Developing a Literature Review

At this point in my study, I'm working on developing my project's literature review. Which is not a simple task! Creating a literature review for your study involves a lot of research, reading, taking notes, and organization. While my own literature review is still a work in progress, what I’ve experienced along the way might be helpful to other researchers in the process of writing their own literature review.

So what exactly is a literature review? It serves a variety of purposes. Creswell (2014), as always, has a definition for us: “It relates a study to the larger, ongoing dialogue in the literature, filling in gaps and extending prior studies” (p. 28). Basically, a literature review helps your reader understand the context of the study. Why is this study in particular important to the field? What are some related studies that support your thesis or research question? What to other researchers have to say on the subject? It’s the researcher’s job to organize all of that information and present it in a way that makes sense to those who read your study.

A literature review takes a lot of time to organize, and for good reason. When performing preliminary research, you need to scour the available literature. Creswell recommends different numbers of articles you should review depending on the purpose of your study (Master's thesis, dissertation, a single study, or something else), but you should plan on at least 50 to really get a good idea of what exists in the current literature. Some articles will be relevant to your study, but others that you think will benefit you really won’t. This thorough research will help you create your literature map, which in turn will help you organize the literature review.

I introduce literature maps in my previous blog post on research tips, so that may help you get started as well! This post also includes a number of my own research tips to help you get through all that research of the literature that you'll have to do.

Currently, I'm developing the themes that create the backbone for the review and help build the literature map. For instance, some of my themes right now are Document Design, Lesson Planning, Private Schools, and Student Understanding. Most of the articles that I review now will fall under one of these categories. These themes will generally follow the keywords that you use throughout your research. As an example, Document Design is one of my keywords that also became a topic of my literature review. Looking at a list of keywords you’ve searched with may help you define these literature map sections. 

Once you've developed some trending themes in your research, you can use a literature map to see how it all connects. The relevant studies you find can then connect your themes together. Some studies I've found for my own map include how lesson planning can affect student understanding, and general thoughts on document design and reader comprehension.

Creswell (2014) gives a visual example of how a literature map may look (p. 39).

As you fill in your map, you can see where the gaps in literature are. For my study, there aren't really any studies that connect Document Design and Private Schools. This gap in literature shows why your specific research questions are important, because no other researchers have looked at that particular intersection of ideas. My study is important to the field because I want to research that connection between document design and private school education to learn more about how private school students understand documents.

Once your map is complete, you can start developing the structure for the written literature review. The best method is to take your broadest theme and work your way down to the more specific themes. For my review, I will start my literature with the broad definition of document design, and how it applies to my topic. From there, I will move on to specific document design research that applies to my own study.

How you organize your review will generally be up to you. What works best and flows best to support your purpose, ideas, and current research in the field? One method of organization I suggest is writing down the different sections of your literature map on separate notecards. You can then lay those notecards out on the floor and create a visual outline for the literature review. The notecards allow you to easily and quickly rearrange your topics as needed.

From there, it’s just a matter of taking your outline and cranking out the review itself! Yes, it will take a lot of work to write the full literature review, but it is an essential part of research design. To make the process a little easier, I would recommend that you find articles similar to your own study, and model your review after that.

Happy researching and writing!

References:

Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Los Angeles: Sage.