Literature Reviews: Getting Started: The 5 Steps

It is important to make sure that the sources you're using are good quality, academic-appropriate sources. You need to read critically when searching for literature. 

Evaluate the sources for their credibility. How have they arrived at their conclusions? Are there any conflicting theories or findings? Is the publisher reputable? Reading at this critical level will help you decide whether a publication should or should not be included in your literature review.

Author credentials

Examine how the contributors are affiliated. Are the researchers connected to a university, a research lab or a pharmaceutical company? Are the authors considered credible in their field? Are they promoting special interests?

Relevance and scope

Make sure the publications you include in your literature review are relevant and within the scope of your topic, in terms of theoretical argument, research methodology, timeframe and currency.

Reliability

How well is the study designed? Do you see any room for improvement? Do similar studies come to the same conclusion? Have the authors explored the topic from different points of view, or do they rely on a more one-sided argument?

Click HERE to see our help guide on evaluating information you find online. 

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The very first step in a literature review is deciding what it is you will be researching. Your research question defines the entirety of your final piece of work, including the literature review. It should focus on something from the research field that needs to be explored, where there are gaps in the information. This will ensure that your contribution is valuable and that you are providing readers with a different angle or perspective on an issue or problem.

Remember, a literature review is not a collection of vaguely related studies, but instead it represents background and research developments related to your specific research question - analysed, interpreted, and synthesised by you.  

For this reason it is important to hit on the right research question. 

Ask yourself: 

• Is it too broad? Is it too narrow? For example, a research question like “why are social networking sites harmful?” is too broad; there will be too much information to write a concise literature review. Change it to “how are online users experiencing or addressing privacy issues on Twitter and Facebook?" and it is more specific. It gives you a niche within the research field to focus on and explore.
• Has it been used as a research question by someone else before?
• Have you discussed it with your lecturer? They can guide you if your question isn't quite right yet. 

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You need to decide how broadly or narrowly you are going to search for literature. This will depend on a few factors: what your research question or topic is, what your lecturer says, and how well written on the topic is. 

Remember, the goal is not to examine everything that's ever been written on  your topic. To avoid your search results being too numerous, you should narrow down your scope by thinking of the following factors:

1. How many years should your search cover?
2. How comprehensive should it be? Will it cover every facet of a topic or focus on one area?
3. Are there criteria by which you can narrow down the topic? For example, by age, by gender, by location, by methodology (e.g qualitative or quantitative research, case studies), by theoretical framework, etc.?

Here are some examples of topics and searches that are too braod, and more narrow approaches you could take: 

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You can also narrow the scope of your search by utilising advanced search techniques, and using filters to eliminate irrelevant search results. You can find more information on both of these HERE

It is important to select the right databases in which to conduct your search. Rather than searching generally across all the library databases, some of which may not have anything to do with your topic, it would be more efficient to go to databases which are more closely aligned with your topic.

You can see IADT Library's list of databases here. 

Ask your lecturer which databases they think you should search.

For information on how to use our databases, click HERE.

Searching for the literature is one of the steps which can take the most time. Take your time to be thorough and methodical. One of the best things you can do is keep track of your searches. The software we recommend to do this is Zotero. Zotero is a tool which allows you to save sources and citations, including taking notes about them as you read them, which will save you lots of time down the road when you come to analysing these sources. You can read all about Zotero here.

Tips to finding relevant literature

• Review the abstracts of research studies carefully. An abstract is a comprehensive summary of what the article is about. This will save you time because you can quickly see if the article is relevant to you or not. 
• Document the searches you conduct in each database so that you can duplicate them if you need to later (or avoid dead-end searches that you'd forgotten you'd already tried).
• Use the bibliographies and references of research studies you find to locate others. You can also use citation tracking to see who has used a piece of work in their own research and how they've built on this.
• Note what key words are used by authors, usually in their abstracts and search for those. Sometimes having the right vocabulary for the topic can help you find many more sources you might have missed otherwise.
• Ask your lecturer if you are missing any key works in the field.

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What about searching Google? Googling your topic can bring up hundreds of thousands of hits, but rarely will the sources from a Google search be appropriate to use in an academic assignment like a literature review. For a literature review, the sources need to be academically authoritative - for example, academic books, journals, research reports, government publications. Using non-scholarly or non-authoritative sources in your literature review will likely result in a poor grade. 

This step is the output that you will be graded on in the end. 

Here are some questions to help you analyse the research:

• What was the research question of the study you are reviewing? What were the authors trying to discover or argue?
• Was the research funded by a source that could influence the findings?
• What were the research methodologies? Analyse its literature review, the samples and variables used, the results, and the conclusions. Does the research seem to be complete? Could it have been conducted more soundly? What further questions does it raise?
• If there are conflicting studies, why do you think that is?
• How are the authors viewed in the field? Has this study been cited?; if so, how has it been analysed by others?
• Has your topic been written about very rarely? If so, why do you think that is? What has been written that's close to the topic?

Tips: 

• Again, review the abstracts carefully.  
• Keep careful notes so that you may track your thought processes during the research process.

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