a guide to writing the dissertation literature review justus randolph

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A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review

Justus Randolph

https://doi.org/10.7275/b0az-8t74

Writing a faulty literature review is one of many ways to derail a dissertation. This article summarizes some pivotal information on how to write a high-quality dissertation literature review. It begins with a discussion of the purposes of a review, presents taxonomy of literature reviews, and then discusses the steps in conducting a quantitative or qualitative literature review. The article concludes with a discussion of common mistakes and a framework for the self-evaluation of a literature review. Accessed 202,565 times on https://pareonline.net from June 04, 2009 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right.

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Randolph, Justus (2019) "A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review," Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation : Vol. 14, Article 13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/b0az-8t74 Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol14/iss1/13

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Article review of Randolph (2006) ‘A Guide to Writing the Dissertation literature Review’

The main purpose of this review of the article is to analyze critically to what extent the author has been successful in capturing the essence of literature review by addressing the key issues like: how faulty literature review leads to derail of a dissertation; how to write high-quality dissertation literature review; purpose of writing literature review; taxonomy of literature review; steps to conduct literature review; common mistakes and framework for the self-evaluation of a literature review. The researcher used Cooper’s (1988) taxonomy of literature reviews (CTLR) as methodological tool to critically review the claims of the author. The researcher found the article an interesting and useful work of the author in providing guidelines about writing literature reviews. The findings support most of the claims of the author regarding the guidelines provided. The author’ discourse on the topic found to be consistent and engaging except a few points which still demand more clarity to understand, which opens new space for writers to develop a comprehensive framework like using an integrative framework of literature review.

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The ability to conduct an explicit and robust literature review by students, scholars or scientists is critical in producing excellent journal articles, academic theses, academic dissertations or working papers. A literature review is an evaluation of existing research works on a specific academic topic, theme or subject to identify gaps and propose future research agenda. Many postgraduate students in higher education institutions lack the necessary skills and understanding to conduct in-depth literature reviews. This may lead to the presentation of incorrect, false or biased inferences in their theses or dissertations. This study offers scientific knowledge on how literature reviews in different fields of study could be conducted to mitigate against biased inferences such as unscientific analogies and baseless recommendations. The literature review is presented as a process that involves several activities including searching, identifying, reading, summarising, compiling, analysing, interpreting and referencing. We hope this article serves as reference material to improve the academic rigour in the literature review chapters of postgraduate students' theses or dissertations. This article prompts established scholars to explore more innovative ways through which scientific literature reviews can be conducted to identify gaps (empirical, knowledge, theoretical, methodological, application and population gap) and propose a future research agenda.

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• Learning outcomes • The nature of a literature review • Identifying the main subject and themes • Reviewing previous research • Emphasizing leading research studies • Exploring trends in the literature • Summarizing key ideas in a subject area • Summary A literature review is usually regarded as being an essential part of student projects, research studies and dissertations. This chapter examines the reasons for the importance of the literature review, and the things which it tries to achieve. It also explores the main strategies which you can use to write a good literature review.

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A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review

• Justus Randolph

Writing a faulty literature review is one of many ways to derail a dissertation. This article summarizes some pivotal information on how to write a high-quality dissertation literature review. It begins with a discussion of the purposes of a review, presents taxonomy of literature reviews, and then discusses the steps in conducting a quantitative or qualitative literature review. The article concludes with a discussion of common mistakes and a framework for the self-evaluation of a literature review. Accessed 202,565 times on https://pareonline.net from June 04, 2009 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right.

Keywords: Research Methodology

Randolph, J., (2009) “A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review”, Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation 14(1): 13. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/b0az-8t74

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Randolph, J. (2009) 'A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review', Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation . 14(1) doi: 10.7275/b0az-8t74

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How to Conduct a Literature Review: Literature Reviews - Getting Started

• Literature Reviews - Getting Started

Steps to Creating a Literature Review

Step 1: Planning your search

Step 2: Selecting a database

Step 3: Conducting your search

Step 4: Evaluating your results

Step 5: Managing your references

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a systematic survey of the scholarly literature published on a given topic.  Rather than providing a new research insight, a literature review lays the groundwork for an in-depth research project analyzing previous research. Type of documents surveyed will vary depending on the field, but can include:

• journal articles,
• dissertations.

A thorough literature review will also require surveying what librarians call "gray literature," which includes difficult-to-locate documents such as:

• technical reports
• government publications
• working papers

Purpose of the Lit Review

What's the point, purposes of the literature review.

• Delimit the research problem
• Avoid fruitless approaches
• Identify avenues of future research
• Seek new lines of inquiry
• Gain methodological insight

Reasons for Conducting a Literature Review

• Distinguishing what has been done from what needs to be done
• Discovering important variables relevant to the topic
• Synthesizing and gaining new perspective
• Identifying relationships between ideas and practices
• Establishing the context of the topic
• Rationalizing the significance of the problem
• Enhancing and acquiring subject vocabulary
• Understanding the structure of the subject
• Relating ideas and theory to applications
• Identifying main methodologies and research techniques that have been used
• Placing research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-art development

Questions to consider

• What is the overarching question or problem your literature review seeks to address?
• How much familiarity do you already have with the field? Are you already familiar with common methodologies or professional vocabularies?
• What types of strategies or questions have others in your field pursued?
• How will you synthesize or summarize the information you gather?
• What do you or others perceive to be lacking in your field?
• Is your topic broad? How could it be narrowed?
• Can you articulate why your topic is important in your field?

Adapted from Hart, C. (1998).  Doing a literature review : Releasing the social science research imagination. London: Sage. As cited in Randolph, Justus. “A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review.” Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation , 14(13), p. 2.

Acknowledgements

Merinda Hensley gave permision for content to be  borrowed by permission from Literature Review: Demystified LibGuide from the University of  Illnois  at Urbana-Champaign.

Getting Started

Once you've decided what you want to write about you will need to conduct a systematic review of journal literature to establish what has been written in your field.

Databases enable you to combine search terms and locate high quality journal articles, conference papers and proceedings from a wide range of sources. Have a look at the Accessing Databases tab to choose the right one for your subject area. There are links to brief online tutorials or pdf guides to help you with using each of the databases there too.

• Brilliant for conducting a thorough, systematic & exhaustive search of the literature
• You can cross concepts together and so be more precise about what you are searching for
• Some databases (BREI, PsycINFO) include a thesaurus so you can check terminology
• The results are valid, reliable and authoritative (academic articles)

What about Google?

G o o g l e and G o o g l e Scholar are not the most efficient or effective tools for searching the literature. Here are a few reasons why:

  • You can only narrow searches by date, not subject   • You cannot give words meaning e.g. primary/first   • Links are unstable and not verified and so you may not be able to access the results   • Pdfs look like they are freely available but often they are not

In addition to this, you also need to carefully evaluate all internet resources:

  1. Who authored the information?   2. What expertise does the writer have to comment?   3. What evidence is used? Are there citations in the piece?   4. What genre is the document: journalism, academic paper,blog, polemic?   5. Is the site/document/report funded by an institution?   6. What argument is being made?   7. When was the text produced?   8. Why did this information emerge at this point in history?   9. Who is the audience for this information?   10. What is not being discussed and what are the political consequences of that absence?   (Taken from Brabazon, T. (2006) 'The Google Effect: Googling, blogging, wikis and the flattening of expertise', Libri, v. 56, pp 157-167)

• You may find this guide for evaluating internet resources (compiled by UWE Library Services) useful too

 And finally.... • They retrieve a huge number of results – which wastes valuable time and leads to information overload and frustration!

• Next: Step 1 >>
• Last Updated: Sep 12, 2022 11:13 AM
• URL: https://libguides.oakwood.edu/litreview

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• A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review By Justus Randolph:There are many ways to derail a dissertation, and writing a faulty literature review is certainly one of them. If the literature review is flawed, the rest of the dissertation will probably be flawed. This is because "a researcher cannot perform significant research without first understanding the literature in the field" (Boote & Beile, 2005, p. 3).
• The Dissertation Defense: Being well-defended in a good way By Elizabeth Augustina Reyes, Ph.D.: Reframing the dissertation defense as a dissertation presentation is a more user-friendly perspective as well as a more accurate one.

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Literature Reviews

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A literature review is a means of demonstrating an author's knowledge about a particular field of study, including vocabulary, theories, key variables and phenomena, and its methods and history. Conducting a literature review also informs the student of the influential researchers and research groups in the field.

Randolph, Justus J. "A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review." Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation 14.13 (2009): 1-13.

What is a Literature Review?

At the top of this page is a general definition for what a literature review can encompass. Here are some additional criteria for you to consider as you begin to consider research studies to use in the paper that you will write:

• What has been done: this includes methods, populations, when was it studied?
• What are the gaps: what aspects haven't been researched?
• What are you going to do with the information you have found?

When you begin writing your literature review, it should be more than just a summary of what others have done. You need to interact with the research that you find. 

What does this mean for you as a student researcher?

• Don't settle for the quickest and easiest search results that you run across.
• Research the books and journal articles that you use in a deliberate way (this guide will help with that aspect).
• Think critically about the information that you find. What you're doing is much more than just a simple summary of other people's research.
• Be able to justify why you are including a research study in your review. How does it influence the research study you would plan or hope to do?
• Identify potential risks or benefits of the research methods used and how they might have impacted the study.

What is the Purpose of a Literature Review?

• distinguishing what has been done from what needs to be done
• discovering important variable relevant to the topic
• synthesizing and gaining a new perspective
• identifying relationships between ideas and practices
• establishing the context of the topic or problem
• rationalizing the significance of the problem
• enhancing and acquiring the subject vocabulary
• understanding the structure of the subject
• relating ideas and theory to application
• identifying the main methodologies and research techniques that have been used
• placing the research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the art developments

Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 1998, p.27.

What is Peer-Review?

Peer-reviewed journals and articles are a way of communicating ideas and information within a specific field of study or academic discipline.

Key features:

• use specialized vocabulary
• written by scholars and experts for other scholars and experts
• assumes that readers have basic knowledge of subject area
• they serve to advance knowledge by introducing new ideas and points of view while remaining in the known field of study
• evaluate the quality of manuscript
• validate the accuracy of the research methodology and procedures
•  it may also have been revised under advisement of the peer reviewers
• articles that don’t meet the standards set by a journal or association are not published

Identifying Peer-Review Articles & Research Studies

A research article is a scholarly article that essentially reports the results of original, primary research and typically appears in peer-reviewed or refereed periodicals. For this reason, research articles are considered the pinnacle of information sources. Research articles are almost always written in the same format. Understanding the format of research articles should help you to more easily navigate databases and select appropriate sources for you to use for your research. Most research articles incorporate five standard elements. The format that research articles follow mirror the research process.

• Introduction : summarizes the problem researched, its significance, and the nature of the study
• Literature review : provides a framework for understanding the problem and the theoretical rationale behind conducting the study; sources cited are typically listed at the end in some sort of reference page
• Methodology : describes how the data were collected, including things like the population studies and the data collection instrument used
• Results/findings : presents a summary of the data collected, typically in the form of charts and tables with accompanying narrative
• Discussion/conclusion : includes such information as the interpretation of the data, recommendations for further study, and limitations of the study.

Other elements that you many find in research articles are an abstract or summary, information about the author(s), and a list of references. The references can be very helpful in directing your to other possible sources of information.

"The student's survival guide to research," M.L. McAdoo, p. 123-4.

Books About Literature Reviews and Thesis Writing

• Worksheet for Literature Reviews This worksheet will aid in creating a summary for the research articles you read. Use the matrices to determine if it meets your criteria.

Source: McLean, Lindsey. "Literature Review."  CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments) , 2015.  https://www.projectcora.org/assignment/literature-review.

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