5 Practical Tips To Help You Write An Excellent Literature Review
The literature review indicates the competence of the thesis writer in the studied issue. Its volume and depth depend on the topic of the research. A high degree of elaboration allows the author's thoughts to be conveyed to persons who are not specialists but intend to understand the issue.
In other words, an excellent literature review is research material that helps to build assumptions about the methods used and the reasons for choosing the subject under study. And in this article of Education Blog of Flyextremeworld, you will learn the top 5 secrets that will help you to cope with that.
# 1 Follow the Clear Structure
Any research paper and its parts have a logical structure, which you must adhere to achieve high results. Of course, a dissertation is a creative work, and some might argue that you can't create according to plan, but a proper literature review has three structural elements to adhere you should follow.
Statement of the objective analysis of the research. In this part, the author specifies the global tasks and current problems in the chosen scientific direction, reflects on the systematization of the data obtained and describes the achieved results. For example, suppose the research work covers the territory of one country. In that case, it is essential to reflect on the analysis of the scientists' contribution to the solution of the considered problem and objectively characterize the potential and importance of the chosen direction.
Description of the situation of scientific schools. In this section, you must group the selected sources according to their belonging to a particular school. Also, it would help if you described the main characteristics of such schools and their significant achievements in the vector under consideration. The following structure element is to identify the leaders and their publications in the selected vector.
Formulation of significant results of the sources used. Finally, this section assesses the study's results, specifying the main ways and methods of their achievement.
We started with this point because it is the most important and challenging. Therefore, if you need more experience in this matter, it is better to use the services of professionals, which you can find at Trust My Paper writing service. Then, further work on the literature review will go much more manageable.
# 2 Create Your Library of Articles
So from your first days in graduate school, you will be searching for articles on your research topic. And if you're convinced it's on your subject after browsing an article diagonally, save it to disk. We recommend putting the file's name to correspond to the article's title and the author's name. Consider that this small but valuable tip will significantly reduce your time in preparing the final text of the literary review.
Remember that some articles may disappear from free access on the Internet, and the reasons may differ: transfer of rights to a paper to a publisher, author's site closing, loss from the index of search services, or anything else. Moreover, it may happen over several years, that is, for a period comparable to the study period in graduate school.
# 3 Make Notes
Immediately make an abstract of the article. You should know that essays are downloaded at the beginning of graduate school, and a literature review is written at the end. And it can take several years, from when you download a piece to when you include it in your literature review.
Never use abstracts of a paper or an abstract of an independent reviewer's writing in your outline. You have a specific dissertation topic and should write the abstract for your needs. Also, highlight those keywords from the article that are important to you when working on your literature review.
And at this point, we can't help but mention some brilliant bibliography software, namely, JabRef. Its primary purpose is to maintain a database of bibliographic records. The database is stored in bib format, which describes the bibliography for LaTeX. For those who use LaTeX for their dissertation, we recommend installing JabRef, since it is free, has a friendly interface, and is easy to use.
# 4 Achieve a Complete Literature Review
Remember once and for all: the literature review must always be complete. But, of course, the completeness of the literature review is achieved with the help of the supervisor, who points out the most significant works in the field under study. But this is only sometimes the case.
Therefore, it is better to rely on your strength and immerse yourself in a long and time-consuming process of downloading and reading articles on your research topic. To begin with, you should suffice two or three pieces found by a random search. After that, you have to do the following:
Write out references of interest to you from the list of references in each article.
Then look for articles on found links on the web, and then return to the previous point.
Let's warn you immediately that the number of articles will grow like a snowball. However, new articles and names will only appear once your work progresses. And the primary sign that it's time to stop is the ability to organize your papers in a hierarchy: first by author, then by the scholarly school.
# 5 Steal Like an Artist
You don't have to search for every article you want to reference in your literature review. Unless, of course, you want to grow old without getting out of this process. For example, when you see in someone's paper something like this phrase: "This concept was first introduced in paper [1]," you don't have to search for article [1] on the Internet because you already know how to refer to it.
Summing Up
Remember that you will have to work with literature from admission to graduate school until the moment of the thesis defense. Following the tips described in this article will save a lot of effort and time. The most important secret is to believe in yourself and to study the entire body of literature in an inspired and systematic manner.
Reading all the articles on your topic only seems impossible, but you will do it if you start doing it in advance. And summarizing the above, we can conclude that quality writing is facilitated by following the below tips:
Finding topic articles for research is essential to start while you're still a graduate student. The easiest and most effective way to save information is to download the material and move it to a reliable medium. There is no better alternative way not to lose exciting details.
It is advisable to annotate each studied and relevant article on the topic with your selection of keywords and evaluate the material from the perspective of the issue under study.
Regularly maintain bibliographic records with the help of specialized programs. Assistive tools such as JabRef adapt the material to modern requirements, format references, and perform other valuable functions.
Completeness of this part of the study is achieved by searching and downloading topical material, which already has its own reference list and review. Finally, each position must be studied and analyzed.