A.

Analyse your critical thinking skills and specify the skills which make you an ideal
research scholar. Aslo, identify the skills you need to improve on.
B. Elaborate on the role of critical thinking skills in creating a database for your
literature review. What essential skills of thinking do you apply in finding appropriate
literature?
C. Briefly explain your tentative research design (Context, Participant, Research
Methodology, Data Analysis). Do you think you need critical thinking skills to
develop your research design? If yes, define how with examples.

Critical Thinking skills

1. Identification:
The first step in critical thinking is identifying the problem and the factors that may
influence it. Once you have a clear picture of the situation and the factors that may be
influenced, you can dive deeper into an issue and its potential solutions.
2. Research:
When comparing arguments about an issue, independent research ability is vital.
Opinions are meant to be persuasive; telling the facts and figures presented in their favour
might be lacking in context or come from questionable sources. The best way to combat this
is independent verification; find the source of information and evaluate.
3. Identifying biases:
This skill can be exceedingly difficult, as even the smartest can fail to recognize
biases. Strong critical thinkers do their best to evaluate information objectively. Think of
yourself as a judge in that you want to assess the claims of both sides of an argument, but
you’ll also need to keep in mind the biases each side may possess.
It is equally important and more difficult to learn how to set aside your own biases
that may cloud your judgement. Have the courage to debate and argue with your thoughts and
assumptions. This is essential for learning to see things from different viewpoints.
4. Inference:
The ability to infer and draw conclusions based on the information presented to you is
another essential skill for mastering critical thinking. The report doesn’t always have a
summary that defines what it means. You’ll often need to assess the knowledge and draw
conclusions based on raw data.
The ability to infer allows you to extrapolate and discover potential outcomes when
assessing a scenario. It is also important to note that not all inferences will be correct.
5. Determining relevance:
One of the most challenging parts of thinking critically during a difficult scenario is
figuring out what information is the most important for your consideration. In many
scenarios, you’ll be presented with information that may seem important, but it may pan out
to be only a minor data point to consider.
Understanding what data is useful even when you know what you’re looking for is
difficult. To counter this, one technique is to prioritise a tangible list of data points. You can
use this method to sort the information into a prioritised list, with the most critical items at
the top and the less important ones at the bottom. From there, you may hone in on the less
black-and-white items in the list’s meat for a more thorough analysis.
By practising critical thinking, we are allowing ourselves to solve problems and come
up with new and creative ideas. Critical thinking will enable us to analyze these ideas and
adjust them accordingly.

identify the skills you need to improve on.

Critical thinking
This skill is important in research because it allows individuals to better gather and
evaluate data and establish significance.

Creativity, judgment, communication, organization, and persistence are all

equally important skills to make the leap from gaining knowledge from others'
discoveries to making discoveries on your own.

Overview of the Literature Review Process and Steps

1. formulating the research question(s) and objective(s),
2. searching the extant literature,
3. screening for inclusion,
4. assessing the quality of primary studies,
5. extracting data, and
6. analyzing data.
Although these steps are presented here in sequential order, one must keep in mind that
the review process can be iterative and that many activities can be initiated during the
planning stage and later refined during subsequent phases 

As a first step, members of the review team must appropriately justify the need for the
review itself, identify the review’s main objective(s), and define the concepts or variables
at the heart of their synthesis. Importantly, they also need to articulate the research
question(s) they propose to investigate. In this regard, we concur with  that clearly
articulated research questions are key ingredients that guide the entire review
methodology; they underscore the type of information that is needed, inform the search
for and selection of relevant literature, and guide or orient the subsequent analysis.
 Searching the extant literature: The next step consists of searching the literature and
making decisions about the suitability of material to be considered in the review. There
exist three main coverage strategies. First, exhaustive coverage means an effort is made to
be as comprehensive as possible in order to ensure that all relevant studies, published and
unpublished, are included in the review and, thus, conclusions are based on this all-
inclusive knowledge base. The second type of coverage consists of presenting materials
that are representative of most other works in a given field or area. Often authors who
adopt this strategy will search for relevant articles in a small number of top-tier journals
in a field. In the third strategy, the review team concentrates on prior works that have
been central or pivotal to a particular topic. This may include empirical studies or
conceptual papers that initiated a line of investigation, changed how problems or
questions were framed, introduced new methods or concepts, or engendered important
debate.
Screening for inclusion: The following step consists of evaluating the applicability of the
material identified in the preceding step. Once a group of potential studies has been
identified, members of the review team must screen them to determine their relevance. A set
of predetermined rules provides a basis for including or excluding certain studies. This
exercise requires a significant investment on the part of researchers, who must ensure
enhanced objectivity and avoid biases or mistakes. As discussed later in this chapter, for
certain types of reviews there must be at least two independent reviewers involved in the
screening process and a procedure to resolve disagreements must also be in place.
Assessing the quality of primary studies: In addition to screening material for inclusion,
members of the review team may need to assess the scientific quality of the selected studies,
that is, appraise the rigour of the research design and methods. Such formal assessment,
which is usually conducted independently by at least two coders, helps members of the
review team refine which studies to include in the final sample, determine whether or not the
differences in quality may affect their conclusions, or guide how they analyze the data and
interpret the findings. Ascribing quality scores to each primary study or considering through
domain-based evaluations which study components have or have not been designed and
executed appropriately makes it possible to reflect on the extent to which the selected study
addresses possible biases and maximizes validity.
Extracting data: The following step involves gathering or extracting applicable information
from each primary study included in the sample and deciding what is relevant to the problem
of interest. Indeed, the type of data that should be recorded mainly depends on the initial
research questions. However, important information may also be gathered about how, when,
where and by whom the primary study was conducted, the research design and methods, or
qualitative/quantitative results.
Analyzing and synthesizing data: As a final step, members of the review team must collate,
summarize, aggregate, organize, and compare the evidence extracted from the included
studies. The extracted data must be presented in a meaningful way that suggests a new
contribution to the extant literature. warn researchers that literature reviews should be much
more than lists of papers and should provide a coherent lens to make sense of extant
knowledge on a given topic. There exist several methods and techniques for synthesizing
quantitative (e.g., frequency analysis, meta-analysis) and qualitative (e.g., grounded theory,
narrative analysis, meta-ethnography) evidence
Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in

contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending
conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review.
On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other
people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other
hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant
literature review. The topic must at least be:

i. interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series

of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a
critical summary),
ii. an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be
interested in the review and there will be enough material to
write it), and
iii. a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include
thousands of publications, which would make the review
unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of
key research questions to be answered , but also from serendipitous
moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to
choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many
cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will
automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but
that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g.,
computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the
literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice
here:
 i. keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can
be replicated,
ii. keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately
(so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
iii. use a paper management system,
iv. define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of
irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the
review to help define its scope), and
v. do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to
review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a
literature review, if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle,
at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews
of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry
on with your own literature review,

Figure 1
A conceptual diagram of the need for different types of literature reviews
depending on the amount of published research papers and literature reviews.
The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just
a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate
change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than
research studies.

i. discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and

conclusions of past reviews,
ii. trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately
in the previous reviews, and
iii. incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated
since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the
usual rules apply:

i. be thorough,
ii. use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google
Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of
Science), and
iii. look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the
review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote
what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading
each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down
interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the
review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have
read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of
the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and
rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument , but you will
have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be
careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are
provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then
to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is
important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage,
so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the
very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.
Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write
After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a
rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is
probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full
review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather
short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the
number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a
minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers,
although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some
relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the
advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a
particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of
the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to
spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The

same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative
reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology,
findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative
reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the
reviewed material. A similar distinction exists between narrative and
systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative,
systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the
published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to
reduce bias. When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a
quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between
different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis,
depending not just on the nature of the material found and the
preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to
write the review and the number of coauthors.

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice

to keep it focused. Including material just for the sake of it can easily
lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need
to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary
reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields. If you are
writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are
used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include
material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of
cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this
case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at
the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this

requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review
relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing
the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does

not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies
methodological problems, and points out research gaps. After having
read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

i. the major achievements in the reviewed field,

ii. the main areas of debate, and
iii. the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A

solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some
people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others
are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some
have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come
from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should
definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical
thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the
choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features:

it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused,
and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual
subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results,
and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general
introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the
main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the
case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards
including information about how the literature was searched.

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that
the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally
helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-
mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way
to order and link the various sections of a review. This is the case not
just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included
in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures
relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text
too.

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way

as research papers, and rightly so. As a rule, incorporating feedback
from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the
review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies,
inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the
writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however
advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a
last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may
enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content
rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from

a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft.
This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the
paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the
absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a
literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in
the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue.
Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies

relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of
interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work ?
Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have
published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own
findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other
direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own
achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if
any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public

relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a
reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and
methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the
readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing
one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors,
this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a
coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific

papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of
the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of
the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have
been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a
major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of
papers in press studies. This implies that literature reviewers would
do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that
it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some
reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain
point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy
process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision
stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that
have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little
perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on
further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic will appear from all
quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon
be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science. I
wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Essential Skills:

There are elements that experts agree are essential for critical thinking, such as being able to
think independently, clearly and rationally. It involves the ability to reflect on an idea or
problem, apply reason, and make logical connections between ideas.

Life skills website Skills You Need point out that critical thinking “is about being an active
learner rather than a passive recipient of information.”

“Critical thinkers rigorously question ideas and assumptions rather than accepting them at
face value,” they write. “They will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments
and findings represent the entire picture and are open to finding that they do not.”

For example, a high schooler may see a news item about climate change. They can apply
critical thinking skills to reflect on the different arguments, learn more about the topic and
come to a reasoned conclusion.

Skills You Need add that critical thinking has a goal – to arrive at the best possible solution in
given circumstances. It is a “way of thinking about particular things at a particular time; it is
not the accumulation of facts and knowledge or something that you can learn once and then
use in that form forever, such as the nine times table.”

As an example, your student might see a social media post spreading rumours about someone
they know. They can use critical thinking skills to evaluate the accuracy (or otherwise) of this
specific information, at this time.

Skills You Need note that someone with critical thinking skills can:

 understand links between ideas

 determine the importance and relevance of arguments and ideas
 recognise, build and appraise arguments
 identify inconsistencies and errors in reasoning
 approach problems consistently and systematically
 reflect on the justification of their own assumptions, beliefs and values.

Perhaps more important is the question of why critical thinking skills are so vital. There are
various reasons:
 Studies indicate that critical thinking skills are among the most highly valued
attributes that employers seek in job candidates. They want staff who can solve
problems, make decisions and take appropriate action. In an Australian context, a
2015 report indicated that demand for critical thinking skills in new graduates rose
158 percent over three years.
 Research also indicates that critical thinkers experience fewer negative life events,
such as racking up credit card debt or getting arrested for drink driving.
 In our increasingly secular society, young people are exposed to a plethora of ideas
that counter the truths of the Bible. They need critical thinking skills to discern
falsehood and make reasoned arguments for their faith.
 God instructs us to be intentional about our thoughts, by renewing our minds for
example (Rom 12:2), and to cultivate wisdom.