Conducting a Literature Review
- Getting Started
- Define your Research Question
- Finding Sources
- Evaluating Sources
Organizing the Review
- Cite and Manage your Sources
Introduction
Organizing your literature review involves examining the sources you have and determining how they best fit together to form a coherent and complete narrative. However you choose to do this, the goal should be to organize your literature in a way that naturally flows and makes sense to your reader.
Additional Resources
- Literature Review: Conducting & Writing by the University of West Florida Libraries
- Literature Reviews: Organizing Your Research by the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Hunt Library
A literature review is structured similarly to other research essays, opening with an introduction that explains the topic and summarizes how the review will be conducted, several body paragraphs organized to share your findings, and a concluding paragraph.
There are many different ways to organize the body of your review. Some possible approaches are listed below.
Subtopic/Theme
While they all share the same overarching topic, each source approaches it in a slightly different way, valuing certain aspects or methods more than others. For example, with a literature review about the impacts of the Affordable Care Act, some literature might focus on the demographic changes in access to healthcare, or the actions taken by private health insurance companies, or even the way healthcare is discussed in politics. By combining sources that discuss the same subtopics, you can organize your review to show how the articles overlap and complement one another to create a more complete view of the existing research.
For a thematic literature review, each body paragraph would consist of one of these themes, or subtopics, and the literature associated with it.
Alternatively, you can group your resources by their relevance to your research question. Again using the ACA as an example, it might be a good idea to begin with the sources that most broadly address the impacts of the Affordable Care Act and then order the literature by increasing specificity.
Methodology
It may be the case that your literature can be neatly defined into different types of research, such as different methods to treat an illness or ways to test a hypothesis. Examining the literature by the ways in which the authors tried to answer questions associated with the topic is a useful way to compare and contrast research results, as well as identify potential strengths or weaknesses in the methodologies used.
Varying Opinions/Problem & Solution(s)
Your various sources might not all come to the same conclusions about the topic; in fact, especially with controversial subject matter, there may be widely differing opinions on the issues and how best to approach them. Related to the thematic review, this type of literature review structure uses the first body paragraph to pose a question, then each of the body paragraphs illustrating the differing answers found in the literature. It is an excellent way to address arguments and counter-arguments if your topic is hotly contested in academic and popular works.
If you find yourself struggling to differentiate your sources by topic or relevance because they are all about equal in these regards, it might be a good idea to organize them chronologically.
There are two major types of chronology literature reviews tend to be grouped by:
- Publication date : Start with the earliest-published research and finish with the most current
- By trend : Organize sources into eras based on the time period and relative events associated with the topic. For example, regarding the Affordable Care Act, it could be split into the time before the ACA was passed, the immediate aftermath (2010-2011), Obama's second term (2012-2016), etc.
Using a Synthesis Matrix
A literature review doesn't merely summarize the current research on a topic: part of your responsibility is to take this information and make something new out of it that can be used by future researchers. This process of combining other sources of information and making an original argument out of them is called synthesis , which literally means "the combination of ideas to form a theory or system." You will synthesize the literature you've selected for review to form an argument about where more research needs to be done on your topic.
One of the most important elements of synthesis in a literature review is analysis: rather than simply repeating the results of each source you've found, you are going to analyze it for similarities to your other resources, limitations and strengths of the methodology, and an examination of the conclusions drawn by the author(s) compared to the rest of the research on the topic. This is why proper organization of the literature is so important; it will allow you to group your sources by theme so that they can be more easily compared and contrasted.
In addition to the recommendations elsewhere on this page, a common method for preparing to organize your literature is by using a synthesis matrix. This is a tool to help pick out the most important aspects of each source and see where the most common themes lie.
With the major information organized like this, it is easy to see which resources used similar methods of research, which had similar or differing results, and when chronologically the research was conducted. Grouping the literature by any of these similarities could be a useful way to organize your review.
- How to Synthesize Your Literature Review by Britt McGowan & UWF Libraries
- Synthesizing Sources by Purdue Online Writing Lab
Questions the Literature Review Should Answer
The University of the West Indies (linked below) provides a useful checklist of questions that a good literature review should address. When outlining your review, pay attention to how you will answer the following:
These will likely be answered throughout your body paragraphs, but it might be worthwhile to address some of these in the conclusion instead or in addition.
- Organizing the Literature Review by the University of the West Indies
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- Last Updated: Sep 4, 2024 1:20 PM
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Literature Review Guide: How to organise the review
- What is a Literature Review?
- How to start?
- Picking your research question and searching
- Search strategies and Databases
- How to organise the review
- Examples of Literature Reviews
- Library summary
How to structure your literature review (ignore the monotone voice as advice is good)
How to structure and write your literature review
- Chronological, ie. by date of publication or trend
- Methodological
- Use Cooper's taxonomy to explore and determine what elements and categories to incorporate into your review
- Revise and proofread your review to ensure your arguments, supporting evidence and writing is clear and precise
Cronin, P., Ryan, F. & Coughlan, M. (2008). Undertaking a literature review: A step-by-step approach . British Journal of Nursing, 17 (1), pp.38-43.
Different ways to organise a Literature Review
CHRONOLOGICAL (by date): This is one of the most common ways, especially for topics that have been talked about for a long time and have changed over their history. Organise it in stages of how the topic has changed: the first definitions of it, then major time periods of change as researchers talked about it, then how it is thought about today.
BROAD-TO-SPECIFIC : Another approach is to start with a section on the general type of issue you're reviewing, then narrow down to increasingly specific issues in the literature until you reach the articles that are most specifically similar to your research question, thesis statement, hypothesis, or proposal. This can be a good way to introduce a lot of background and related facets of your topic when there is not much directly on your topic but you are tying together many related, broader articles.
MAJOR MODELS or MAJOR THEORIES : When there are multiple models or prominent theories, it is a good idea to outline the theories or models that are applied the most in your articles. That way you can group the articles you read by the theoretical framework that each prefers, to get a good overview of the prominent approaches to your concept.
PROMINENT AUTHORS : If a certain researcher started a field, and there are several famous people who developed it more, a good approach can be grouping the famous author/researchers and what each is known to have said about the topic. You can then organise other authors into groups by which famous authors' ideas they are following. With this organisation it can help to look at the citations your articles list in them, to see if there is one author that appears over and over.
CONTRASTING SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT : If you find a dominant argument comes up in your research, with researchers taking two sides and talking about how the other is wrong, you may want to group your literature review by those schools of thought and contrast the differences in their approaches and ideas.
Ways to structure your Literature Review
Different ways to organise your literature review include:
- Topical order (by main topics or issues, showing relationship to the main problem or topic)
- Chronological order (simplest of all, organise by dates of published literature)
- Problem-cause-solution order
- General to specific order
- Known to unknown order
- Comparison and contrast order
- Specific to general order
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- Last Updated: Sep 6, 2024 3:37 PM
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