What is a Literature Review?
The literature review is a general overview of the topic of your research and the main ideas and theories related to it.
The literature review gives an in-depth overview of the previous studies and their limitations, which helps to support your claim.
Literature reviews are often essential for papers, theses, and dissertations. They provide an overview of what has been written on a particular topic or issue within scholarly literature so it can be better understood by readers who may not have access to all these sources themselves.
The literature review is a very important part of your paper. It summarizes sources and critically evaluates them to give you an accurate understanding of the topic. Also, it is different from an annotated bibliography.
How to Write a Literature Review?
The literature review is the key to any good academic paper. It’s where you summarize what other researchers have found and how their work relates (or doesn't) with your own research findings, so everything here must make sense.
It's important to know the proper process for drafting a literature review. If you are writing this for the first time, follow these steps carefully and thoroughly.
1. Understand the Requirements
When you write your research paper for an academic assignment, make sure to understand your professor's requirements. This will help improve grades because it shows that they're looking out for specific things in their students' work and not just giving low-quality assignments without any direction.
2. Narrow the Topic
Narrow down your research topic and think about what interests you. Talk with a professor and read other related work on the same subject matter for an idea of expected topics or themes in this field before writing anything.
3. Conduct Research
To write a literature review, you need to define your source selection criteria. It should be relevant and interesting for the problem being studied in research. Find relevant journals, articles, or other sources like conference proceedings, scholarly articles; look up papers on Google Scholar using strong keywords and search different databases.
It is important to think about what central themes and ideas connect your sources when doing research. This will help you focus on the information that matters most for your project.
4. Analyze and Select Sources
To find the best sources for your research paper, it's important that you thoroughly read each source. However, this may be difficult, so some factors will help make analyzing more manageable:
- Key findings of the research work
- Methodologies
- Results
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Possible contributions
When you are looking for information, make sure that the source is reputable and relevant. You should search for how many it has been used in other works before deciding if you should use them.
5. Create Thesis Statement
The thesis statement is the central idea of your paper and should be clear, concise, and direct. It is a very important part of your paper.
The thesis statement contains the main points you see in your topic research. It presents a viewpoint about the topic rather than arguing for a position or opinion.
6. Literature Review Outline
The literature review is a crucial part in any research paper outline. Its outline should be structured like other essays with an introduction, body, and conclusion.
Let’s discuss these parts in detail.
- Introduction
The introduction section provides an overview of the topic, its importance, and relevance to readers. It also encloses information about what problems you want to solve with this research project, as well as the methodology used in achieving expected results.
- Main Body
The main part of the literature review is finding sources to write about. They have a lot in common, but each one is different. You need to give a brief overview of the main points of each source.
You also need to discuss the significance of findings and not paraphrase other researchers' work. Summarize and synthesize the main points of each source.
- Conclusion
The conclusion of your paper summarizes what you have said in the introduction and restates the main points. In addition, you should discuss the results of your study. Additionally, you should describe any research gaps, approaches, and findings that your research uncovered.
7. Proofreading
The proofreading phase is the last step in writing a literature review. After you've made all of your corrections, check to see if any spelling or grammar mistakes are left before submitting your work.
Literature Review Examples
The following are some great research paper examples for a literature review to consider when writing your own.
How to Write a Literature Review For a Research Proposal
Here is an example to help you learn writing a literature review in a research proposal.
The research paper is the deciding factor of whether or not you will be granted your degree. Therefore it should always include all the relevant sections like a literature review.
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