It involves developing your skills in being
able to read actively and critically: 1. Take
good notes, including the material you read.
2. Develop critical reading skills. 3 Your
search for literature should be guided by
your research question. Your review of
literature also shows why your research
question is important. 4. Do not try to get
everything you read into a literature review.
5. reading the literature is not something
that you should stop doing once you begin
designing your research. 6. Try to use the
literature to tell a story about it. 7. Make sure
that key references included in the review
are essential.
Six ways of conceptualizing a literature
review: 1. List 2. Search 3. Survey 4.
Vehicle 5. Facilitator 6. Report
Systematic review
This is an approach to reviewing the literature
that adopts explicit procedures. The
proponents of systematic review are more
likely to generate unbiased and
comprehensive accounts of the literature,
especially in fi elds in which the aim is to
understand whether a particular intervention
has particular benefi ts, than those using the
traditional review, which is often depicted by
them as haphazard.
Its main steps: 1. Define the purpose
purpose and scope of the review. 2. Seek
out studies relevant to the scope and
purpose of the review. The reviewer
should seek out studies relevant to the
research question(s). 3. Evaluate and
judge the studies from Step 2. the
research items are examined for their
degree of fit with the research
question(s) and with the quality criteria
employed by the researchers. 4. Analyse
each study and synthesize the results
Meta-analysis involves summarizing the results of
a large number of quantitative studies and
conducting various analytical tests to show
whether or not a particular variable has an effect.
compared. The aim of this approach is to establish
whether or not a particular variable has a certain
effect by comparing the results of different studies
Meta-ethnography is a method that is used
to achieve interpretative synthesis of
qualitative research and other secondary
sources, thus providing a counterpart to
meta-analysis in quantitative research
(Noblit and Hare 1988). Crucial to
understanding this approach is that the
synthesis is focused primarily on the
interpretations and explanations offered
by studies that are included, rather than
on the data that these studies are based
on. It thus translates the interpretations
of one study into the interpretations of
another one.
Proponents of systematic review also
recommend the approach for its
transparency; in other words, the
grounds on which studies were selected
and how they were analysed are clearly
articulated and are potentially replicable
Narrative review
The process of reviewing the literature is
a more uncertain process of discovery, in that
you might not always know in advance where
it will take you! Narrative reviews therefore
tend to be less focused and more wide-ranging
in scope than systematic reviews.
Interpretative researchers are thus more likely than
deductive researchers to change their view of the theory
or literature as a result of the analysis of collected data
and so they require greater fl exibility to modify the
boundaries of their subject of study as they go along. This
means that narrative review may be more suitable for
qualitative researchers whose research strategy is based
on an interpretative epistemology
Compared to systematic reviews,
narrative reviews can appear rather
haphazard (thus making them diffi cult
to reproduce), of questionable
comprehensiveness, and lacking in
discrimination in terms of the kind of
evidence used, though such a view is
by no means always held
Avoiding plagiarism
To plariarize is defi ned in The Concise Oxford
Dictionary as to ‘take and use another person’s
(thoughts, writings, inventions . . . ) as one’s own’.
Major reasons for plagiarism on which
staff and students largely agreed were:
a failure to understand referencing
rules; laziness or bad time
management; and the ready
availability of material on the Internet.
These findings point, at the very
least, to the need to be fully acquainted
with your institution’s regulations on
plagiarism and its advice on proper
referencing.
One of the most important messages of this
section will hopefully be that you should guard
against plagiarism at all costs. Try therefore to
express your ideas in your own words and
acknowledge properly those ideas that are not
your own.