A literature review must do these things:
a) be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question
you are developing
b) synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known
c) identify areas of controversy in the literature
d) formulate questions that need further research
Image from the master of mind maps, Tony Buzan.
Here are some of the questions your literature review should answer:
1. What do we already know in the immediate area concerned?
2. What are the characteristics of the key concepts or the main factors or
variables?
3. What are the relationships between these key concepts, factors or variables?
4. What are the existing theories?
5. Where are the inconsistencies or other shortcomings in our knowledge and
understanding?
6. What views need to be (further) tested?
7. What evidence is lacking, inconclusive, contradictory or too limited?
8. Why study (further) the research problem?
9. What contribution can the present study be expected to make?
10. What research designs or methods seem unsatisfactory?
How to Write a Literature Review, Language Center, Asian Institute of Technology
Image: “First off, by way of establishing some credibility, I’d like to note that…” New Yorker Cartoon by Donald Reilly
Producing this chapter for your thesis enables you to gain and demonstrate skills in two areas:
1. information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of useful articles and books
2. critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies.
The Literature Review emphasizes the credibility of the writer in his or her field. Literature reviews also provide a solid background for a research paper’s investigation.
Often it is comes right after the introduction. It position early in the thesis means that it is an opportunity to establish your credibility early on with the reader and examiner. They are likely to be fresher and less tired than when they first read your later chapters. Get the literature right and you set a positive tone for the rest of the thesis. You want the reader to move on to later chapters feeling confidence in you as a scholar.
Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. In computer science, for instance, an area such as best practice in computer vision is constantly changing according to the latest studies.
In this example, information even two years old could be obsolete. The review should therefore be updated regularly, but it’s still essential to get a draft written early and keep at it, polish your writing technique and use it as a ‘think piece’. But without the personal opinion. A think piece is an article in a newspaper, magazine, or journal presenting personal opinions, analysis, or discussion, rather than bare facts.
Introduction: Gives a quick idea of the topic of the literature review, such as the central theme or organizational pattern.
Body: Contains your discussion of sources and is organized either
chronologically, thematically, or methodologically.
Conclusions/Recommendations: Discuss what you have drawn from
reviewing literature so far. Where might the discussion proceed?
Chronologic
Thematic
Methodological
The ‘style’ and ‘tone’ of the literature review
1. What is the specific thesis, problem, or research question that my literature review helps to define?
2. What type of literature review am I conducting? Am I looking at issues of theory? methodology? policy? quantitative research (e.g. on the effectiveness of a new procedure)? qualitative research (e.g., studies)?
3. What is the scope of my literature review? What types of publications am I using (e.g., journals, books, government documents, popular media)? What discipline am I working in (e.g., nursing psychology, sociology, medicine)?
4. How good was my information seeking? Has my search been wide enough to ensure I’ve found all the relevant material? Has it been narrow enough to exclude irrelevant material? Is the number of sources I’ve used appropriate for the length of my paper?
5. Have I critically analysed the literature I use? Do I follow through a set of concepts and questions, comparing items to each other in the ways they deal with them? Instead of just listing and summarizing items, do I assess them, discussing strengths and weaknesses?
6. Have I cited and discussed studies contrary to my perspective?
7. Will the reader find my literature review relevant, appropriate, and useful?
Ask yourself questions like these about each book or article you include:
1. Has the author formulated a problem/issue?
2. Is it clearly defined? Is its significance (scope, severity, relevance) clearly established?
3. Could the problem have been approached more effectively from another perspective?
4. What is the author’s research orientation (e.g., interpretive, critical science, combination)?
5. What is the author’s theoretical framework (e.g., psychological, developmental, feminist)?
6. What is the relationship between the theoretical and research perspectives?
7. Has the author evaluated the literature relevant to the problem/issue? Does the author include literature taking positions she or he does not agree with?
Dena Taylor, Director, Health Sciences Writing Centre, University of Toronto.
This might also be the full length Literature Review for a longer peer-reviewed paper or for a chapter you write for a book.
On the optimal container size in automated warehouses Y. Roll, M.J. Rosenblatt and D. Kadosh, Proceedings of the Ninth ICPR Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) are being introduced into the industry and warehousing at an increasing rate. Forecasts indicate that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future (see [1]). Research in the area of AS/RS has followed several avenues. Early work by Hausman, Schwarz and Graves [6,7] was concerned with storage assignment and interleaving policies, based on turnover rates of the various items. Elsayed [3] and Elsayed and Stern [4] compared algorithms for handling orders in AR/RS. Additional work by Karasawa et al. [9], Azadivar [2] and Parry et al. [11] deals with the design of an AS/RS and the determination of its throughput by simulation and optimization techniques.
Several researchers addressed the problem of the optimal handling unit (pallet or container) size, to be used in material handling and warehousing systems. Steudell [13], Tanchoco and Agee[14], Tanchoco et al. [15] and Grasso and Tanchoco [5] studied various aspects of this subject. The last two references incorporate the size of the pallet, or unit load, in evaluation of the optimal lot sizes for multi-inventory systems with limited storage space. In a report on a specific case, Normandin [10] has demonstrated that using the ‘best-size’ container can result in considerable savings. A simulation model combining container size and warehouse capacity considerations, in an AS/RS environment, was developed by Kadosh [8]. The general results, reflecting the stochastic nature of the flow of goods, are similar to those reported by Rosenblatt and Roll [12]. Nevertheless, container size was found to affect strongly overall warehousing costs.
In this paper, we present an analytical framework for approximating the optimal size of a warehouse container. The approximation is based on series of generalizations and specific assumptions. However, these are valid for a wide range of real life situations. The underlying assumptions of the model are presented in the following section.
Notice how the writers have:
Adapted from: McMillan, Writing Papers in Biological Sciences.
Make critical arguments that account for why a well known key text or theory is not pertinent to your research. Do not just omit a key area and hope your overall argument makes it obvious why you are not discussing X or Y seminal idea or text. By making a critical argument and referring to the text you let the reader know, by ‘showing’ not ‘telling’, that you understand that text, that you know it exists. If done well, this means the reader does not need to question further any apparent ‘omission’ of key thinkers later in the thesis.
This is part of good research writing practice for your PhD, what I often refer to as “relaxing the reader, the examiner”. In this case, by concisely explaining why an apparently key text is not central to your Literature Review, you stop the examiner making a note and wondering whether you have worrying gap in your knowledge. Do this in one or two sentences. These should acknowledge and summarise the role of that text or theory, very briefly. Other knowledge domains may be omitted because you “can’t cover everything” and they are not central enough to the domains you are covering. In such cases, again, reassure the reader that you know your stuff, that you DO know about that domain. Explain why it is not coming into your thesis, which again adds to your credibility as a scholar. End that couple of sentences with a statement such as, “it is therefore beyond the scope of this research to discuss X further.” This applies to all disciplines and the example below, while conversational in tone. illustrates why eliminating areas is good for you as a researcher.
“At CERN, there was a video where a particle physicist was asked “What if you don’t find the Higgs Boson? What if you’re wrong about this?” and he thought that would be brilliant, because then they’d know a whole area they could block out and go OK, not this, but how about this?”
James Bridle, http://booktwo.org/notebook/sxaesthetic/
As an examiner, if I have to read through the thesis and ‘guess’ why X or Y key thinker has been omitted I question the depth and breadth of the work being presented. If I am told clearly early on, with a convincing argument, I have one less question for you at the Oral Examination and this contributes to me believing that you know your stuff.
We discuss the role and position of the researcher, the way we, as researchers, influence the research process and our findings. We will consider ourselves as “Reflexive Practitioners”. This is a road view of ‘practitioner’ that includes, but is not limited, to creative practitioners, workshop leaders and teachers, software engineers and video ethnographers. The reflexive practitioner becomes usefully ‘self-conscious’, makes themselves aware of the baggage they bring to the research. This is not to suggest that we can simply rise above the baggage and become ‘objective’ but we can become aware our preconceptions, how our backgrounds influence us and account for some of that influence when we plan, conduct and evaluate our research.
We also consider how to be reflexive ‘in the moment’ of research, how to develop theories of our practice under real-time conditions, as we conduct research, in real-time. This includes being mindful of surprise, puzzlement, or confusion during real-time research – these often signal of valuable to our research theories but are easily dismissed as ‘noise’ in our data or process.
We analyse cyclic models of reflexive research and compared those models to Action Research and Participatory Action Research cycles and spirals. We note the various ways that we can capture data of our use of these methods while we are doing the practice, from text and image-based research journals in sketchbooks and blogs, to programmers’ comments, to video and audio recordings of workshops, rehearsals and performances.
