Literature Reviews

Start the process by:

1. considering a broad topic of research interest and then write it down,
2. consider specific areas, you wish to examine within this topic,
3. consider key themes and elements of these specific topics to investigate in depth,
4. consider how to work these key areas and elements into your research question.

Be sure to include the following elements in your research question proposal:

• What new knowledge will be generated for the discipline?
• Why is it valuable?
• How can the reader be assured the conclusions will be valid?
• How will you present your findings?

Framing your research question - outlines a number of frameworks you can use to clarify and develop your research question.

Preliminary Investigation

The next step is to undertake a preliminary investigation on your research topic. 

The preliminary investigation will help you to refine your topic area.

Evaluating your research question

If your preliminary investigation into the literature is inconclusive or you cannot make headway, then it is time to re-evaluate your research question. Try to answer the following questions:

• Is your research question clear?
  • With so much research available on any given topic, research questions must be as clear as possible in order to be effective in helping the writer direct their research.
• Is your research question focused?
  • Research questions must be specific enough to be well covered in the space available.
• Is your research question complex?
  • Research questions should not be answerable with a simple “yes” or “no” or by easily found facts and should, instead, require both research and analysis on the part of the writer.

York University, 2013 "Research Question Info Sheet".

There are seven basic steps in the search process:

1. Identifying the key words and phrases that reflect the key concepts of your research topic.
2. Formatting these key words and phrases using techniques such as phrase searching and truncation that make the most of them.
3. Turning these key words and phrases into effective searches using a few easy to master techniques.
4. Using the filters and limits in databases to optimise your searches.
5. Reviewing/evaluating your search results.
6. Making the most of your search results – by using the information in database records and article reference lists to find other resources.
7. Search again – Searching is not a linear process. And it is not enough to do just one search. You will need separate searches for each aspect of your topic. You will also need to repeat your searches in multiple databases. As you continue to search and read the literature related to your topic, you will find that you need to modify your searches to include the other keywords you come across, or other aspects of the topic you need to investigate. 

Extra processes for Literature Review (Systematic) – Note: This process is not a Systematic Review

As the name suggests, the searches for this type of literature review are systematic. This more scientific approach to searching requires the searches to be repeatable.

If you are doing a literature review (systematic), you will need to do some preliminary searching to identify:

• the key databases you will be using for your review.
• the most successful keywords and phrases for locating relevant literature for your review.
• relevant subject headings in each of your databases. Subject headings are used in conjunction with keywords to improve the efficacy of your search.

By the end of this process, you should have a search you can repeat in each of your databases.

Note: Different databases use different subject headings. If you've used a subject heading from one database that doesn't appear in the others, you'll need to enter it as a keyword in the other databases to ensure consistency in your search terms.

You'll need to keep a record of:

• your keywords and subject headings for each of your concepts
• the databases you searched in and the dates of the searches.
• the number of results from each search

The literature you need to find will depend on your area of research. In general, you will be searching in databases and online.

Search the library databases for:

• commercially published literature such as books, eBooks, articles in commercially published journals.
• dissertations, reports, conference papers.
• Open Access publications such as articles in open access journals.

Search online for:

• government reports and statistics
• company / organisation information
• historical sources such as diaries, letters, and photographs
• Open Access publications such as articles in open access journals
• social media sources

The synthesis is not just a summary of each reading that you've decided to include in your review. The purpose of your synthesis is to bring together all of your research findings to:

• describe main themes in the literature you've found and deemed relevant.
• demonstrate any relationships between those themes.
• explain how all of the selected sources fit into the body of literature you are evaluating, and how they interrelate.
• identify any gaps in the literature. (This is the starting point for your justification of your future work on the gap you plan to fill.) 

You're going to need to sort and collate your references by main topics and themes, so you can see which arguments they support. This allows you to pull these ideas together to frame coherent arguments and provide supporting evidence from what you've read.

A literature matrix is a useful tool for this stage. It is a table or spreadsheet of your literature with columns for reference details such as authors, title and year, as well as additional columns for your notes, e.g. a column for the main theme/s of each article, another column for how it fits into the literature, and a column for the part of your research question it answers.  

Tabulating your literature like this means you can sort the table by the column headings. For example, you could sort it to group your references by key themes or by the section of your research question they are related to, which makes it easier to start your analysis and synthesis of your findings.

If you use a spreadsheet, you will be able to filter the columns so that you are able to focus on a subset of your readings, e.g. you could filter by the part of the question it answers so that you can only see the notes for that section while you are writing it up. 

Note: There is a large volume of work in this stage of your review so breaking it up into easier stages is a good idea.