The Importance of a Literature Review in Research Writing
Doing a careful and thorough literature review is essential when you write a research at any level—the basic homework that is assumed done vigilantly, a given fact in all research papers. By providing a literature review, usually offered in your introduction before you reach your thesis statement, you are telling your reader that you have not neglected the basics of doing a research because a literature review not only surveys what researches have been done in the past on your research topic but it also appraises, encapsulates, compares and contrasts, and correlates various scholarly books, research articles, and other relevant sources that are directly related to your current research. Given such fundamental nature of providing a literature review, your research paper will be not considered seriously if you lack a literature review in the beginning of your paper.
A Literature Review Helps You Create a Rapport with Your Audience
A literature review helps you create a sense of rapport with your audience or readers so that they can trust the fact that you have done your homework; as a result, they can give you credit for your due diligence: you have done your fact-finding and fact-checking mission, one of the initial steps of any research writing. As a student, you may not be an expert in a given field; however, by listing a thorough literature review in your research paper, you are telling the audience, in essence, you know what you are talking about. As a result, the more books, articles, and other sources you can list in the literature review, the more trustworthy your scholarship and expertise can be. Depending on the nature of your research paper, each entry in the literature review can be long or short; for example, if you are writing a doctoral dissertation or Master ’s Thesis, the entries can be longer than the ones in a term paper. The key is to stick to the gist of the sources as you synthesize the source in the literature review: its thesis, research methods, findings, issues, and further discussions mentioned in the source.
A Literature Review Helps You Avoid Incidental Plagiarism
Imagine this scenario. You have written a research paper, an original paper in your area of specialization—without a literature review. When you about to publish the paper, you soon learn that someone has already published a paper on a topic very similar to yours. Of course, you have not plagiarized anything from that publication; however, if and when you publish your work, people will be suspicious of your authenticity. They will ask further about the significance of repeating a research so similar? In short, you could have utilized the time, money, and other resources you have wasted on your research on something else. Had you prepared a literature review at the onset of your research, you could have easily avoided such mishap; during the compilation of your literature review, you could notice how someone else has done a similar research on your topic. By knowing this fact, you can tailor or tweak your own research in such a way that it is not a mere rehashing of someone else ’s original or old idea.
A Literature Review Sharpens Your Research Focus
As you assemble outside sources for your literature review, you will condense, evaluate, synthesize, and paraphrase the gist of outside sources in your own words; through this process of winnowing, you will be able to place the relevance of your research in the larger context of what others researches have already done on your topic in the past (See Reference 1). The literature review will help you compare and contrast what you are doing in the historical context of the research as well as how your research is different or original from what others have done, shedding light on the rationale why you need to do this particular research (See Reference 2). Perhaps you are using a new or different research method which has not been available before, allowing you to collect the data more accurately or conduct an experiment that is more precise and exact thanks to many innovations of modern technology. A literature review, thus, is essential in helping you shape and guide your research in the direction you may not have thought of by offering insights and different perspectives on the research topic.
A Literature Review Comes in Many Different Types
Depending on your area of specialization, a literature review can take various forms: argumentative review, integrative review, historical review, methodological review, systematic review, and theoretical review (See Reference 1). An argumentative review is written to present an opposing view to a given position. Such review will be valuable to persuade others to join you in supporting your thesis. An integrative review is composed of examinations and critical analysis on a given topic to introduce a need for a new research. For example, you can use an integrative review on the spreading of a pandemic plague, arguing how the old methods of gathering and analyzing the data were inadequate and how modern technology, such as DNA analysis, will help make the same research more accurate. Similarly, a historical review will assess all the historical records of scholarship chronologically while methodological review examines the research methods alone—collection of data, their critical analysis, interpretation, and research results, for example. A literature review in any field is essential as it offers a comprehensive overview and recapitulation on the given scholarship from past to present, giving the reader a sense of focus as to which direction your new research is headed (See Reference 3).
1. Wesleyan University: Library
http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/guides/litrev/whatsalitreview.html
2.The University of Southern California: USC Libraries
http://libguides.usc.edu/content.php?pid=83009&sid=615851
3. The University of North Carolina: The Writing Center
http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/literature-reviews/
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