WEEK 3
ReviewingWEEK 3
the
Literature
Intended Learning
Outcomes
Determine the importance and purpose of the critical literature
review to your research project;
Execute a critical perspective in your reading;
Distinguish what you need to include when writing your critical
review;
Recognize search terms and to undertake online literature searches;
Evaluate the relevance, value and sufficiency of the literature
found;
Analyze the literature found accurately;
Realize what is meant by plagiarism;
Apply the knowledge, skills and understanding gained to your own
research project.
Determine the Importance and Purpose of the
Critical Literature Review to Your Research Project
Importance
01 Provides the foundation on which your
research is built.
It will help you to develop a good understanding
02 and insight into relevant previous research and the
trends that have emerged.
Determine the Importance and Purpose of the
Critical Literature Review to Your Research Project
Purpose
To review the most relevant and significant research on your
topic
Review
Gall et. al. (2006)
- To help you to refine your research question(s) and objectives further.
- To highlight research possibilities that have been overlooked
implicitly in previous research
- To discover explicit recommendations for further research. These can
provide you with a superb justification for your own research
question(s) and objectives
Review
Gall et. Al. (2006)
- To help you to avoid simply repeating work that has been done already
- To obtain insights into the aspects of your research question(s) and
objectives that are considered newsworthy and relevant by sampling
current opinions in newspapers, professional and trade journals.
- To discover and provide an insight into research approaches, strategies,
and techniques that may be appropriate to your own research question(s)
and objectives
Execute a Critical Perspective in Your
Reading
Harvard College Library suggests
that you should get in the habit of
hearing yourself ask questions of your
reading
Wallace and Wray (2011)
recommend the use of review
questions
SKILLS TO BE PRACTICED FOR
EFFECTIVEHarvard College Library (2006)
READING
1. Previewing: Looking around the text before you start reading in order to
establish precisely its purpose and how it may inform your literature search.
2. Annotating: Conducting a dialogue with yourself, the author and the
issues and ideas at stake.
3. Summarizing: The process of extracting the main points from a text
and presenting them in a concise form.
4. Comparing and Contrasting: Comparing is showing the similarities,
and contrasting is showing differences between two things that are related in
some way.
5 Critical Questions to Employ in Critical
Reading
1. Why am I reading this?
2. What is the author trying to do in writing this?
3. What the writer is saying that is relevant to what I want
to find out?
4. How convincing is what the author is saying?
5. What use can I make of the reading?
DISTINGUISH WHAT YOU NEED TO
INCLUDE WHEN WRITING YOUR
CRITICAL REVIEW
In considering the content of your critical
review, you will need:
1. To include the key academic theories within your chosen area of
research that are pertinent to or contextualize your research question;
2. To demonstrate that your knowledge of your chosen area is up to
date;
3. Through clear complete referencing, enable those reading your
project report to find the original publications which you cite.
RECOGNIZE SEARCH TERMS AND TO
UNDERTAKE ONLINE LITERATURE
SEARCHES
RECOGNIZE SEARCH TERMS AND TO
UNDERTAKE ONLINE LITERATURE
SEARCHES
Search Strategy should include:
1. The parameters of your search;
2. The search terms and phrases you intend to use;
3. The online databases and search engines you intend
to use;
4. Discuss your ideas as widely as possible. (Use of
brainstorming and relevance trees technique)
1. Defining the parameters of your
search
• Language of publication (e.g., English);
• Subject area (e.g., human resource management);
• Business sector (e.g., management);
• Geographical area (e.g., Europe);
• Publication period (e.g., the last 10 years);
• Literature type (e.g., refereed journals and books)
2. The search terms and phrases you intend
to useThe identification of search terms is the most important part of
planning your search for relevant literature (Bell 2010).
Tertiary Literature
Designed either to help to locate primary and secondary literature or to
introduce a topic. They therefore include online databases and indexes as
well as encyclopedias and bibliographies.
3 types of Online
Databases:
1. Full text online databases
2. Abstracts
3. Indexes
2. The search terms and phrases you intend
to use Search terms can be identified using one or a number of
different techniques:
1. Discussion
2. Brainstorming
3. Initial reading, dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks
and thesauruses
4. Relevance Tree
3. The online databases and search engines you
intend to use
Literature search can be conducted using a variety of approaches:
a. Searching using tertiary literature sources, in particular online
databases;
b. Obtaining relevant literature referenced in books and journal
articles you have already read;
c. Scanning and browsing secondary literature in your library;
d. General Internet searching.
a. Searching using tertiary literature sources, in particular
online databases;
1. Make a list of the search terms that describe your research
questions and objectives;
2. Search appropriate online databases;
3. Note precise details;
4. Note the full reference of each item found; and
5. Download the article in pdf format and save it incase you need
to locate it again later.
b. Obtaining relevant literature referenced in books and
journal articles you have already read;
After your initial search of books and journal articles, tertiary
literature will provide you with details of what literature is
available and where to locate it.
c. Scanning and browsing secondary literature in your library;
Scanning will involve you going through individual items such as
a journal article to pick out points that relate to your own research
because new publications such as journals are unlikely to be
indexed immediately in tertiary literature, so you will need to
browse these publications to gain an idea of their content.
sibly
d. General Internet searching
General search engines:
- Google
- Bing
Google:
- Advance search option
Specialized search engine:
- Google Scholar
4. Discuss your ideas as widely as possibly
Can be done with the use of brainstorming and relevance trees.
EVALUATE THE RELEVANCE, VALUE AND
SUFFICIENCY OF THE LITERATURE
FOUND
This involves defining the scope of your review and assessing the
value of the items that you have obtained in helping you to answer
your research question(s).
Assessing the relevance of the literature you
have collected to your research depends on
your research question(s) and objectives.
ACCURATELY
Assessing the value of the literature you have collected is
concerned with the quality of the research that has been
undertaken.
You need to be sure that your critical review
discusses what research has already been
undertaken and that you have positioned your
research project in the wider context, citing
the main writers in the field.
ANALYZE THE LITERATURE FOUND
ACCURATELY
Taking Notes.
The process of note making will help you to think through the ideas in
the literature in relation to your research.
Using Systematic Review.
A process for reviewing the literature using a comprehensive
preplanned strategy to locate existing literature, evaluate the contribution,
analyze and synthesize the findings and report the evidence to allow
conclusions to be reached about what is known and, also, what is not
known (Denyer and Tranfield 2009).
5 Step Process
of Systematic
Review
1. Formulate the review questions
2. Locate and generate a comprehensive list of
potentially relevant research studies using online database
searches, specialist bibliographies, tables of contents and other
sources and attempt to track down unpublished research.
3. Select and evaluate relevant research studies using
predetermined explicit inclusion and exclusion (selection)
checklists of criteria to assess the relevance of each in relation to
the review question(s).
4. Analyze and synthesize the relevant research
studies
a) Breaking by:each study into its constituent parts and recording the
down
key points
b) Using the data extraction forms to explore and integrate the studies
and answer the specific review questions.
5. Report the results providing:
a) An introductory section that states the problem and review questions;
b) A methodology section that provides precise details of how the review
was conducted;
c) findings and discussion sections that review all the studies, specifies
precisely what is known and what is not known in relation to the review
questions.
REALIZE WHAT IS MEANT BY
PLAGIARISM
So what precisely is plagiarism?
Quite simply, it is presenting work or
ideas as if they are your own when in
reality they are the work or ideas of
someone else, and failing
to acknowledge the original source.
Park (2003) lists four common forms of plagiarism which are
commonly found in universities. These are:
1). Stealing material from another source and passing it off as your
own, for example: buying a paper from a research service, essay
bank or term-paper mill;
2). Submitting a paper written by someone else (e.g., a peer or
relative) and passing it off as your own;
3). Copying sections of material from one or more source texts,
supplying proper documentation;
4). Paraphrasing material from one or more source texts without
supplying appropriate documentation.
End of slides
Thank you for
listening!
Reference: Saunders, M. N., Lewis, P., & Thornhill, A. (2012).
CREDITS: This presentation template was created by Slidesgo, and
Research methods for business students. New York: Pearson.
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