HOW TO GET CURRENT AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE REVIEW

• 05 Sep, 2020
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• Source : ProjectShelve

A literature review is usually the second chapter in a research project or dissertation. It shows how the related works in a field of study influence what a researcher is doing in his own research work. The objective is to use the academic works you will consult to provide a stimulus for your own work.

Before you consider which content to include from your literature, you need to remind yourself of the main purposes of your work. The literature review provides the historical background for your research and also gives the overview of the current context your research is situated. It does this by referring to contemporary debates, issues, and questions in the field of study.

Literature review also gave a discussion of the relevant theories and
concepts on which your research work is based. It also introduces to you to relevant terminologies and definitions that you will use to clarify the terms in the context of your work.

But why should you conduct a literature review for your undergraduate or postgraduate studies?

Importance of literature review

1.      You will not be accused of plagiarism: Imagine that you have conducted and written a research work on your area of specialization. When you submit the work, you learn that someone somewhere has conducted a similar research. Now you didn’t copy their work, but because of the similarities in your work, you may be accused of incidental plagiarism. That is why it is necessary that you seek out and read from all other works in your field of study.
Then you can reference them in your work and add your own views in your own work.

2.      You will have an affinity with people: Once people see your literature review, they will believe that you did your homework well.

This will create a sense of togetherness between you and your readers. Your lecturers and others will give you full credit for doing your due diligence. The thorough research you do in your project or dissertation will make people see you as an expert in that field.

This comes about because you listed many books, articles and other sources in your review of past literature. This makes you trustworthy and people will value your work more.

3.      Your review sharpens your work : As you start gathering your sources for your work, you will analyze, aggregate, condense, summarise, evaluate and synthesize all these information so that you will be able to get only the important ones. This will enable you to have a laser focus on your work, thereby removing the fluff and presenting only the needed and required materials needed for the research work. This will also help people to see the relevance of your work among all other works in that field.

Now we have seen three main reasons why you should conduct a literature review, how do you go about it? To have an effective review, you need to consult both present and old materials in your research topic. Search for a database in your topic in all the peer-reviewed sources like journals and other sources like government websites, research groups and organisation. Make good use of the university library and get all the information you need. Doing this will ensure that you write an awesome literature review.

One Great way of getting reliable and current Literature Review for your research paper is by visiting Google Scholar This Awesome site provides researchers with Scholarly articles that can be used as a great source for reference purposes. The most awesome feature about this site is that the user gets to choose date ranges for materials on the site.

Your review of literature should include all relevant sources around your topic. Search comprehensively all databases surrounding your research using your research keywords.

Explore every resource available including government websites, journals, organisation materials, and research groups. Also ask the librarians for help as they can suggest other sources you may not have heard. As long as it is related to your field of study, gather it, analyze it and organise it for research purposes.

To summarise here are the sources for academic literature - original reports of research work in journals, letters, diaries, speeches, autobiographies, government websites, interviews, textbooks, official reports, court records, newspapers, artifacts, biographies, photographs, magazines, and drawings. Use all these sources for a great literature review.

Consulting past and current work for your literature is important as it gives a thorough overview and summary of the events on the given topic. It helps to selectively and creatively and bring out ideas for your own writing. This makes the readers have a sense of focus and gives them a direction where the research is headed.