Literature Review

A literature review shows previous publications on a particular topic by qualified researchers and scholars. Your literature review demonstrates how broad your research is, what knowledge and ideas you have established on a topic and how strong and weak they are. It should be related to you research question. You need to be able to scan the literature effectively and identify useful books, articles, journals, etc. You should also be able to identify fair and valid studies.

When you write your literature review, follow these points:

• You need to recognize areas of debate in the literature.
• You need to devise questions that require further research.
• When you conduct your literature review, your need to determine what your approach should be. For example, qualitative research, quantitative research, etc.
• Determine what sort of publications you should be using, for example, books, journals, articles, etc.
• You should scrutinize your research abilities. Whether your research was broad enough to gather pertinent matter for your literature review? Have you used enough sources to write your paper? Did you manage to narrow down your topic and exclude irrelevant matter?
• You need to examine the literature that you collect and discuss its strengths and weaknesses.
• Read your literature review and determine whether your readers will find it informative and useful.
  

It is imperative that you manage to find relevant sources for your literature review. You will have to carry out an in-depth research in order to collect relevant matter. It is advisable to go through both online and offline resources in order to write an effective literature review.