7. Are you ready to write your review of literature?
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Transcript of 7. Are you ready to write your review of literature?
Writing Your Doctoral Dissertation or Thesis Faster
A Proven Map to Success
by E. Alana James and Tracesea Slater
Are You Ready to Write Your Review of Literature?
What is Included in an Award-Winning Literature Review?
• Length (over 60 pages long) • Organization clearly showing how the author
determined what concerns to focus on • Moved from wide scope to more specific
Basic Literature Review Approaches or Layouts
One common approach is to go from the broad topic area to the specifics leading to the variables you will measure
A literature review that pulls form diverse fields of study but where topics overlap can resemble a Venn diagram.
Another approach might be a case where your topics, although diverse, fit together without overlap, much like a jigsaw puzzle.
How is the Literature Review Assessed?
• Minimum standard – a well researched, well presented adequate assessment/interpretation of the others’ work on your topic
• Draw the reader into your work in an elegant way that clearly shows the importance of your ideas and the significance of your as it relates to others
• Discussing the topics from multiple angles helps convince others of your neutrality
Organizing and Analyzing the Literature in a Concise Manner
• Organizing Authors and Ideas – Discussions shouldn’t be presented one author
at a time, but instead by concept, idea, problem, solution across various authors
• Analyzing Gaps – Primary sources
The Theoretical and/or Methodological Sections
• Stressing Certain Issues • Examining Concepts • Describing Complexity • Unpacking Methodological Assumptions in Previous
Studies • Argumentation • Limitations to What You Are Reading
Writing a Formal Review of Literature
• Preliminary Activities – R eaching saturation
• Procedures – Analysis, synthesis, interpretation, knowledge
• Helpful Hints – Capturing and Organizing Notes – Citing and Referencing While You Write
Lit Review Writing Tips: Do...
• Engage in your mind (and maybe in real life) with the authors you are reading.
• Read the classics and consider how the thoughts are put together. • Notice and analyze the linkage between different authors and their
ideas and methods. • Keep searching the literature surrounding your topic until you
understand where the disagreements within it occur. • Write in a voice similar to the language and cadence of your speech. • Use your personal research journal to keep a list of the key words and
phrases from your reading that will need to be discussed in your “terms section.”
• Frequently double-check to ensure that all topics covered in your instruments or interviews are discussed.
Lit Review Writing Tips: Don’t...
• Stop searching as soon as you have enough to build the argument you want to make.
• Mistake the number of citations for quality of the research. • Assume that because no one has done your exact study that
there is no literature on it (Patton, 2008).
An excerpt from ‘Writing Your Doctoral Dissertation or Thesis Faster’
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Where Should I Go to Dig Deeper? Suggested Resources to Consider
• Hart, C. (1998). Doing a literature review: Releasing social science research imagination. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. This entire book is excellent, but we believe every student should be familiar with pages 143 through 195 for his or her discussion of analysis of literature and how to write it up.