Lesson 23: The Process of Review of Related Literature

Your search for knowledge happens in every stage of your research work, but it is in the research stage of review of related literature where you spend considerable time searching knowledge about the topic. Exposed to various sources of knowledge and conditioned by a timeframe of the research work, it is necessary that you adopt a certain method in reviewing or reading varied works of literature that are related to your research problem or topic.

Going methodical in your review of related literature means you have to go through the following related stages of the process of review of related literature that are true for any style of review (traditional or systematic) that you want to adopt. (Lappuci 2013; Robyler 2013; Freinbell 2012)

Stage 1: Search for the Literature

This is the stage of review of related literature where you devote much of your time in looking for sources of knowledge, data, or information to answer your research questions or to support your assumptions about your research topic.

Generally, there are three basic types of literature sources:

1.     General references that will direct you to the location of other sources;

2.     Primary sources that directly report or present a person’s own experiences; and

3.     Secondary sources that report or describe other people’s experiences or worldviews.

Secondary sources of knowledge give the most number of materials such as the Internet, books, peer-reviewed articles in journals, published literary reviews of a field, grey literature or unpublished and non-peer reviewed materials like theses, dissertations, conference proceedings, leaflets and posters, research studies in progress, and other library materials.

Websites introducing materials whose quality depends solely on every individual, social media networks (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, video, etc.) and other online encyclopedia are the other sources of information that you can consult during this stage.

You can have an access to these various sources of data in two methods: manually, or getting hold of the printed form of the material, and electronically or having a computer or online reading of the sources of knowledge.

Here are the pointers you have to remember in searching for the best sources of information or data: (Fraenbell 2012)

1.     Choose previous research findings that are closely related to your research.

2.     Give more weight to studies done by people possessing expertise or authority in the field of knowledge to which the research studies belong.

3.     Consider sources of knowledge that refer more to primary data than to secondary data.

4.     Prefer getting information from peer-reviewed materials than from general reading materials.

Stage 2: Reading the Source Material

Reading, understanding, or making the materials meaningful to you is what will preoccupy you on the second stage of reading RRL.

You can only benefit much from your reading activities if you confront the reading materials with the help of your HOTS. In understanding the sources of knowledge with your HOTS, you need to think interpretatively through these ways of inferential thinking: predicting, generalizing, concluding, and assuming.

On top of these should be your ability to criticize or evaluate, apply, and create things about what you have read.

Hence, reading or making sense of the source materials does not only make you list down ideas from the materials, but also permits you to modify, construct, or reconstruct ideas based on a certain principle, theory, pattern, method, or theme underlying your research.

Stage 3: Writing the Review

You do a great deal of idea connection and organization in this last stage of RRL to form an overall understanding of the material by paraphrasing or summarizing the it. In doing either of these two, you get to change the arrangement of ideas, structures of the language, and the format of the text using appropriate organizational techniques of comparison-contrast, chronological order, spatial relationship, inductive-deductive order, and transitional devices. Also, you make effective changes not only on language structures and format but also the quality of ideas incorporated into the summary or paraphrase as well. This means that in writing the review, based on the focus, theme, or theory underlying your research, you are free to fuse your opinions with the author’s ideas. (Corti 2014)

A simple presentation of the findings or argumentations of the writers on a particular topic with no incorporation of your own inferential, analytical, and comparative- contrastive thinking about other people’s ideas indicates poor literature review writing. This mere description, transfer, or listing of writer’s ideas that is devoid of or not reflective of your thinking is called dump or stringing method.

Good literature review writing shuns presenting ideas in serial abstracts, which means every paragraph merely consists of one article. This is a source-by-source literature writing that fails to link, compare, and contrast series of articles based on a theory or a theme around which the research questions revolve. (Remlen 2011)

Juxtaposing or dealing with studies with respect to each other is your way of proving the extent of the validity of the findings of previous studies vis-à-vis the recent ones. Reading the source material and writing the review analytically, argumentatively, or critically, you give yourself the chance to express your genuine or opinionated knowledge about the topic; thereby, increasing the enthusiasm of people in reading your work. (Radylyer 2013)

Another good approach to writing an excellent review is adopting good opening sentences of articles that should chronologically appear in the paper. Opening examples is not good.

Aquino (2015) said...

Roxas (2016) stated…

Perez (2017) wrote...

Mendoza (2018) asserted...

Examples of better article openings manifesting critical thinking through analysis, comparison and contrast of ideas and findings are as follows:

One early work by (Castro, 2017) proves that...

Another study on the topic by (Torres, 2017) maintains that...

The latest study by (Gomez, 2018) reveals that...

A research study by (Rivera, 2017) explains that...

Coming from various books on literature review writing are the following transitional devices and active verbs to link or express authors’ ideas in your paper. Using correct words to link ideas will make you synthesize your literature review, in a way that evidence coming from various sources of data, will present an overall understanding of the context or of the present circumstances affecting the research problem.

1.     Transitional devices – also, additionally, again, similarly, a similar opinion, however, conversely, on the other hand, nevertheless, a contrasting opinion, a different approach, etc.

2.     Active verbs – analyze, argues, assess, assert, assume, claim, compare, contrast, conclude, criticize, debate, defend, define, demonstrate, discuss, distinguish, differentiate, evaluate, examine, emphasize, expand, explain, exhibit, identify, illustrate, imply, indicate, judge, justify, narrate, outline, persuade, propose, question, relate to, report, review, suggest, summarize.