee through your manuscript and your presentation that you know something about this topic you have a specific topic and you know about and you must demonstrate it and finally you should also look at updating the reader with state-of-the-art information so the reader maybe is not knowing exactly today what is the most current research what are the most recent publication it is your role to read an update give the information to the reader what's happening in the context of research in the field of professionalism related to your field so these are the reasons why we do a literature review one side is for your site to increase your expertise and on the other side to help the reader and reviewer to understand and to be up-to-date what's happening in the current practice well one of the major steps you have to check when you start your literature review you have first to guarantee that you have a good quality of resources by good quality of resources I mean that you are looking at published major works and you are looking to related narrow topic this is very important if you keep reading in general fields of expertise without specifying your topic you will get lost because there is a lot of nice titles of books publications manuscripts and every time you read something you will like it no if you don't start by specifying a very narrow field of specialization defining exactly for example a type of building a type of problem and going after that looking for major works the most important publication related to this topic this is the beginning to make sure that you have a good resource quality well there are different types of resources I'm talking here about dissertations dissertations are for PhD or theses for masters you have books you have peer-reviewed journals and conferences you have non peer review work and definitely the non peer-reviewed work will be less quality because it was not reviewed by experts outside the domain of the writer and you can have also technical report newspaper articles professional magazines recordings and you can have also online articles but you must make sure that this these resources have good quality they are written by professionals by researchers and they went through a revision process and therefore you must make sure that you are looking at these resources in a good way one of the very important criteria when we judge as professors at TF or master ceases at the end of their work we look at references list if I see in the references list only not important or very basic citation internet Wikipedia website non relevant non non-academic or non scientific publications there is no journals I remember in one of the CDs jewry a professor asked the student why didn't you cite any a field Review Journal this is very important so make sure that you are in a good side of sources books are very good journal papers are very important seizes and dissertations are very important and then you can go below until you reach standards technical reports anything coming from authority is considered as a good reference so it's very important to keep the quality of your resources well another important thing related to resources today the language of science is English and there is no doubt that this was in solve a 1927 here in Belgium and all these researchers they got only to talk together by talking in English if there was no common language they couldn't communicate so you have also to surrender to this fact that today science is English so if your reference list is not including English these resources and you are only focused on one source of information then this means that you have a limited source and here one of the criteria we look at when we develop a good literature review to guarantee that the sources are not coming from one single domain this means that I have to look at sources coming from the English or anglo-saxon domain from the French from the German and so on and so forth related to my topic if I only focus on french-speaking or francophone domain it means that I did not explore the anglo-saxon word I did not explore the Germano or the Flemish or the Dutch word and it's very important to have this open view trying to explore other domains at least if you cannot master the other language at least you have to explore the anglo-saxon domain another important thing to guarantee that your source of literature review are good sources you must guarantee that the sources are coming from different geographical domains don't cite only works that has been done in Brussels this is not enough I have to see work that has been done maybe in the hague and Amsterdam in in Italy in Germany in Japan in the United States in North America in this sense if my literature is covering different geographical domains it means that I really reviewed the largest part of literature and I went to different philosophies different point of view and this will enrich your review and definitely guarantee always that your resources are coming from the scientific domain and by scientific domain I mean the strong citations our journal papers conference proceedings dissertation thesis professional magazine standards technical fact sheets documentaries these are all good professional sources bad resources are heat something like Wikipedia lectures referring to a professor's lecture or referring to a review non reviewed article or non recorded conversation so keep this in mind always and like that you are sure that you have a good quality by keeping the language domain geographical domain and scientific on domain well the next step to do is to start the review so what is meant by doing the review a review is mainly looking to cover major concepts and by that you are trying to provide a snapshot a snapshot like a very fast picture about the literature related to your topic and you have in this snapshot try to describe the relationships between the different sources and references and you have to classify your work in a way that allows you to extract the information that allows you to at the end of this review come up with a conclusion that is useful telling what has been done it could be grouped in this way or this way and the most important thing you must make sure that your review is up-to-date up-to-date means that it can help the reader to know what's happening in this time in this moment in the field of research related to the topic so this is all important to do and the review is mainly like looking through different publication extracting them and presenting them in a way that allows somebody to go through them by doing a summary of your work well any literature review when it's judged it will be always asked this question does the proposal or does the research advance the state of the art and introduce innovative approach approach this is very important why it's important it's it you must ask yourself is your if your research proposal does it show a good understand standing of major works and topics if you are talking about let's say sustainability did you review the Brundtland report for example one of the major key vacation did you review the IPCC climate change report and so on so in every field it is well known that there are key major publications related to this topic did you review them this is very important you have also to make sure that you identified the gaps gaps by gaps I mean what has been not discussed in literature and this is very important to connect it to York and I will explain it later and you can have other question like what is currently available in the air or in Belgium or in Wallonia or in Europe or worldwide related to the topic and you have also to look at to capture the major concept and ideas related to your research area so these are the major criteria we look at when we review how is a review good or not so keep in mind to embed these criteria in your own work well once you are done with your review you have to move to the next step once you did you review you can start with something what I call the resources screening list what is the resources screenings the list this list is based on a three a three step approach that I developed and I would like you to use and work and it's based on a excel sheet that I use in my lab ask me for it I can share it with you and the whole idea is about screen the resource screening list is to regroup all sources where you could find information and guarantee that you explore the publication of key institutions which means what and every domain there are key institution publishing work if you only depend on Google Scholar in searching using the keywords for your search you are not sure that you covered the major publication of key institutions and therefore this is an example I ask you to create a list of sources that you explored and the links or the addresses of these sources and this is the first step to do a literature review you must tell where are you going to search your information where are you going to find the resources in this case you should look at university portal you look at Google Scholar you can see a look at Elsevier portal you can look at an institution the governmental institution the weather climatic Institute whatever kind of institution that probably will have publication on the level of the province on the level of the region or on the level of the country and sometimes also can do it on a European level or on an international level so this is the first step to come up with sources where are you going to look at this list will be keep keeping growing and moving the point here is to mention where are you going to look at to make sure that you are exploring the maximum doors and venues to make sure that you have a coverage for your literature view the second step that you have to do for your literature review you have to come up with a literature survey list what is the literature survey list it's an analysis that is done very fast of publication using keywords so simply after defining exactly where are you going to search let's say I defined I start by Google Scholar once I came in to Google Scholar I have to use my keywords to have to do a search the first result of this research should be represented in something called the literature survey list the literature survey list as you can see has three colors green red and orange green means these are favourable references I will read that means these are not important references I will not read and yellow are references maybe I will read them if I have time and it's very important to start by that the literature survey list could reach up 200 references it doesn't mean that he will go read them all but you have to make sure that you explore these references and list them in your excel sheet and later on pick up the most important ones and focus on reading them well you will find with every one of those a number what is this number well this number is the citation number which means what it means how many times the reference was cited how can I get the citation number for any publication well if you type for example your keywords in Google Scholar automatically Google Scholar will list all the publications scientific publication and related to your keywords and you will find something very interesting next to every publication you will find a number cited by 325 cited by 199 180 no citation no citation 58 citation this does mean what it means that by default once I use the keywords looking for a topic Google Scholar will list the most important publications and in the same time it will would tell me it was cited by other researchers it means what it means that other researcher read the document and included refer to it in their own research publication or work and this is very important and it will help you very good to develop your literature survey list because based on this citation I ask you to listed in this column and it will be up to you to decide what I'm going to read definitely if I find a document with zero citation it sounds that I will not read it compared to a reference that had has hundreds citation so today in the scientific world it's a measure to use this citation number of citations to make sure if this document is a quality document or not it doesn't mean that every document that has zero citation is a bad document because sometimes there are documents that are not available online sometimes there is a document for example that is only in French and the international scientific english-speaking community could not access the document because it's in French so it doesn't mean that having a zero citation means that it's a bad reference but it can help you more into exploring the best references and then it's up to you through your own intelligence to decide which reference I will read which one I will not read and which one I might read later when I have time so keep in mind the citation use Google Scholar ww-will Scholar dot-com and simply you can type your keywords you are using and directly use these results well as I told you once you cite you can easily develop your decision and here the green goes to the green the red I will not read I am NOT in trusted in this title it's called zero energy buildings it doesn't sound like something interesting to me because there are other topics so I will put it in not readable this 58 citation understanding okay maybe I will read it put it in the yellow so it's your work that you must develop this processing and select first screen these reviews and then select them and finally embed them in the matrix sheet and this is how it looks the matrix sheet as you can see it's simply you mention the number of the reference the name of the reference including the author and the year and you should mention the citation and finally if you have any observation just saying reading not reading or maybe later reading it so this is the second step to do your literature review well moving to the third step this is the step which is called the literature review matrix and the literature review matrix now you are starting to process the information the main point here is to start the analysis and to summarize the articles and simply we present it be presented in a table table with a number reference study parameters focus gap and findings so keep in mind that this is very important to start with your analysis but how does it look it's simply another matrix you will find it on the same file that allows you to explore every references by reading it you roll now after defining exactly what are you going to read let's say I will read this publication I will read the document called below energetic dalawa Looney for example I decided to read the document I read the document what should I do after reading it I should come up with this table I should define in this document what is the name and the title and authors what were the study parameters of this document what was the focus of the document where where where what are the gaps I found and what are the findings so simply you are starting to summarize a full document into one line and you are doing it in a professional way that helps you later on to say what are the findings that were found out in this study you can criticize or actually you must criticize the document because any research document at the end of the day is not comprehensive there is no research in the world that is comprehensive and conclusive any research has limitation it's your role to say in the gap what are the gap of this report or of this manuscript and you have to define the focus on the end the study parameter this is very important why because once you finish your literature review and you start embarking in your experimentation or in your analytical work for your thesis after three four months as you will start to forget what did you do with your literature review and everything you have been reading you will start to forget it so the only way to make sure that you come back to the review of the books and instead of going back and tracing every book and by grabbing the book and reading it again you just visit your written literature review matrix and like that you easily can go through very fast about every document but you must take your time to develop those I don't ask you to develop many of these reviews maybe for your thesis you need 1520 review but do them well read the document focus what was the study better parameters what was the focus what are the major findings that the author are reporting to me and you must come up with a critique to the study and reported in the gap well this is an example of a complete study that was done by a master student and here she was developing her readings and having different study parameters focus and gap and findings it's at the end very helpful and very useful and you can add it as an amendment to in the appendix of your master's thesis to show what literature II explored because this is very important to communicate in the progress of your thesis once this step is is done you move now to the last step the last step is called the literature review analysis and here I'm talking mainly to your intelligence and your ability to process information by literature review analysis I mean mainly that you analyze the major points that you found in your review and you have to summarize the article you read in several points how to do that I explained that you have to start to have for every reference a study parameter focus gap and findings and you started by doing the following you start to organize your work and all these publication you went through in a sir so once you come up with your literature review matrix you have to now think to reorganize them and group this publication in a certain order this order is your choice but let me show you what could be the order of choice you can order them chronologically so you say the publication before 2006 and the publication after 2006 you can say the publication's of the 90s of the 80s of the 70s for example you can also arrange them or rank them based on the advancement the technology you say ok this is before developing the electrical car and this is after developing the electrical car this is before the PV time and this is after the PV time another one you can develop you can arrange them by weaknesses and strengths which are talking about the strengths of a technology or a tank or a theme and which are talking about the strengths you can also do it geographically these publications were published then while only those are in Flanders those are Brussels those are in Germany those are here those are there you can also classify your work by geography and you can also classify it by questions so you say how can I do this topic and then you classify all these references that try to answer how to do it what is this topic you classify all the the publications that are talking about what is this topic so let's say zero energy buildings what are zero energy buildings you can classify all the publications that says what is a zero energy building how to design a zero energy building the methodology of a zero energy then you classify all of those how to measure the performance of zero energy buildings this could be a third group and in this way you are starting to organize the organization technique is you it's your choice you must be creative you must come up after doing your literature review matrix you must come up with the intelligent analysis work that allows you to extract this data and classify it in a way that at the end will be useful for you and useful for your thesis and useful for the reader to better understand the literature well this is an example the title here is the review of heat energy recovery exchanger for use and zero energy building include in cold climates so here somebody is reviewing the energy recovery exchangers and how they are used in cold climates and you can see simply that this is the result of the review here they also decided to say what I will group the work based on you can see countries Norway Denmark Sweden Canada China so these are the publications for this country and start to say in every country what was the performance requirements in those countries so this is a literature review here well this is here this is the literature view you have the the heat recovery exchanger and also decided to classify all publications depending on countries where they come from and the rate of air liter per second for every country so this is a way of classification you can have another example this is another study zero energy building a review of definition and calculation methodology so this is somebody who is reviewing a topic zero and rebuilding and trying to look what are the different methodologies for this topic look at this example the author here decided to do what he or she decided to simply look at the different criteria for evaluation some criteria are related to the delivered energy some criteria are related to primary energy others are talking about co2 emissions others are talking about total energy or generation use or grade in out or off-site on-site so the person evolved or developed themes topics related to diseases and start to classify the literature according these topics and check which of the literature mentioned that so this is also a very unique way to classify and process your literature review matrix another existing system here existing building retrofits here I'm talking about renovation and retrofits methodology in state-of-the-art and also here decided to do what classify the publication according to the building type residential office commercial schools tertiary whatever the type of building then the major technology used for renovation the savings and the major results so this is another way to come up to modify the literature review matrix modify it in an intelligent way and presented based on a way that serve your own objective of your own research proposal or research agenda well these are all examples so I would like to come back to confirm that a public or a literature review is mainly based on arranging the publication you have to review your literature review matrix try to identify different patterns methodologies country's techniques rates problems trends weakness try to organize the references in groups and based on the technique or identified pattern you can now represent the literature view and show me that you digest the literature you you have read many things you classifies them and you know you group them according to your own interest that help you in your own research another important issue here is to look at how to write your review once you are done with the arrangement we can start now to write so the writing simply is after developing these tables you can start to summarize the sources and provide a transitional connection between each group of references and now you have a real content that you can describe so you don't need anymore to get confused about how to write a literature view you understand it you first did a classification you did a grouping you read the documents you took your remote remarks you know did a kind of pattern and matching classification finally now you can start writing you have to highlight also past research accomplishment related to the topic of your research don't forget to say what has been done by previous student researchers related to your topic topic you have to evaluate the weakness and gaps of previous research mention what has not been done what were a problematic what did not cover the cost for example this study was only environmental study this study was only social the study was only economic and so on and so forth and you have to connect the review analysis with your own research because at the end you are all doing all that to justify the reason of your research you should tell at the end I am doing this research because all those researchers they did not address this topic that I am going to address for my own thesis or my own dissertation so another example climate adaptive building shells state of the art and here what was the aim the aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of research design and development effort in the field of climate adaptive building shells based on a structured literature review a classification of 44 climate adaptive building shells is made to place the variety of concept in context so this researcher simply decided to review all facades or skins that are climate adaptive that they can change they close they open they have blinds they have them electrochromic systems they are intelligent they're smart facades the researcher here decided to review all the the different buildings who has integrated this technology and present them and they are talking here about 44 and classify them and group them in a way that cover all these buildings and present information that is useful and as you can see it says here that despite the positive perspective it was found you must get a finding of your literature view it was found that the concept of climate adaptive building shells cannot yet be considered mature future research need to be future future research needs and further challenges to be resolved and therefore identified as it so in this abstract you can show clearly this is the outcome of a full literature review the literature review has been done you identified you grouped the information you presented and at the end you give a summary telling how much was it useful what can we do what is missing and what is going to be done in the future work related to your own research so some golden rules before closing up the presentation keep in mind that you have to report the status of accomplishment of previous researchers this is a literature review you must tell me who did what before you in this topic number two you have to evaluate the weakness of previous research you should not only read and say X did that and why did that that's not enough you must criticize what was missing in their work even if I work or a research that you like very much and you're so convinced that's a very good research you simply could find a limitation because no research is complete so you must have a critical evaluation for the weaknesses of find literature you can also conclude with that and you have to group your article based on your own criteria so you group them according your own criteria one of the major questions you will be always asked what was your criteria to classify the literature was it based on the date on the geography on a topic on a team on a methodology on the results on examples may be case studies this is very important and as I mentioned before provide a critical thinking this is very important you must show that you are just not consumer you're just not consuming the information and reading and reporting summarizing this is a kind of not intelligent work just to summarize literature many students think that a literature review is just a summarizing letter no it's not summary partially it's a summary but the most important here is classification grouping arrangement and proposing weaknesses and strengths of existing literature and proposing new endeavors or roads that I should explore as a researcher saying that this has not been done this was focused only on that but neglected that and further study should go in that direction or in this direction so this is your role to have a critical thinking provided and definitely you should link the review with what you want to do with your own research don't forget that you are doing all this literature review to justify the reason of your research you're doing all that work to say yes all this literature has done this work on one hand but they didn't do this work that I'm going to do otherwise your work is just a repetition so you can simply say yes there is many Passivhaus schools research that has been done in Flanders in Brussels but nothing has been done for example in Wallonia nothing has been done in Liege so you start to contextualize your study and give it a reason and a significance so at the end of your literature review after doing all these steps don't forget to link it to your own research by that I finished the presentation on literature view I hope you can succeed in doing it don't hesitate to contact me send you review and it's a matter of experience and time after time every time you find a good reference a good book don't forget to use the literature review matrix thank you very much for attention and you can follow preview next modules

Channel: Shady Attia

Views: 81,684

Rating: 4.9196787 out of 5

Keywords: Literature Review (Literature Subject)

Id: 7jR4Q5Cu5Kc

Length: 32min 43sec (1963 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2015