Hello Krishna,

Attached you will find a flowchart illustrating the main steps in preparing a literature survey. A brief guide to the technical writing is also attached. Hope that they will help you.

Dear Krishna,

Have a look at my working paper: Working Paper How to Write a Literature Review

Krisha,

It is true that the task can seem daunting to those learning the process. It's not just the critical search process itself - but also the added complexity of the critical appraisal of the collected literature. The attached chapter may assist. It is nursing-focused - but the principles are generic and can be applied to various bibliographic databases.

This file may help you

Krishna ji ,

I guess most of these literature will stress on the review of literature before the departure for the fieldwork/research. In fact , it does not stop at this point and you may need to to go for that after having good amount of data on hand.

I find that developing a specific question to answer helps to focus the literature searching and then the review. Often a topic is the focus, for example, infant nutrition, which gives a large amount of studies to go through. If the review is more focused, e.g. what is the effect on advice given to parents from formal teaching of paediatricians on protein and energy needs of infants, this helps searching and structuring the review.

http://gia.usf.edu/data/general-guidelines.pdf

Introduction

The introduction should identify your topic, some discussion of the significance of that topic and a thesis statement that outlines what conclusion you will draw from your analysis and synthesis of the literature. If your literature review is part of a larger work, explain the importance of the review to your research question.

Body

Often divided by headings/subheadings, the body summarizes and evaluates the current state of knowledge in the field. It notes major themes or topics, the most important trends, and any findings about which researchers agree or disagree. If the review is preliminary to your own thesis, its purpose is to make an argument that will justify your proposed research. Therefore, it will discuss only that research which leads directly to your own thesis.

Conclusion

The conclusion should provide a summary of your findings from the literature review. Explain what your analysis of the material leads you to conclude about the overall state of the literature, what it provides and where it is lacking. You can also provide suggestions for future research or explain how your future research will fill the gaps in the existing body of work on that topic.

The literature review process depending on the size and scope of your literature review. consists of the reading and research, analyzing, and revising.

Introduction, body, conclusion

Dear Colleges

Thank you very much for useful tips.

Could you suggest me strategies to synthesize literature review as a coherent piece of writing?

Regards

Krishna

https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/literature-reviews/

The CiteSpace may be very useful to you in preparing a review.

Article The Structure and Dynamics of Co-Citation Clusters: A Multip...

I also found the research tools mind map of Nader Ale Ebrahim is a prefect reading.

https://www.mindmeister.com/39583892/research-tools-by-nader-ale-ebrahim

1. Develop your research question first

2. Search using different keywords from different sites (such as Pub-med, Embase, Cochrane or Google scholars) by connecting the keywords as 'Mesh' terms and 'text words'

3. Then go to advance (in case of pub-med) the connect the obtained result by 'AND' or 'OR' according to the differences or similarities.

4. Extract first by title, then by abstract and finally by full texts.

5. So accordingly based of the outcome variables you are interested you can extract and compile either as texts (systematic review) or tables, graphs, charts (for Meta-analysis).

Good Luck!

The following are useful strategies for literature review.

· First, you should identify key terms,

· Locate appropriate literature accordingly,

· Critically evaluate and select the literature,

· Systematically organize the literature,

· Finally, prepare or write a review.

Dear Krishna,

Thank you very much for asking a very important question. I have found these six kinds of reviewing of literature in Internet. For the novices, one of the way to write a part of the manuscript is aware of the questions are supposed to be answered at that part(please find attached file).

Additionally, in my opinion, thematic literature review is the easy way for beginners. To do so, use some software packages to qualitative data analysis such as MAXQDA or Nvivo to code your manuscripts that you have already found from Internet or databases. One or more codes may create one theme, then try to organize your paragraphs based on these themes. Finally, you may follow the procedures as mentioned above by Tefera Tadesse

For the first stages of writing, I think this may help. However, the effective recommendation is reading the more articles, books or research reports.

Best regards,

At some point you should expect that they have written term papers. Set a goal. I had one class where the term paper was any subject of your choice related to class topics and it must have 60 or more citations. I think there might have been one or two sub-assignments. Things like "submit your topic by fifth week of class."

In addition to the information/referenced materials as mentioned in the links specified below, the guidance/strategies as per the following papers may further help, namely: the guidelines for assessing research reviews (see: Table 1, Oxman and Guyatt, 1988, p. 698); principles of a search strategy/stages in the search process/summary table (see: Timmins and McCabe, 2005, pp. 43-44).

• Oxman, A. D. and Guyatt, G. H. (1988) Guidelines for reading literature reviews, Canadian Medical Association journal, 138, 8, pp. 697-703.
• Rowley, J. and Slack, F. (2004) Conducting a literature review, Management research news, 17, 6, pp. 31-39.
• Timmins, F. and McCabe, C. (2005) How to conduct an effective literature search, Nursing Standard, 20, 11, pp. 41-47.
• How to select papers when writing a literature review?: https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_to_select_papers_when_writing_a_literature_review
• How to select an article for literature review section?: https://www.researchgate.net/post/how_to_select_an_article_for_literature_review_section

I download all papers related to my subject from all relevant sources of information including google scholar, researchgate and other journals that my institution has access to. I then save all of them in a folder. I then write a skeleton of my review. I read again all the references, but this time now citing specific issues. I then check all relevant citation in each of the journals i would have downloaded and download these as well. I enrich my citation with the ones i got from the second round. After this I continue to improve my review by again checking the journals that make specific references to my main points in the review. I relate ech aspect to the findings of my paper and I am done!

To write a literature review you need to check the following:

1. Find survey papers within the scope of your research then use their current (within 5 years) references to be part of your review.

2. Use the most cited and current papers to be your related work.

3. Follow the structure of close thesis so that you may have roughly a guideline what should be in, and what should be out.

3. Consult your supervisor for final draft of the literature.

@Yousef, A focus on the most recent 5 years might be justified for the beginning student (college freshman, high school). However, I don't thing that restriction will work in general because it will exclude many key papers.

I figure that if the paper is relevant to the research that you are conducting then you should be aware of that paper no matter when it was published. If they happened to do your experiment exactly but published in 1897, then you need to deal with that publication in some form.

@Timothy_A_Ebert

On of the most and primary feature of any research is to be "current". Therefore, the hot and current issues can be found roughly in the most recent survey and review papers at least in the domain of applied science.

However, if we are going to play the IF condition game, which is "odd". Of course there should be an exception.

- IF the paper is relevant to the research and can be justified then no matter how old it is. in fact if the paper time same as the time the prophets Jesus or Mohammed then it can be accepted.

Bottom line: There is no FIX rules in research as long as researcher able to justify. What we post here is the most generally accepted practice.

The date component in defining "current" may be well defined in some subjects and poorly defined in others. Current in computer technology might only be a few years old. Current in the systematics of a small group of insects may be 50 years old or more since the last revision of the group, with a few monographs along the way that are helpful. Current might have been longer since "this" study site was last subjected to an archeological dig.

Given that there was no restriction to the discipline of science, and the RG audience is diverse. So there is no real way to set a specific date for the time span of a relevant review.

The problem also arises in something as simple as a review of the Higgs Boson. Do you stop at 2012 when it was first discovered, or do you go back further to discuss the theoretical discourse that predicted its existence in 1960. That depends on how you phrase the title of the review article, or maybe how you have phrase the problem to the students.

@ Timothy A Ebert.

Your las comment make sense.

"Depends on how you phrase the title of the review article, or maybe how you have phrase the problem to the students". Well said.

I would like to add the following:

Each domain may have its generally accepted practice which is not necessary to be applied in the other domain . For instance, Computer Science and Information Technology may differ in defining the word "current" comparing to the social science field, where they get to discuses underpinning theories from the 60s and 70s to establish their research.

again, there is no FIX rules in research as long as researcher able to justify.

I think all previous answers covered this basic question.

First, identify key-concepts, find out and write the main ideas about them. Identify the sub-concepts.

Second, link concepts and sub-concepts in theory.

Go on, until you find out what is missing in the theory around them. This gap should be answered by your research questions.

A very basic ... (and broad yes, I know!)principle about how to deal with literature review, which I find usefull.