Literature Review
Ibanda Hood

objectives
• What is literature review
• Reasons for literature review
• Approaches to literature review
• Structuring/Organising the literature review chapter
• summarising
• discussing plagiarism and other issues about literature review.

What is literature review
• Literature review is a systematic identification, location, retrieval,
analysis, and evaluation of documents that are related to the research
problem as well as analysis of the casual observations and opinions
related to the planned research.
• The purpose of literature review is help a researcher develop a
thorough understanding and insight into previous works and trends
that have been recorded pertaining to the research problem

Reasons for literature review
• It gives a historical background to the research.
• It provides an overview of the current context in which your research is
situated by referring to current debates, issues, and questions in the field.
• It includes relevant theories & concepts which underpins your research.
• It introduces relevant terminology, and gives definitions to clarify how
terms are being used in the context your research.
• It describes related research in the field and shows how your work extends,
challenges, or shows gap in the existing research.
• It provides supporting evidence for a practical problem or issue which your
research is addressing, thereby underlining its significance.

Sources/references needed for literature
review
• Preliminary sources: also called general sources, these are references that a
researcher consults first to help him/her locate other sources related to the
research problem. Preliminary sources are commonly organised by subjects
or authors.
Preliminary sources include, indices, abstracts, table of contents.
• Primary sources: These are publications in which the persons who carried
out the research report their findings.
Primary sources include journals, committee reports, dissertations and theses, conference
papers, etc.
• Secondary Sources: These are publications in which authors describe the
works of others.
Examples of secondary sources include textbooks,

Steps of conducting a literature review
• Define the research problem
• Review secondary sources
• Select and skim through the most appropriate preliminary sources
• Formulate search words
• Search the preliminary sources
• Read the relevant primary sources in details now, taking notes and
making summaries
• Organise the notes
• Write the report/chapter.

Reading for literature review
• The style of reading changes as we read during research; initially,
reading is exploratory; later, it is more focused. We can even return to
the same article/text, this time with a different focus, e.g. methods
used.
• The recommended reading style is SQ3R
• Survey: survey the text to ascertain the gist or general idea.
• Question: while reading the text, think of questions you would like the text to answer if you
are to read it further.
• Read: read the text more carefully if you think it’s pertinent for your research
• Recall: Recall the main points from the text after reading the text
• Review: Review the text to confirm that you have recalled all points that are significant for
you and your research.

The literature review chapter in a
thesis or proposal

Organising the LITERATURE REVIEW chapter
• Literature review format may differs from one research project to
another, and one discipline to another. Here we present just the
common ways of approaching the chapter.
• Keep reading, notes taking, and summarising all throughout the
research project.
• You can make an outline from the beginning and just populate the
subheadings with literature. Others prefer doing a lot of exploratory
reading before they can develop categories/outlines that will guide
the literature review and how its chapter will be organised.

Things that make your literature review
understandable. These are a must have!
• An introduction at the beginning of the chapter:
This explains how your review is organised
• Headings and subheadings within the chapter:
Headings and subheadings provide a map that shows the various strands of your argument. Remember to include
transition statements from one heading/subheading to the next; this shows how the ideas in the different
sections/subsections of the chapter relate to one another.
A paragraph is not made of only one sentence. It better have an argument, evidence, and a conclusion.
• A summary:
Put your summary at the end of the chapter; it is in the summary where you reiterate key ideas in a concise way:
NB: If a review is very long, like for higher level education, it is advisable to put
summaries along (after every major argument/section); this helps summarise what you
have argued so far and how it connects with what is to follow. Don’t forget to use
transition statements while doing this.
NB: The review should also focus on the questions/objectives, variables of your research

Structure of the review.
Weisberg & Burker (1990)
• Distant to Close (Most distantly related to your research to the most closely
related to your research work).
• Chronological (Earliest related work to recent related work).
• Comparison and contrasting of different ideas, approaches, theories and their
characteristics, or research.
Rudestam & Newton(2007): They describe how to approach the ‘distant to close’ structure of
review. Three references are described.
Long shots: these are general sources, e.g. textbooks, they provide general
knowledge/background context about the issue to show that research has been done about it;
you don’t need to critically appraise them or the evidence they provide, as it may not closely
relate to your research.
Medium shots: these are references are related to the current research. Although not critiqued
in details, enough information is provided to show how the reference impacts on current
research.
Close ups: These are references pertinent to the current research and deserve critical appraisal.
For example, a limitation cited in previous work may provide reason for you to do your
research.

The relationship between introduction and literature
review chapters.
The chapter, introduction, serves the following purposes:
• A brief historical/contemporary context of the research
• A conscience reference to the research already made on the issue.
• An outline of the research problem that needs to be tackled as a result of gap(s)
left by previous research
• Justification for the proposed research
• An outline of the contents of the different chapters of the proposal, thesis, or
dissertation.
• At its end, the introduction mentions the objectives of the study.
So don’t be surprised if a reviewer or supervisor recommends that a section/paragraph is shifted from
literature review to introduction or the other way round, because the 2 sections are too similar and all the
literature review does is to serve those purposes more comprehensively.

Difference between introduction and
background.
• Introduction gives the meaning of technical details
• Background gives information on the problems in the literature.
These things are used interchangeably.
Ebscohost/ endnote are other methods of searching online works
Questions on literature review: What is literature review, How, why it is
done?
Why cite: give credit to people that did the work; we can get to the list and
follow up the citation to make sure you really represented the opinions of
the researchers.

Concerns in literature review
Critical reading, reading fast, notes taking, summarising, Avoiding plagiarism

Critical reading
1. See the authors’ argument and conclusion from the source text.
2. Evaluate the strength of the evidence used by the author to support his
argument & conclusions; then ask key questions like:
• Is the evidence sufficient or relevant?
• Are the authorities cited reliable?
• Are the data and interpretation of the data adequate to support the line of reasoning and
conclusions drawn in the text?
• If statistics were used, where do they come from and why were they used? How relevant are
they to the argument? Are statistical tests appropriate? And how have the statistics been
used?
3. Identify the implicit assumptions that underpin the text and how the
assumptions

CARS criteria for checking the credibility of a
research article.
• Credibility,(English, author title, quality control,
• Accuracy{timeliness(must be <10 years)), comprehensive, No bias,
• Reasonableness{it the knowledge given moderate/not completely
out of the expected, consistency, Not too much claim,
• support: there must be some collaboration, it must be consistent
with other findings. The inconsistencies must be just a few flows and
major deviations from other findings.

Summarising
Types of summaries
• Global summaries (Abstracts of theses, articles, & dissertations)
• Selective summaries (this gets summary information from a particular section of a text, e.g.
methods’ section, findings, etc.
Techniques of summarising.
• Get the main points in the text by annotating, highlighting, or notes taking.
• Acknowledge the source of the facts, and then produce the first draft of a summary pointing
out key points from the text of interest.
• Redraft the summary, putting the key points in the most logical order. This order may differ
from how the facts appear in the text.
• Check back to the main text to make sure you have not left out any key points you need.
• Be careful not to give more information than is needed for a summary. If you have a comment
on the author’s idea in the summary, include phrases like “however other researchers found
……..”; this show that these are your opinions about the work and not what that research is
saying.