Lesson 22: Review of Related Literature (RRL)

Meaning of Review of Related Literature

Literature is an oral or written record of man’s significant experiences that are artistically conveyed in a prosaic manner. Embodied in any literary work like essay, novel, journal, story, biography, etc. are man’s best thoughts and feelings about the world. These recorded or preserved world perceptions of man are expressed directly and indirectly. Direct expressions of man’s knowledge of the world are in books, periodicals, and online reading materials. Indirect expressions are his inferences or reflections of his surroundings that are not written or spoken at all. (Ridley 2012)

A review of related literature is an analysis of man’s written or spoken knowledge of the world. You examine representations of man’s thinking about the world to determine the connection of your research with what people already know about it. In your analysis or reading of recorded knowledge, you just do not catalog ideas in your research paper, but also interpret them or merge your thinking with the author’s ideas.

Hence, in doing the RRL, you deal with both formal or direct and informal or indirect expressions of man’s knowledge. Fusing your world understanding with the authors’ world perceptions enables you to get a good analysis of existing written works that are related to your research study. (Wallman 2014)

Purposes of Review of Related Literature (RRL)

1.     To obtain background knowledge of your research

2.     To relate your study to the current condition or situation of the world

3.     To show the capacity of your research work to introduce new knowledge

4.     To expand, prove, or disprove the findings of previous research studies

5.     To increase your understanding of the underlying theories, principles, or concepts of your research

6.     To explain technical terms involved in your research study

7.     To highlight the significance of your work with the kind of evidence it gathered to support the conclusion of your research

8.     To avoid repeating previous research studies

9.     To recommend the necessity of further research on a certain topic

Styles or Approaches of RRL or Review of Related Literature

1. Traditional Review of Literature

To do a review of literature in a traditional way is to summarize present forms of knowledge on a specific subject. Your aim here is to give an expanded or new understanding of an existing work. Being necessarily descriptive, interpretative, evaluative, and methodically unclear and uncertain, a traditional review is prone to your subjectivity. This kind of review does not require you to describe your method of reviewing literature but expects you to state your intentions in conducting the review and to name the sources of information.

You experience much freedom or flexibility in doing a traditional RRL, so as an undergraduate student taking BA, BSE, BSEED, or any four-year bachelor degree and lacking much knowledge and expertise in research work, this is the appropriate method for you. Attaining mastery in doing a traditional RRL is an excellent preparation for the more demanding, second style of RRL called systematic review that is required at the graduate level.

Hence, being unprepared for a systematic review, you have no other way but to do the traditional review to complete the requirements of your course. (Jesson 2011)

Traditional review is of different types that are as follows:

1.     Conceptual review – analysis of concepts or ideas to give meaning to some national or world issues

2.     Critical review – focuses on theories or hypotheses and examines meanings and results of their application to situations

3.     State-of-the-Art review – makes the researcher deal with the latest research studies on the subject

4.     Expert review – encourages a well-known expert to do the RRL because of the influence of a certain ideology, paradigm, or belief on him/her

5.     Scoping review – prepares a situation for a future research work in the form of project making about community development, government policies, and health services, among others

2. Systematic Review of Literature

As indicated by its name, systematic, which means methodical, is a style of RRL that involves sequential acts of a review of related literature. Unlike  the traditional review that has no particular method, systematic review requires you to go through the following RRL steps (Ridley 2012):

1.     Have a clear understanding of the research questions. Serving as the compass to direct your research activities, the research questions tell you what to collect and where to obtain those data you want to collect.

2.     Plan your manner of obtaining the data. Imagining how you will get to where the data are, you will come to think also of what keywords to use for easy searching and how to accord courtesy and respect to people or institutions from where the data will come such as planning how to communicate your request to these sources of data.

3.     Do the literature search. Using keywords, you look for the needed information from all sources of knowledge: Internet, books, journals periodicals, government publications, general references, and the like.

4.     Using a certain standard, determine which data, studies, or sources of knowledge are valuable or not to warrant the reasonableness of your decision to take some data and junk the rest.

5.     Determine the methodological soundness of the research studies. Use a checklist or a certain set of criteria in assessing the ways researchers conduct their studies to arrive at a certain conclusion.

6.     Summarize what you have gathered from various sources of data. To concisely present a synthesis of your report, use a graph such as a table and other presentation formats that are not prone to verbosity.

A systematic review of literature is a rigorous way of obtaining data from written works. It is a bias-free style that every researcher wanting to be a research expert should experience. Limiting itself to peer-reviewed journals, academically written works, and quantitative assessment of data through statistical methods, this style of literature review ensures objectivity in every stage of the research. (Fraenbell 2012)

Structure of the RRL

The structure of the whole literature review indicates the organizational pattern or order of the components of the summary of the RRL results.

For the traditional review, the structure of the summary resembles that of an essay where series of united sentences presents the RRL results. However, this structure of traditional review varies based on your subject and area of specialization.

For the systematic review, the structure is based on the research questions; so much so, that, if your RRL does not adhere to a certain method to make you begin your RRL with research questions, your RRL is headed toward a traditional literature review structure.

Regardless of what RRL structure you use, you must see to it that the organizational pattern of the results of your review contains these three elements:

1.     An introduction to explain the organizational method of your literature review,

2.     Headings and subheadings to indicate the right placement of your supporting statements and,

3.     A summary to concisely restate your main point. (Ridley 2013)