Literature Review is not simply putting articles, journals, and other
sources in a section. While it involves summarizing other works have
been done, it is important to relate these sources to your topic by
focusing on the critical relationship between each of them and your
work.
The aim of doing literature review is:
1. Providing an overview of the subject
2. Providing a solid background for your investigation
3. Reporting on previous works around the same issue
The basic theme for writing Literature Review consists of these parts:
1. Introduction: provides bird’s eye view of your work.
2. Body: is where you put all the relevant information from various sources; like journals, articles, books, etc.
3. Conclusion/ Recommendations: the
aim of this part is telling your readers the summary of the whole
literature review. It includes what you have found by reading the
sources and what will be the next step.
Body, as the
heart of the literature review needs extra effort and attention. One of
the important points in writing literature review body is organizing
massive information and sources into a compressed section. You might
read many valuable sources and have many things to say, but your
readers won’t be impressed unless you know how to manage them.
There are different methods to arrange the sources in writing Literature Review:
1. Chronological:
in this method you will start reviewing the sources from the oldest to
the newest one. This mean that you first talk about the sources that
have been published in 1980s, and later move to the ones from 1990s and
finally focus on 2000s sources. This method is useful, especially when
your topic needs considering the effect of time; an example is
technology development related topics.
2. Thematic:
this approach means managing your literature review based on
categorizing the sources into separate topics or issues. For example, if
your topic is about Employee Training methods, you may review each of
the offered training techniques one-by-one.
3. Methodological:
despite the previous methods, this one works based on your methodology.
Here you write your literature review in close connection with the
methodology chosen for the aims of the study.
