What Is a Literature Review? An Introduction
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Introduction
A Literature Review is an essential part of academic texts, not only of your BA dissertation, but also of ‘serious’ research papers that are published in academic journals. When you have to write a literature review for the first time, and in a foreign language, you might wonder what the Literature Review is all about and how you are actually going to write it up. The following activities are designed to give you some help.
Objectives
You will have a closer look at a literature review chapter from a published journal article. The following tasks will introduce you to what content goes into a literature review, how you can structure it and what kind of expressions you can use in English, when you write your own literature review chapter (LRC).
Examples and some tasks and references are oriented specifically at undergraduate business students for whom English is a foreign language.
Activity 1: What do you do in a "Literature Review"?
There are certain things you DO, when you write a certain text for a certain audience. For example, in an e-mail to a friend, you start by saying hello, you often ask, how he or she is, then tell your friend about something that has happened or ask a question, and you normally finish by giving your regards and your name.
Just as well, but obviously in a different way, there are some things you should do, when you write a literature review chapter as part of an academic text. There are, just as in a letter, your potential readers that you should keep in mind while writing, who want to learn certain things from your literature review.
Instruction
Work through the tasks below. Then read the feedback.
Task 1: Just take a few minutes and make some notes in the text box below: What do you think: what is the idea of a literature review chapter? Who do you write it for, and what do you DO in that chapter?
Task 2: In this task you will find some statements about what to do in your literature review chapter (in the following abbreviated as LRC).You decide, if the following statements are correct or incorrect and tick the appropriate box. Then check the feedback, which will give you some more information about the right ideas, and common wrong ideas about the literature review chapter.
1. Your LRC is like a list of everything you have read about your topic.
2. What you write in your LRC has to be relevant to your research question.
3. There is no need for a clear structure in your text, your supervisor will understand what you want to say anyway.
4. Your LRC should include short summaries of research that has been conducted in the area of your research topic.
5. The more details you include the better.
6. Your LRC should indicate a “gap” in the literature, that is, aspects that have not been looked at by other researchers in your topic area.
7. To make your LRC critical, you should comment on strengths and weaknesses of the studies you summarise.
8. It is a good idea to finish your LRC by linking the gap in the literature to your own research question.
9. It is useful for your readers, if you sort the studies you present in your LRC in alphabetical order according to author name.
10. The LRC is only necessary in BA dissertations. It shows your supervisor how much reading you have done.
Here you find a short excerpt of what is given in Saunders et al. (2003) about literature reviews: Excerpt Saunders et al. (2003)
You may also find UWIC's study skills “Dissertation writing” useful: UWIC Study Skills 11. It gives you, among other information, a short overview about what you do in each chapter of your BA dissertation, of which the literature review chapter is just one.
Activity 2: How do the professionals do it?
We now have a look at a “real” literature review written by university staff and published in an academic journal. You will be given full references for the article a bit later, there are still some tasks you have to do first...
Instruction
Download the text: Example Text, print it and read it and then continue with the next task.
Task 1: Here you find a short list of the most typical things that you do in a literature review, (remember, we spoke about that in Activity 1, Task 1). In the Literature Review example that you just printed out, there are gaps like this ____________ marked (a) to (i). It is your task to decide, which statement from the list below describes what is done in the text preceding the gaps. You will have to fill in the gaps with a pen, writing down the number of the statement that you think refers to that particular gap (e.g. (a)_____1_______). You can use every statement only once, so it might help if you tick the box of each statement that you have used.
By the way, 1 is not correct for (a)....
Task 2: Until now, we called the text you printed out simply “literature review”. In the original article, however, the authors chose to give their chapter an additional title that reflects its content a bit more specifically. You know this chapter's content by now, what title would you give it? Write it down here:
Activity 3: Finding out more about text and topic
Until now, you were not given any details about our example text. You will find out more about the text and the topic in the following tasks.
Instruction
Work through the tasks below and read the feedback, before you finally hold the whole example text in your hands (or see it in front of you on the screen...).
Task 1: The title of the article is “Why young consumers are not open to mobile marketing communications”. Now go and find out the rest of the information (author name, year and place of publication, journal title, pages) and write it down below, as accurately as possible.
Surely, you need not be told that in a first attempt to find it you could use the Internet...?
Task 2: Let's assume you want to find more literature about this topic, either on the internet or in your library's (online) catalogue. What keywords (words that are meaningful for the topic you want to research) could you use? Write down at least 6 examples.
Task 3: Finally, let's get our hands on the whole text.
Where do you look for it? Write it down here and then get it. Just a tip, it is available electronically!
By the way, for a first search on the internet, Google may not be the best starting point. Did you ever try Google Scholar? While Google might give you any kind of text, Google Scholar will lead you to specifically academic publications. For further search possibilities, also in your library, for example in electronic subject specific databases, ask your library and/or read Saunders et al. (2003), chapter 3.5, pages 59-70.
Activity 4: Useful English expressions for literature review writing
As a last activity, let's have a look at the language that you can use, when you write your literature review chapter. Our example article shows many useful expressions that you could use just as well. And if you collect some of them now, you won't have to think so hard, when you start writing up your own LRC.
Instruction
Final task: Collect some useful English expressions for your literature review: e.g. introductory and concluding sentences of literature review; introducing a particular study/group of studies; introducing further studies; commenting on existing research literature; summarising content of other studies/rephrasing what other authors found/said; indicating a gap in the existing literature; linking your own research topic to the existing literature.
You can write the expressions in here and then print them out, or download the attached word-document and fill it in: English Expressions Work Sheet
References:
Grix, Jonathan (2005): The Foundations of Research. 2. edition. Houndmills, UK and New York: Palgrave.
Saunders, Mark et al. (2003): Research Methods for Business Students. 3. edition. Harlow, UK, et al.: Prentice Hall.
© Dr. Christina Janik / UWIC School of Management / Cardiff 2008