Chapter 4: Literature Review

Literature review involves reading on research papers or articles that are listed in quality academic journals that are related to your research topic. Normally you need to look for first or second tier research journals because of their academic value and high quality writing. They may be more difficult to understand but it will worth all your effort as you can grasp a deeper understanding of the subject.

Reviewing literature doesn't mean reading for fun but you need to look for important points and review it critically. Critical review means you should be aware of the current state of knowledge on the subject as well as its limitations, and how your proposed research can fill the gap between the known and the unknown. By filling up the gap, you will be able to generate new knowledge in that field.

When you are doing literature review, you have to avoid the pitfall of information overload. You might be reading so much material that you might lose your direction and get stuck with your research work. What you should do is to filter the reading materials and get the gist out of it, and focus on critical issues related to your research topic. Write short notes on those issues and record down the reference sources as you read so that you can refer back to them easily later. It is better to list down the related articles in a  chorological way so that you know how does a model or theory evolve so that you can define your conceptual framework for the purpose to produce a new knowledge at the end of your research.

After reading enough research papers related to your subject, you have to start writing your literature review as soon as possible. Your writing should not be something like a uncritical recording of past researches but you should be writing something that offer insightful evaluation of the present knowledge which will lead to clarification of the gaps in the field and the way in which your proposed research is intended to fill them.