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Understanding the literature review
The purpose of a literature review is to:
- Provide foundation of knowledge on topic
- Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication and give credit to other researchers
- Identify inconsistencies: gaps in research, conflicts in previous studies, open questions left from other research
- Identify need for additional research (justifying your research)
- Identify the relationship of works in context of its contribution to the topic and to other works
- Place your own research within the context of existing literature making a case for why further study is needed.
Types of Literature Review
Don't forget to meet with your mentor or McNair staff and discuss the purpose and type of literature review you will be doing. Remember, you cannot cover all of the material, so you need to set some limitations.
It is important to think of knowledge in a given field as consisting of three layers. First, there are the primary studies that researchers conduct and publish. Second are the reviews of those studies that summarize and offer new interpretations built from and often extending beyond the original studies. Third, there are the perceptions, conclusions, opinion, and interpretations that are shared informally that become part of the lore of field. In composing a literature review, it is important to note that it is often this third layer of knowledge that is cited as "true" even though it often has only a loose relationship to the primary studies and secondary literature reviews.
Given this, while literature reviews are designed to provide an overview and synthesis of pertinent sources you have explored, there are several approaches to how they can be done, depending upon the type of analysis underpinning your study. Listed below are definitions of types of literature reviews:
Argumentative Review: This form examines literature selectively in order to support or refute an argument, deeply embedded assumption, or philosophical problem already established in the literature. The purpose is to develop a body of literature that establishes a contrarian viewpoint. Given the value-laden nature of some social science research [e.g., educational reform; immigration control], argumentative approaches to analyzing the literature can be a legitimate and important form of discourse. However, note that they can also introduce problems of bias when they are used to to make summary claims of the sort found in systematic reviews.
Integrative Review: Considered a form of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated. The body of literature includes all studies that address related or identical hypotheses. A well-done integrative review meets the same standards as primary research in regard to clarity, rigor, and replication.
Historical Review: Few things rest in isolation from historical precedent. Historical reviews are focused on examining research throughout a period of time, often starting with the first time an issue, concept, theory, phenomena emerged in the literature, then tracing its evolution within the scholarship of a discipline. The purpose is to place research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the-art developments and to identify the likely directions for future research.
Methodological Review: A review does not always focus on what someone said [content], but how they said it [method of analysis]. This approach provides a framework of understanding at different levels (i.e. those of theory, substantive fields, research approaches and data collection and analysis techniques), enables researchers to draw on a wide variety of knowledge ranging from the conceptual level to practical documents for use in fieldwork in the areas of ontological and epistemological consideration, quantitative and qualitative integration, sampling, interviewing, data collection and data analysis, and helps highlight many ethical issues which we should be aware of and consider as we go through our study.
Systematic Review: This form consists of an overview of existing evidence pertinent to a clearly formulated research question, which uses pre-specified and standardized methods to identify and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect, report, and analyse data from the studies that are included in the review. Typically it focuses on a very specific empirical question, often posed in a cause-and-effect form, such as "To what extent does A contribute to B?"
Theoretical Review: The purpose of this form is to concretely examine the corpus of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue, concept, theory, phenomena. The theoretical literature review help establish what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what degree the existing theories have been investigated, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested. Often 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.
Setting the scope of the literature review
You also want to spend some time discussing with your mentor or McNair staff the scope of your literature review. What will your literature review do? Give yourself a goal and use that to establish the scope of your literature review.
A literature review may be comprehensive or selective but should examine seminal or principal works and works that have been consequential in the field. The scope of a literature review will vary by assignment and discipline. The literature review may be part of a larger work or a stand-alone article, meaning that it is the entirety of a paper. The literature review may be part of the introduction, or a separate section to a thesis, dissertation, or research report setting up the context for the author's original research. The literature review:
- Compares and contrasts
- Identifies areas of consensus and dissent
- Reveals gaps or oversights
- Indicates areas needing further research
- Points out trends, themes, approaches, methodologies, theories, and frames of analysis
- Discusses major debates in the field
- Examines methodological or theoretical strengths and weaknesses
Writing the literature review
This workshop discusses the purpose of a literature review and details a step-by-step process for writing one. This video also includes a demonstration on how to make synthesis paragraphs.
- Check out these literature review matrices to note similarities among the authors; and retrieve citation information for easy insertion within a document.
What is synthesis?
Synthesis is the process of creating a new perspective by analyzing the similarities and differences among a group of other perspectives. Typically, synthesis occurs in academic writing when you are bringing together multiple sources.
- The Say/I Say template guide for academic writing
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