- Read: Thomas (2025): Chapters 1 — 4
- Read: The mindmapping for marketing strategy: Case study of fashion industry Links to an external site.
- https://www.proquest.com/docview/2557517749?accountid=12085&pq-origsite=summon&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals
- Read: Chapter 1 for Htdylr.pptx
- Read: Chapter 2 for Htdylr.pptx
- Read: Chapter 3 for Htdylr.pptx
- Read: Chapter 4 for Htdylr.pptx
- Watch: Concept Mapping for Dissertation Writing
- Watch: How to Write a Literature Review
Discussion Thread: Literature Review Types and Primary Steps
Narrative And Systematic Literature Reviews
Differentiate between the narrative and systematic literature reviews including advantages/disadvantages of each.
Phases of a Literature Review
Briefly explain the Scan, Scope, Search, Structure, Synthesize, and Write phases of a literature review. Remember brevity, be concise – see rubric.
PowerPoint 1 Starting
Chapter 1 from
How to do your literature review
How to do your literature review
11 Chapters
11 PowerPoints
Chapter and PowerPoint overview
| 1 | Starting |
| 2 | Scanning, skimming, saving and storing |
| 3 | Sources, quality and criticality |
| 4 | Scoping |
| 5 | Searching and screening |
| 6 | Structuring a narrative review |
| 7 | Systematising |
| 8 | Strategising: comparing systematic, realist and narrative reviews |
| 9 | Synthesising: storyline and theory |
| 10 | Synthesising and analysing |
| 11 | Scribing, concluding and stopping |
This is PowerPoint 1 for Chapter 1 …
We will look at
What a literature review is for
The process of doing a review
Types of literature review
What counts as literature
The shape of a review
The nature of an Introduction to a literature review
Setting a question
Whether to use AI
All of this is discussed in much more detail in Chapter 1 of How to do your literature review
What is a literature review for?
To identify themes and lines of agreement among authors
To identify disagreements, controversies or dilemmas in the literature
To bring together – to integrate – different sources of information on a topic
To synthesize these different sources of information
To pinpoint gaps in the literature
To discover and discuss the main methods of research being used in the area
To critically reflect on the nature and quality of the literature on the topic.
To draw conclusions from the literature and comment on the validity of those conclusions.
The process of a literature review …
You get a ‘feel’ of the area by reading around. You set a prima facie question. (Chapters 1-3)
Finding core references, drawing a mindmap, revising your prima facie question. (Chapter 4)
Deciding how you will structure your review – thematic, funnelled, chronological, etc.
(Chapters 6-8)
Gathering more information using databases and AI tools.
Organising your references and selecting the best. (Chapter 5)
Weaving your findings into a narrative. Engaging with theory. (Chapters 9-11)
Scan Scope Search Structure Synthesise
A literature review may be …
A project in itself – a freestanding literature review
Or
Part of a broader research project
There are two types of literature review
The narrative review
The systematic review
Each has different purposes. Neither is superior to the other. We’ll look at each in detail in subsequent PowerPoints.
What counts as literature?
books
authored books
chapters in edited books
journal articles
peer review journals
professional journals
conference and symposium proceedings
dissertations and theses
newspaper and periodical articles
websites
blogs and vlogs
social media
research reports
university repositories of their staffs’ published and unpublished material
patent databases
court records
10
What’s the shape of a review?
Chapter or section headings
Percent of wordage
Begin with an Introduction
The Introduction to your literature review has to …
introduce the reader to your thinking about the topic and its associated literature.
translate your thinking, your interests and your purposes into initial research questions for your literature review.
tell the reader briefly about any changes in direction that have happened as the review has progressed.
outline the potential ways in which you could go about doing the review.
First set a question, or a thesis statement
Your prima facie question may be revised
Revised question(s)
Prima facie question(s)
Initial reading around
What makes a good question for a literature review?
Clear It has to be unambiguous and easily understood
Specific It has to be sufficiently specific for it to be clear what constitutes an answer
Answerable We can see what literature needs to be collected to answer it
Should you use AI
There are AI tools such as Elicit.com that are good at helping you to search
They are less good at weaving together sources into a narrative
They can’t triangulate
They can’t understand how sources fit (or don’t fit) together
They can’t offer lines of reasoning that help to answer a research question
Summary
Literature reviews tell you what is known about a topic and help you to contextualize your own work.
Literature reviews either contribute to a broader project in which you do your own fieldwork, or they can be freestanding projects, without additional fieldwork.
There are narrative and systematic reviews. In a narrative review the onus is on you to select appropriate literature and assess it, whereas with the systematic review you use a specialised procedure to search for and select appropriate literature.
There are several steps involved in doing a literature review: scanning, scoping, searching, structuring, and synthesising. They’re about gradually focusing down on the subject that you are interested in, searching and synthesising the literature, and ultimately concluding with a write-up that has cohesion.
The Introduction to your review is important. It maps out the area for your work, and it helps you shape your questions.
For a literature review that informs a broader project, it will normally occupy 20-30 percent of the wordage for the project write-up. For a freestanding review, it’s 100 percent.
The research question or thesis statement will be at the heart of your review. Right at the beginning of your work, you will set a start-up question, a prima facie question, which may be changed as you scope the area.
Activity
| Topic | |
| Background | |
| Dimensions of the issue | |
| Question or thesis statement |
Look at Table 1.1 in How to do your literature review. It sketches out background features to an issue and some dimensions to pursue in an introductory chapter.
Think of a topic in your own area of interest. Now:
sketch out a background to the issue
outline various dimensions to the issue
offer a question or statement based on these …
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PowerPoint 2 Scanning, skimming, saving and storing
Chapter 2 from
How to do your literature review
This is PowerPoint 2 for Chapter 2 …
We will look at
Speed reading
Gutting books and articles
Keeping notes
Using a reference manager
All of this is discussed in much more detail in Chapter 2 of How to Do Your Literature Review
Speed reading
Don’t try to read word by word.
Rather than reading left to right as normal, scan down the centre of the page.
Allow yourself a maximum time to scan one page – say, 20 seconds.
Give more time to diagrams and tables, which contain more information than words.
Cover the lines and paragraphs that you have already read. Or if reading on a screen, keep scrolling so that you can’t go back.
Don’t try to understand the full sense of a piece. Just get an impression of what it’s about. Use titles and section headings to help you in this.
Don’t be a perfectionist. If it doesn’t make sense, move on.
Gutting an article
Read the abstract, if there is one. If not (if it’s a chapter, for example), use some other summary, often contained in the Introduction section.
Look at the keywords. Do they address the theme of your own research questions?
Scan and survey the whole piece quickly, remembering that key nuggets of information occur at the beginning and end of an article or chapter, and at the beginning and end of paragraphs.
Ask yourself questions, related especially to what you intend to find out.
Gutting a book
Very quickly, flip through the book to get a general impression of its relevance for you. Don’t be tempted to try to read parts in detail.
Look at the table of contents – the headings and subheadings. Pay particular attention to the Introduction chapter. In many books, this contains a useful summary of the whole book.
Sometimes a book will contain a Conclusion chapter. Read this more carefully.
If you have an e version of a book, it’s easy to highlight parts or mark phrases for notes.
Try using an app to keep notes
Microsoft OneNote
Apple Notes
Google Keep
Notion
Obsidian
Evernote
Joplin
Formatting notes
At the top, put the reference to the article or book
On the next line, write down keywords
Now, jot down notes about background information, themes, methods, findings, or any material of interest to you and your research questions
Go through these notes highlighting themes or adding different coloured text to indicate higher-order classification
Use background colours to differentiate categories
Make clear any words that come directly from the author
In the last lines, add any of your own commentary, including reference to other material that you think may be relevant
Use the organisational system of the particular tool you are using (e.g. Notebook Section Page in OneNote, or Labels and Titles in Google Keep), to divide up and hierarchise your references
Use a reference manager
A reference manager helps you to build up a personal library of references to sources as you collect them.
Popular ones are RefWorks, EndNote and Zotero
RefWorks is almost entirely web based which means there isn’t much software to install but you’ll always need a web connection. EndNote and Zotero, by contrast, are mainly desktop based and work offline.
RefWorks and EndNote need institutional subscriptions for free use, but Zotero is free for a basic account.
EndNote, RefWorks and Zotero all work with Mac and Windows, but only Zotero works also with Linux.
All are compatible with Word. EndNote is not compatible with Google Docs, while RefWorks and Zotero are.
Summary
There’s a lot to read, and it’s important to be able to read quickly, given the amount of material that has to be digested in a literature review.
In your initial scans of the literature, learn to skim, speed read and gut articles and books.
To do this we have to learn to skip over material and just get a general feel of what it’s saying.
Taking notes is important for subsequent retrieval of your findings and ideas.
You can take notes in a number of ways, including by using readily available online tools.
Be systematic in the way you collect notes, and use online tools such as Google Keep to help you store and organise them.
Reference managers such as Zotero take much of the drudgery out of saving and storing references and help enormously in the compilation of your reference list.
Reference managers also help in the organization of your work by enabling you to compile a library with sections and subsections
Activity
Using your favourite search engine, access the home pages for EndNote and Zotero
Make notes on the offer made by each
Find out which reference manager your university supports (eg EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero)
Access the reference manager in 3 and take notes on its main features
If you can’t access the university-supported reference manager, access Zotero (which is free) and take notes on its main features
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PowerPoint 3 Sources, quality and criticality
Chapter 3 from
How to do your literature review
This is PowerPoint 3 for Chapter 3 …
We will look at
Quality of sources
Being critical
Triangulation
All of this is discussed in much more detail in Chapter 3 of How to Do Your Literature Review
Literature comprises sources
Books
authored books
chapters in edited books
journal articles
peer review journals
professional journals
conference and symposium proceedings
dissertations and theses
newspaper and periodical articles
websites
blogs and vlogs
social media
research reports
Sometimes called ‘grey literature’
Judging the quality of sources
Two main ways of judging quality are by asking …
Is the source a primary source or a secondary source?
Is it peer reviewed?
Primary or secondary sources
Primary sources are ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’, such as a research report written by the person or people who did the research.
A secondary source – such as a textbook – has reported on somebody else’s research.
Primary sources are usually thought to be more trustworthy than secondary sources, though secondary sources may give a good overview.
Peer review
A peer review journal is one where experts in the field have examined the piece of work to see if it is worthy of publication in the journal.
Peer review is generally thought to be the best guarantee of a source’s worth. However, it is not infallible.
Being critical
Ask yourself:
What is the status of the output? Peer reviewed? Primary or secondary?
Are there any vested interests at play (revealed by funders)?
Might different methods for collecting data or analysing findings have yielded different results?
What sources of information are the writers or researchers themselves drawing upon – is there evidence of balance?
Has the writer been on a thought merry-go-round, looking only at ‘high-quality’ papers that cite each other and ignoring research of different types or dissenting voices or unorthodox views?
Is citation count a good index of quality?
Citation count is about how often a paper has been cited, which you can find out on Google Scholar and databases.
It’s a useful pointer, but is more an index of impact rather than quality.
Why might citation count give the wrong idea?
Very recently published high quality papers will not have many citations – because they’re new, and the field has not had a chance to assimilate them yet.
High quality papers may be hard for a field to understand.
Low quality papers may achieve high citation counts because they summarise a standard position but offer little that is new.
Papers may achieve high citation counts simply because they are on controversial subjects.
Other ways of judging quality
Was the research funded? If so, by whom?
What methods were used? Were they appropriate?
Has the source been cited by others?
Critical awareness
Critical awareness is not just about spotting bias.
It is about an awareness that knowledge is frail, not fixed, and that you should approach everything you read and hear with a questioning mind.
You should always ask yourself whether something could have been done differently, or whether different conclusions could have been drawn.
Search far and wide – triangulate
Triangulation means using a combination of several data collection methods and/or analytical techniques to gain a rounded perspective on a research problem or question.
Triangulation is especially important in literature review, since you are relying on one source of data (ie literature).
It’s therefore important that you seek literature of different kinds and which uses different methods.
Right method for the question
There are many kinds of research …
case study
action research
ethnography
experiment
longitudinal study
cross-sectional study
survey
comparative study
… and more. Do you think that the methods used in the research article you are looking at were appropriate for the question being asked?
Don’t get bewildered by over-analysis
There is the danger in making analyses of quality that we can overthink things.
Don’t get bewildered in the critical analysis headlights. While criticality is vitally important, over-analysis can prevent you from putting fingers to keyboard at all.
Summary
There are many sources on which a literature review can draw, from articles to books to conference proceedings to websites … and many others – almost anything that is recorded in any form.
The quality of sources varies enormously: some are well grounded and trustworthy; others may be unreliable.
Primary sources, where researchers have drawn directly from their own work are usually more reliable than secondary sources (such as textbooks), where authors have drawn from the work of others.
Peer review – the process of researchers’ work being reviewed by other researchers – is taken to be the most dependable form of quality assurance.
Conflicts of interest, such as that potentially introduced by research funding, should make us guarded about the findings of a research study.
Citation count is an indicator of a source’s impact, not necessarily its quality.
It’s important to approach the literature with a critical disposition, taking all of the above into account and approaching everything you read in a questioning frame of mind.
Try to be wide-ranging in your literature appraisal, valuing triangulation, i.e. looking at an issue from different points of view and using different methods.
Activity
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