Literature Review
Outline
• Literature Review
• Importance and Roles of Literature Review
• Steps for writing Literature Review
Searching for Literature
• What are you trying to find out?
– Try to specify exactly what you need to know
• What type of information do you want to find?
– An answer to a specific question?
– An overview of a subject area?
– A specific document?
• Why do you need this information?
– Literature survey: Information needs to be
comprehensive
Literature Review
It is a survey of scholarly sources or projects on a
specific topic.
It provides an overview of current knowledge,
allowing you to identify relevant theories,
methods, and gaps in the existing research or
project that you can later apply to your paper,
thesis, or dissertation topic.
It is a summary of the published work in a field of
study.
It can be a section of a larger paper or article, or
can be the focus of an entire paper.
Importance and Roles of
Literature Review
The purpose of a literature review is:
To gain an understanding of the existing research or
Project relevant to a particular topic or area of
study
To present that knowledge in the form of a
written report.
Cont.
It helps to acquire methodologies used by other
researchers to find and solve research questions
similar to the ones a researcher is investigating.
It gives an idea whether the methods other
researchers used worked for them and the
problems they faced.
Cont.
It provides the reader with a comprehensive
background for understanding current
knowledge and highlighting the significance of
new research.
It can inspire research ideas by identifying gaps or
inconsistencies in a body of knowledge
Cont.
Generally, the goal of review of literature is:
To provide a justification of the proposed research
and this can be achieved by:
Identifying and summarizing relevant theories and
researches
Identifying gaps in literature
Critique the literature
Shows the way to select appropriate design and
methodology for the new research.
Steps for Writing Literature
Review
There are five key steps to writing a literature
review:
1. Search for relevant literatures
2. Get related Sources and Evaluate them
3. Identify themes, debates and gaps
4. Outline the structure
5. Write your literature review
1. Search for relevant literatures
Search for literature related to your research
problem and question.
Make a list of keywords
Start by creating a list of keywords related to
your research question.
Include each of the key concepts you’re
interested in, list any synonyms and related
terms.
You can add to this list as you discover new
keywords in the process of your literature
search.
Cont.
Example
What is the impact of social media in mental health?
– Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
Snapchat, TikTok, Body image, self perception,
self-esteem, mental health
Use your keywords to begin searching for sources.
Where to Search?
• Sources for literature on the internet:
– Freely available collections (personal/institutional)
• Publishers’ websites/databases
• Literature databases
Where to Search: Interrelationship of
Sources
• Submitted papers to conference/journal for peer
review
• If accepted, the paper is revised by the authors and
submitted to conference/journal editor
• The paper is processed to bring it into the
publisher’s format (typesetting/layout)
Where to Search: Interrelationship of
Sources
• The paper is then
– included in the publisher’s database,
– made available on-line via the publisher’s website, and
– possibly published in printed form
• Literature databases
– collect the bibliographic information from several
publishers
– add additional information (references with links,
citation index)
– link back to publisher for full-text of papers
Databases and Search Engines:
Publishers
• It has subscriptions to many publishers’ databases:
– ACM Digital Library
• Full-text of all ACM journals and conference proceedings
• http://portal.acm.org.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/dl.cfm
– IEEE Xplore
• Full-text of IEEE journals, conference proceedings, and books
• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/
– ScienceDirect
• Full-text of Elsevier journals
• http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk
…Databases and Search Engines:
Publishers
– SpringerLink
• Full-text of Springer journals, conference proceedings, and
books
• http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/
– Wiley InterScience
• Full-text of Wiley journals and books
• http://www.interscience.wiley.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/
• Access to full-text requires authentication.
Databases and Search Engines:
Literature Databases
• University Libraries have subscriptions to many
literature databases:
– Scopus
• Covers 14,000 journals and proceedings series; incl. ACM,
Elsevier, IEEE, Springer
• http://www.scopus.com/
– Web of Knowledge
• Covers 22,000 journals and 192,000 proceedings; incl. ACM,
Elsevier, IEEE, Springer
• http://isiknowledge.com/
…Databases and Search Engines:
Literature Databases
– DISCOVER (UoL)
• Meta search engine for ACM Digital Library, IEEE Explore,
etc but also Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar
• www.liv.ac.uk/library/e-library/eds.html
Databases and Search Engines: Web
Search Engines
• Freely available (scholarly) web search engines
include:
– Citeseer
• Digital library of 750k freely available papers in computer and
information science
• http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
– Google
• General internet search engine
• http://www.google.co.uk
– Google Scholar
• Searches scholarly literature on the web.
• http://scholar.google.com
…Databases and Search Engines:
Web Search Engines
– Scirus
• Searches journals (ScienceDirect) and web resources
• http://www.scirus.com/
– Windows Live Search Academic
• Academic search engine - search academic journals and
content for article titles, author names, article abstracts, and
conference proceedings.
• http://academic.live.com/
Databases and Search Engines:
Comparison
• There is an important difference to remember:
– Library catalogue: Allows to search for a journal, but
not for journal articles
– Publishers’ and literature databases: Allow to search for
journal articles, but not in the full-text journal articles
– Web search engines: Allow to search in the full-text of
journal articles, but have difficulties with their structure
Queries
• Search terms might be simple keywords, phrases,
or consist of field identifiers, modifiers, operators,
and keywords
– Examples: induction
• “mathematical induction”
• induct
• author = Ambuhl
• author like Ambuhl
• author soundex(Maier)
(see advanced search of GOOGLE)
Queries (cont’d)
• Queries are typically constructed from search
terms using Boolean operators
– Examples: induction AND mathematical
• induction OR deduction
• induction AND NOT recruitment
– AND retrieves records where ALL of the search terms
are present, induction AND mathematical
– OR retrieves records containing either one term OR
another induction OR deduction
Queries (cont’d)
– NOT retrieves records NOT containing a particular
term NOT recruitment
• The set of all correct queries for a particular
search engine is its query language
• Typically, different search engines use different
query languages
Keywords
• Only the right keywords will correctly identify
useful information
• Mode of search is very important:
– narrow: you are looking for exactly one record
– use a search term which is as specific as possible
“cell microprocessor” instead of cell
– use additional criteria
• publication date year = 2006
• type = journal
• language = english
• publisher= Springer
Keywords (cont’d)
• wide: you are looking for all records relating to a
subject
– try alternative words/phrases
• microprocessor / computer processor / computer chip
– try alternative spellings
• judgement / judgment
– try wildcards
• gene for genes, genetics, genetically
Cont.
• You can also use Boolean operators to help
narrow down your search.
• Make sure to read the abstract to find out
whether an article is relevant to your question.
• When you find a useful book or article, you can
check the bibliography to find other relevant
sources.
2. Evaluate and select sources
You likely won’t be able to read absolutely
everything that has been written on your topic.
So, it will be necessary to evaluate which
sources are most relevant to your research
question.
2. Evaluate and select sources
For each publication, ask yourself:
• What question or problem is the author
addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they
defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
2. Evaluate and select sources
• How does the publication relate to other literature
in the field?
• Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established
knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the
research?
2. Evaluate and select sources
Take notes and cite your sources
• As you read, you should also begin the writing
process.
• Take notes that you can later incorporate into the
text of your literature review.
• It is important to keep track of your sources with
citations to avoid plagiarism.
• write a paragraph of summary and analysis for
each source which helps you remember what you
read and saves time later in the process.
3. Identify Gaps
Gaps
What is missing from the literature?
Are there weaknesses that need to be
addressed?
This step will help:
It work out the structure of your literature review
It shows how your own research will contribute
to existing knowledge.
4. Outline your literature review’s
structure
There are various approaches to organizing the
body of a literature review.
Depending on the length of your literature review,
you can combine several of these strategies (for
example, your overall structure might be thematic,
but each theme is discussed chronologically).
5. Write your Literature Review
Like any other academic text, your literature
review should have an introduction, a main body,
and a conclusion.
What you include in each depends on the objective
of your literature review.
Cont.
1. Introduction
It should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the
literature review.
You can emphasize the timeliness of the topic (“many
recent studies have focused on the problem of x”)
Highlight a gap in the literature (“while there has been
much research on x, few researchers have taken y into
consideration”).
Cont.
2. Body
Depending on the length of the literature review, the body
can be divided into subsections.
i. Summarize and synthesize
give an overview of the main points of each source
and combine them into a coherent whole
ii. Analyze and interpret
don’t just paraphrase other researchers—add your
own interpretations
iii. Critically evaluate
mention the strengths and weaknesses of your
sources
Cont.
iv. Write in well-structured paragraphs
Use transition words and topic sentences to draw
connections, comparisons and contrasts
3. Conclusion
Summarize the key findings you have taken from
the literature and emphasize their significance.
Be sure to show how your research addresses gaps
and contributes new knowledge
