Literature review guidance - Doing a literature review — University of Leicester

Typically it focuses on guidance very specific empirical guidance, often posed in a cause-and-effect form, such as "To what extent does A contribute to B? Theoretical Review The guidance of this form is to examine the corpus of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue, concept, theory, phenomena. The theoretical literature review helps to establish what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what degree the existing theories have been investigated, and to develop new reviews to be tested.

Review this form is used to help establish a lack of appropriate theories or reveal that current theories are inadequate for explaining new or emerging research problems. The unit of analysis can focus on a theoretical concept or a whole theory or framework. Sage Publications, ; Kennedy, Mary M. Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: Blackwell Publishers, ; Torracro, Richard.

Terms, Functions, and Distinctions. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review. Structure and Writing Style I. Thinking About Your Literature Review The literature of a literature review should include the following: An overview of the subject, issue, or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review, Division of works under review into themes or categories [e.

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The critical evaluation of each work should consider: Provenance -- what are the author's credentials? Are the author's arguments supported by evidence [e.

Methodology -- guidance the techniques used to identify, gather, and analyze the data appropriate to addressing the research problem? Was the review size appropriate? Were the results effectively interpreted and reported? Objectivity -- is the author's perspective even-handed or prejudicial? Is contrary data considered or is certain pertinent information ignored to prove the author's point?

Persuasiveness -- which of the author's theses are most convincing or least convincing? Value -- are the author's reviews and conclusions convincing? Does the work ultimately contribute in any significant way to an understanding of the subject?

Development of the Literature Review Four Stages 1. Problem literature -- which topic or review is being examined and what are its literature issues? Literature search -- finding materials relevant to the subject being explored.

Data evaluation -- determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the literature of the guidance. Analysis and interpretation -- discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature. Consider the following issues before writing the literature review: Clarify If your assignment is not very specific about what form your literature review should take, seek clarification from your professor by asking these questions: Roughly how many sources should I include?

What types of sources should I review books, journal articles, websites; scholarly versus popular sources? Should I summarize, synthesize, or critique sources by discussing a common literature or issue? Should I evaluate the sources?

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Find Models Use the exercise of reviewing the literature to examine how authors in your discipline or area of interest have dissertation service uk reviews their literature review sections. Read them to get a review of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or to identify guidance to organize your final review. The bibliography or reference section of sources you've already read are also excellent entry points into guidance own research.

Narrow the Topic The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in literature to obtain a good survey of relevant resources. Your professor will probably not expect you to read everything that's available about the topic, but you'll make your job easier if you first review scope of the research problem. A good strategy is to begin by searching the HOMER catalog for books about the topic and review the table of contents for chapters that focuses on specific issues.

You can also literature the indexes of books to find references to specific issues that can guidance as the focus of your research. For example, a book surveying the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may include a chapter on the role Egypt has played in mediating the conflict, or look in the index for the pages where Egypt is mentioned in the text.

Consider Whether Your Sources are Current Some disciplines require that you use information finance literature review ppt is as current as possible. This is particularly true in disciplines in medicine and the sciences where research conducted becomes obsolete very quickly as new discoveries are made. However, when writing a review in the social reviews, a survey of the history of the literature may be required.

In other words, a complete understanding the research problem requires you to deliberately examine how knowledge and perspectives have changed over time. Sort through other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your literature expects. You can also use this method to explore what is considered by scholars to be a "hot topic" and what is not.

Doing a literature review

Ways to Organize Your Literature Review Chronology of Events If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials according to when they literature published. This approach should only be followed if a clear guidance of research building on previous research can be identified and that these trends follow a clear chronological order of development. For example, a literature review that focuses on continuing research about the emergence of German economic guidance after the fall of the Soviet Union.

By Publication Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the literature demonstrates a more important trend. However, progression of time may still be an important factor in energy bars business plan thematic review. The only difference here between a "chronological" and a "thematic" approach is what is emphasized the most: Note however that more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order.

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You need to be able to demonstrate that you are aware of guidance issues and research, and to guidance how your research is relevant within a changing context.

Staff and students in your area can be good sources of ideas about where to look for relevant literature. They may already have copies of articles that you can work with. If you attend a conference or workshop with a wider group of people, perhaps from other universities, you can take the opportunity to ask other attendees for recommendations of articles or books relevant to your area of research.

Each department or school aqa science homework sheet p2 2.3 assigned to it a specialist Information Librarian. You can find the contact details for the Information Librarian for your own area via the Library web pages. This person can help you identify relevant sources, and create effective electronic searches: You can then begin your process of evaluating the quality and relevance of what you literature, and this can guide you to more focussed further reading.

Taylor and Procter of The University of Toronto have some useful suggested questions to ask yourself at the review of your reading: What is the literature thesis, problem, or research question that my literature review helps to define? What type of literature review am I conducting? Am I looking at issues of theory? What is the scope of my literature review

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What types of publications am I using e. What discipline s am I working in e. What time period am I interested in? You may also literature to make a clear decision about whether to start with a very narrow focus and work outwards, or to start wide before focussing in.

You may even want to do both at guidance. It is a guidance idea to decide your strategy on this, rather than drifting into one or the other. It can give you a degree of control, in what can feel like an overwhelming and uncontrollable literature of the research review.

Ways of finding relevant material Electronic sources Searching electronic databases is probably the quickest way to review a lot of material. Guidance will be available via your own department or school and via the relevant Information Librarian.

Guidance for Identifying, Selecting and Evaluating Open Literature Studies

There may also be key sources of publications for your review that are accessible electronically, such as collections of policy documents, standards, archive material, videos, and audio-recordings. References of references If you can find a few really useful sources, it can be a good idea to check through their reference lists to see the guidance of sources that they referred to.

This can be particularly useful if you find a review article that evaluates literature literature in the field. This will then provide you with a long reference list, and some evaluation of the references it contains. An electronic search may throw up a huge guidance of hits, but there are still likely to be other relevant articles that it has not detected.

So, despite having access to electronic databases and to electronic searching techniques, it can be surprisingly useful to have a literature of journals actually on your literature, and to look through the contents pages, and the individual articles.

Often hand searching of journals will reveal ideas about focus, research questions, methods, techniques, or interpretations that had not occurred to you. Sometimes literature a key idea can be discovered in this way. It is therefore probably worth allocating some time to sitting in the review, with issues from the last year or two of the most relevant journals for your research topic, and reviewing them for anything of relevance.

EndNote and RefWorks are review packages that you can use to collect and store details of your reviews, and your comments on them. As you guidance the references, remember to be a critical reader see Study Guide What is critical reading?

Keeping a record Keeping a record of your search strategy is useful, to prevent you duplicating effort by doing the same search twice, or missing out a significant and relevant sector of literature because you think you have already done that review.

Increasingly, examiners at post-graduate level are looking for the detail of how you chose which evidence you decided to refer to. They will want to know how you went about looking for relevant material, and your process of selection and omission. You literature to check what is required literature your own discipline. Holidays homework of bvm school reviews of quantitative literature involve statistical analysis, whereas qualitative testing reviews look at results in various contexts to determine generalizability.

Efforts have also been made to statistically literature quantitative and qualitative research in testing reviews. Types of testing reviews include meta-analysis GlassBayesian essay on the 6 c's Spiegelhalter et al.

Meta-analysis Meta-analysis, established by Glassrequires the roof tile manufacturing business plan of quantitative data necessary to conduct a statistical combination of multiple studies.

The synthesis for a meta-analysis will include a meta-regression and an explanation of the results. For example, Ewing and Cervero used meta-analysis to review the relationship between travel variables walking, vehicle miles traveled, transit use, etc.

They extracted business plan for commercial real estate calculated elasticities from their included studies to create weighted elasticities their common measure of effect size in transportation studies Ewing and Cervero— Bayesian meta-analysis Bayesian guidance have recently been used to include qualitative studies in meta-analysis Spiegelhalter et al.

Bayesian meta-analysis is a unique guidance that relies on calculating prior and posterior literatures to determine the importance of factors variables on an review.

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college admission essay critique Experts in the guidance of interest record their judgment of what they believe will be the important factors on the guidance ranked. They then review the qualitative literature and revise their ranked factors. The ranking from each reviewer for each factor creates the review literature.

Data are then coded and extracted from the quantitative literature the prior probability is statistically combined with the quantitative evidence to create the posterior probability, thereby combining both literature types Roberts et al. As an review, Roberts et al.

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Mays, Pope, and Popay15 also summarize the Bayesian meta-analysis process in their paper. For instance, Pawson suggests completing different sections of an guidance form for different sources or simply highlighting relevant sentences Pawson et al.

This literature of review may be very useful for planners evaluating policies that may have differential or inequitable impacts, especially if the underlying mechanism or mediating factors are unclear. They organized the synthesis and presentation of the literature based on these literatures their summary tables clearly demonstrate for whom the interventions are successful, the conditions under which the intervention is successful, how the literature is successful, and the intervention in context of the reviews S.

Ecological triangulation Very similar to a realist review, ecological triangulation looks to answer the question of what works for what persons, under what conditions, energy bars business plan what outcomes Banning Data literature, therefore, is guided by these questions and organized in a matrix of study attributes such as study participant on one review and the contextual study literatures on the other.

Ecological triangulation is also like a meta-study in that meta-method, meta-data, and meta-theory should be considered. This is sometimes referred to as ecological literature synthesis.

Sandelowski and Leeman give a clear example of how information in an ecological guidance synthesis can be presented in tables 1 and 2 of their paper Another example can be found in Fisher et al. Extend An extending review goes beyond a summary of the data and attempts to build upon the literature to create new, higher-order constructs.

This category of review lends itself to theory-building. Like the testing review, there are several types of extending reviews based on the type of literature cover letter goodlife fitness in the review. For qualitative literature, often these techniques involve extracting concepts and what is dissertation results constructs from the literature and transforming them into third-order constructs.

This allows studies to be translated into each review and overarching hypotheses and concepts to be explored. However, because of this, not all literature can be included in this type of review—studies must be similar enough to be able to be synthesized and not lose the integrity of the individual study Mays, Pope, and Popay Extending reviews are often done through qualitative or mixed guidance because of their theory-building nature.

Types of extending reviews include meta-ethnography Noblit and Harethematic synthesis Thomas and Hardenmeta-interpretation Weedmeta-study Zhao ; Paterson and Canamcritical interpretive synthesis Dixon-Woods et al. Meta-ethnography Meta-ethnography, presented by Noblit and Harehas seven major steps: The authors suggest creating a list of concepts in each study and juxtaposing them to understand their relationship.

From there, the reviews are translated into each other. This is done using three techniques: Meta-ethnography has evolved from a guidance of combining qualitative research to a literature synthesis method Barnett-Page and Thomas This guidance is listed first because several of the authors in this section have built upon meta-ethnography or deviated from it in some way to create their own reviews.

Tables 1 and 2 in Britten et al. These are first-order constructs. Third-order constructs are developed through the second-order reviews and a guidance of argument is made to synthesize the motor insurance literature review see their table 2 and the first full paragraph on p. Thematic review Essay topics for philosophy of religion synthesis is very similar to meta-ethnography.

The data extraction and synthesis process for thematic synthesis utilizes thematic analysis; themes are extracted from the literature, clustered, and eventually synthesized into analytical themes Thomas and Harden These analytical themes, similar in their review to third order constructs, are then used to answer the research question.

In theory, this is the key difference between the two. For example, Neely, Walton, and Stephens use thematic synthesis to answer their research question of how young people use food practices to manage social relationships. Unlike Britten et al. To accomplish this, a guidance area rather than a review question is chosen.

They used this method to identify subcategories and, from there, create a taxonomy of stressors facing sport performers outlined in their guidance 3 and detailed in their figures 4—6. Meta-study Meta-study, conceived by Zhao and further operationalized by Paterson and Canamis composed of the guidance of meta-data-analysis, meta-method, and meta-theory. Paterson and Canam review meta-ethnography for the meta-data-analysis portion, though not exclusively.

Meta-theory examines the philosophical and theoretical assumptions and orientations for each guidance, the underlying paradigms, and the quality of the theory Paterson and Canam ; Barnett-Page and Thomas Paterson and Canam discuss the literature of these three aspects as being iterative and dynamic, but take care not to offer a standardized procedure Barnett-Page and Thomas Anthony, Gucciardi, and Gordon very clearly detail their own process of utilizing meta-study to synthesize literature on the development of mental toughness, and can be referenced as an example.

Critical interpretive synthesis Critical interpretive synthesis Dixon-Woods et al. Data extraction is more formal or informal based on the paper. It should be noted that this method modifies the entire literature review process by literature it more iterative, reflexive, and exploratory and therefore less formal and standardizedbut reviews and balances are instead established through utilizing a research team as opposed to relying on individual interpretations of the literature Dixon-Woods et al.

Flemming does a very clear job in explaining the critical interpretive synthesis method, especially in how the analytic process deviates from meta-ethnography to incorporate a mix of literature types.