Scientific Research

Methodology
Unit 2: Reviewing The Literature
Al Ain University
College of Business

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 Outline

1 Literature Review in Research Process

2 How to Review the Literature

3 How to Write a Literature Review

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 Literature Review in Research Process

What is literature review

Definition (Literature Review)

Reviewing literature is a method for identifying, summarizing, eval-
uating, and interpreting the existing recorded works produced by re-
searchers, scholars, practitioners, etc.

Types of Review:
Self-study: to show familiarity and establish credibility.
Context: to link your study with a specific research context.
Historical: to outline the development of an issue over time.
Theoretical: to compare how different theories address an issue.
Integrative: to summarize what is known at point in time.
Methodological: to point out how methodology varies by a
study.
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 Literature Review in Research Process

Literature Review in Research Process

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 Literature Review in Research Process

Function of Literature Review

The literature review is an integral part of entire research process
and contributes to almost every operational step:
1. Before the first step: it helps in thinking about a research ques-
tion that you may want to find answers to through your
research journey.
2. Initial stages: it helps in establishing the theoretical roots of the
study, clarify the ideas and develop the methodology.
3. Later on: it helps to integrate the findings with the existing
body of knowledge.
In summary, a literature review has the following functions:
 Provides theoretical or philosophical background of your study.
 Helps you to link between what you are proposing to examine
and what has already been studied.
 Allows you to show how your findings contributed to the the
existing knowledge.
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 Literature Review in Research Process

Importance of Literature Review

Bring clarity and focus to research problem:
 Reviewing literature helps to conceptualize the research
problem clearly and precisely and understand the relationship
between the research problem and the body of knowledge in the
area.
Improve the research methodology:
 It helps to select, with confidence, a methodology that is
capable of providing valid answers to the research questions.
Broaden knowledge base in the research area:
 It ensures thorough reading around the subject area and helps
the researcher to identify what other researchers have found in
regard to the same or similar questions and what gaps exist in
the relevant body of knowledge.
Contextualize the findings:
 It helps in examining how the research findings fit into the
existing body of knowledge (comparison with others,
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 How to Review the Literature

Literature Sources
Literature sources:
Primary literature sources
The original reports of the original work or experience.
Examples: reports, theses, emails, conference proceedings.
Secondary literature sources
Subsequent publication of primary literature.
Examples: Journals (periodicals, serials and magazines)
Tertiary literature sources
Also called search tools, are developed to support to locate pri-
mary and secondary literature.
Examples: Indexes, abstracts, catalogues, encyclopedias, dictio-
naries, bibliographies, search engines (Google Scholar).
Most libraries have the following electronic resources:
) Electronic journals
) Full-text databases (Wiley, Emerald, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis,
Ebrary)
) Bibliographic/Abstract databases (MathSciNet, Scopus, ISI)
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 How to Review the Literature

Procedure for reviewing the literature

Start with broad area of interest if research problem is not known and
narrow down. After that the literature review should be focused around
the selected research problem.
 What is already known in the area?
 What is not known or what are the gaps in the existing body of
knowledge?
 What questions have remained unanswered?
 Are there any areas of professional conflict?
 What theories have been put forward relevant to the area of re-
search?
 What suggestions have been made for further research?
 What research strategies have been employed by others
undertak- ing similar research?
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 How to Review the Literature

Procedure for reviewing the literature

Search for existing literature:

1. The first step involves identifying the various published and
un- published materials (Books, Journals, Conference papers,
The Internet, Unpublished papers, Theses, Newspapers, etc.)
that are available on the topics of interest.
2. Then, a reading list (bibliography) is compiled where the re-
searcher should do the following:
A look at the titles of the articles or books will indicate which of
these may be important.
The abstract of such articles that seem to be relevant will give an
idea of the article that need to be looked into in depth.
The full text of which can then be printed out.
3 . While reading these articles, take notes about the problem
that was researched, the research design, and the findings of the
study. These notes will facilitate the writing up of the literature
review.
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 How to Review the Literature

Procedure for reviewing the literature

Review the selected literature

The existing literature must be read and examined critically with
respect to the following:
 Identifying the relevance of the knowledge to a theoretical
framework.
• Evaluating the adopted research methodology (study design,
sample size and its characteristics, measurement procedures,
etc.).
• Examining to what extent the findings can be generalised to
other situations.
• Identifying significant differences of opinion among researchers
and giving an opinion about their validity in addition to putting
forward a position with reasons.
• Ascertaining the gaps that exist in the body of knowledge.

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 How to Review the Literature

Procedure for reviewing the literature

Develop a theoretical framework
• Finding the roots of the research problem in a number of
theories.
• Sorting the information obtained from under the main themes
and theories (agreement, disagreement, gaps).
• The theoretical framework consists of the theories or issues in
which your study is embedded and it represents a conventionally
accepted model that shows inter-relationships between variables,
and is based on previous multiple studies that confirm its validity.
Develop a conceptual framework
• The conceptual framework describes the aspects selected from
the theoretical framework to become the basis of the specific
enquiry.
• This is a model usually developed by a researcher, on the inter-
relationships believed to exist between concepts based on various
concepts in literature.
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 How to Review the Literature

Example: Delta Airlines

With airline deregulation, there were price wars among the various
airlines that cut costs in different ways. According to reports, Delta
Airlines faced charges of air-safety violations when there were several
near collisions in midair, and one accident that resulted in 137 deaths
in 1987. Four important factors that seem to have influenced these
are poor communication among the cockpit crew members
themselves, poor coordination between ground staff and cockpit crew,
minimal training given to the cockpit crew, and management
philosophy that encouraged a decentralized structure. It would be
nice to know if these factors did indeed contribute to the safety
violations, and if so, to what extent.

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 How to Review the Literature

Example: Theoretical Framework

The dependent variable is safety violation, which is the variable
of primary interest.
The variance in the safety violation is attempted to be explained
by the four independent variables of
communication among crew members,
communication between ground control and the cockpit crew,
training received by the cockpit crew, and
decentralization.

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 How to Review the Literature

Example: Theoretical Framework

The less the communication among the crew members
themselves, the greater is the probability of air-safety violations
since very little information is shared among them.
When ground crew fail to give the right information at the right
time, misfortunes are bound to occur with aborted flights and
collisions.
Coordination between ground and cockpit crew is at the very
heart of air safety. Thus, the less the coordination between
ground control and cockpit crew, the greater the possibility of
air-safety violations taking place.
When cockpit crew members are not adequately trained, they
may not have the requisite knowledge of safety standards or may
suffer from an inability to handle emergency situations and avoid
collisions. Thus, poor training also adds to the probability of
increased safety violations.
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 How to Write a Literature Review

How to Write a Literature Review

Write about the literature reviewed to provide a theoretical
background and contextualise findings to existing body of literature:
Describe various theories.
Specify gaps in the existing knowledge area.
Write about recent advances in the area of study.
State current trends.
Refine own methodology.
Quote findings from existing studies.
Thematic, based on the main theme of inquiry.
Following a logical order using subheadings if necessary.
Arguments referenced with supporting evidence from the existing
literature.
Use academic referencing style.
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 How to Write a Literature Review

How to Write a Literature Review

Be selective:
 Select only the most important points in each source to
highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to
mention should relate directly to the review’s focus, whether it
is historical, methodological, or chronological.
Example: Punch (1998) provides a guide to social research that
equally addresses quantitative and qualitative approaches. He
conceptualizes key differences between the two approaches in sev-
eral ways.
Be evident:
 A literature review is just like any other academic research
paper. Your interpretation of available sources must be
supported with evidence to show that what you are saying is
valid.
Example: In her study, Hamilton (2001) found that 16% of stu-
dents use library for revision and assignments, while 38% visit
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 How to Write a Literature Review

How to Write a Literature Review

Summarize and synthesize:

) You should be able to summarize and synthesize important
points within each paragraph as well as throughout the review.
) Example:The writers in the previous examples summarized im-
portant points of the studies, but then synthesized it by rephras-
ing the study’s significance and relating it to their won work.
Keep your own voice:
) While the literature review presents others’ ideas, your voice
should remain front and center.
) Example: Maxell (1996) provides a good overview of the
proposal development process for qualitative research that, in
many ways, is applicable to quantitative and mixed methods
research as well.

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 How to Write a Literature Review

Example: Organizational Effectiveness

Organization theorists have defined organizational effectiveness (OE) in various
ways. OE has been described in terms of objectives (Georgopolous & Tannenbaum,
1957), goals (Etzioni, 1960), efficiency (Katz & Kahn, 1966), resources ac-
quisition (Yuchtman & Seashore, 1967), employee satisfaction (Cummings, 1977),
interdependence (Pfeffer, 1977), and organizational vitality (Colt, 1995). As Coul-
ter (2002) remarked,there is little consensus on how to conceptualize, measure, or
explain OE. This should, however, not come as a surprise to us since OE models are
essentially value-based classification of the construct (the values being those of the
researchers) and the potential number of models that can be generated by
researchers is virtually limitless. Researchers are now moving away from a single
model and are taking contingency approaches to conceptualizing OE (Cameron,
1996; Wernerfelt, 1998; Yetley, 2001). However, they are still limiting themselves to
examining the impact of the dominant constituencies served and the organization’s
life cycle on OE instead of taking a broader, more dynamic approach (Dahl, 2001,
p. 25).
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 How to Write a Literature Review

Example: Organizational Effectiveness

From the portion of the above extract, several insights can be gained.
The literature review:
introduces the subject of study (organizational effectiveness),
highlights the problem (that we do not have a good conceptual
framework for understanding what OE is), and summarizes the
work done so far on the topic in a manner that convinces the
reader that the researcher has indeed surveyed the work done in
the area of OE and wants to contribute to the understanding of
the concept, taking off on the earlier contingency approaches in
a more creative way (by reporting the citations in the body of the
research by mentioning the family names and the year of
publication only).

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 How to Write a Literature Review

Activities

Look up the keyword phrase “test anxiety” in Google Scholar.

(a) What are the first three titles that appear?
(b) Find three references; a journal article, a conference proceeding
and a book.
Go to the AAU Library, Google or Google Scholar and find five
journals in your field of study. After you have located the
journals, examine them to determine:
(c) What type of articles are published (reviews of literature,
empirical studies, etc.).
(d) Whether the journal is published by a professional organization
(such as IEEE or American Pharmacists Association) or by a pri-
vate group (such as Taylor & Francis).
(e) How often the journal is published and other information about
its editorial policies (e.g., guidelines, features).

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