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
