Kindly share your valuable suggestions .
Most importantly my concern is while referring a research paper, if I want to read the author cited papers under reference section how can I find them.Kindly help me in this I am getting chaos regarding this.
Dear Adhikari,
The process of conducting a literature review is very similar across various fields of studies. Since you wish to look at social security in the manufacturing industry in India, your first step will be to identify those words or combination of words that could potentially provide hits on the various databases that you are searching in. Remember that most publishers request that authors should provide key words to their article. These key words are used for indexing the article so that when those key words are typed into the databases where that article is indexed, then the article is identified. Therefore, identifying potential key words that could provide those articles is key. When you key in those words and very little comes up, then there is a potential dearth of knowledge in that area. Other authors in their conclusion and recommendation would suggest further research into certain areas. You can also identify knowledge gap through the trend of what is already published.
Of course, you can look at the reference list of other authors to obtain other articles dealing with the same interest. Usually, authors will cite their previous publications dealing in the same subject matter.
Regards
Thank you very much Prof. Mukumbang for your valuable information
I agree Ferdinand C. Mukumbang and have this procedure to add.
1. Identify research keywords
Your research interest can be reduced to at least 3 keywords. Each keyword is normally 1 - 3 words. You can identify the keywords from previously published work related to your research interest.
2. Search research databases
Search for papers on that research databases such as Web of Knowledge and Scopus. Try to narrow your search using appropriate search strings where necessary. And collect the necessary papers.
3. Identify pivotal papers
The pivotal papers in your research interest are normally those with the most citations or the first articles on the topic. Reading these is important because it will show you why and how the research interest began.
4. Identify key review papers
Not all reviews are equal, some reviews merely list work that has been done. These might not be good. You need to read reviews that analyze and synthesize the state of science. They will discuss knowledge gaps and future research directions.
5. Read the papers critically
You don't need to rely on reviews. Sometimes they're no reviews on that specific topic. Read the papers, check the methods - how can you improve them, check the objectives- what more could be done, compare the papers - who did it better, what's missing, what else could be done.
6. Talk to people
Talk to senior researchers in the field, your boss, fellow researchers at your institution or in other countries. Attend conferences and talk to people. Most of the published material is dated the most recent article contains material done maybe a year ago. Talk to people for a up-to-date information.
7. Write a review
That's what I did. Writing a review forces you to do all of the six steps above. Importantly, it offers a time bound way of measuring the fruitfulness of your activities. Again, the reviewer comments you will receive will inform your research.
For scholarly literature review, Edmond Sanganyado suggested excellent advice. I have also published literature review papers. Based on my literature review experience, I suggest the following ways:
1) Select your broad research topic and then find related specific topics: Example: Broad topic: Online marketing or Internet marketing, then go for a set of specific topics: like Search engine marketing, website marketing, Online consumer behaviour etc.
2) Find the recent and seminal papers on each related topical area. Try to find main focus of each article. Especially look into limitation and future research direction sections of each article.
3) Identify key research ares on your broad topics. To identify the key topical areas, critically analyze at least top 4-6 Meta analysis papers.
4) Based on the findings from the point 2 and 3 above, try to find out which topical areas need to be analysed further based on future research direction analysis in point 2.
For conducting methodological review of literature, please see this seminal paper. I have used this paper to review literature in my research area.
Webster, J., & Watson, R. T. (2002). Analyzing the past to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review. MIS quarterly, xiii-xxiii.
Thanks,
Gobinda
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