Literature Review
The literature review is a concise and meaningful overview of the research field in narrow flow, from a general to a specific point. Its main points are the followings.
1. Research Field: state the research field in the beginning of the literature review. The springboards can be the followings:
- Non-scientific point of view: introduce your personal engagement to the topic, your reason for the choice. Keep your objectivity and professionality, but you express from where you learnt about that research subject, why you became interested, and how you would like to proceed. This gives personal credibility to your research.
- Scientific point of view: support the significance and actuality of the chosen topic by quotes and outstanding data. This justifies your research need.
2. Research Panorama: classify or categorise the applied literature
- Show the sources from where you collected your literature, organise them into categories (e.g. primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. sources). Count the number of the sources within the categories, and conclude the research field from where they have been retrieved. Measure their objectivity, persuasiveness, and reliability. This justifies the credibility of the applied sources.
3. Literature Review: Context
- You start to build the theoretical corpus of the research here.
- Explain the embeddedness of the chosen research subject into the wider context and its main definitions.
- Shed light on the intercorrelations between the other research fields within the context.
4. Literature Review: Focus
- Dissect the scientific literature thematically.
- Include descriptive statistics on the gained knowledge with authors’ network. Support your findings with figures and tables so that the reader can easily follow your thread.
- Critically evaluate the former findings.
- Support your argument with pros and cons.
5. Arriving at the exact research problem
- On the peak of your argument, state the exact research problem and highlight the research niche you would like to deal with.
- The proposition of a new perspective: claim the research of that niche.
Editor A.S., 2018