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Title: Challenges Of Writing Literature Review

Writing a literature review is an essential aspect of academic research, yet it's often regarded as one
of the most challenging tasks for students and researchers alike. This critical component of scholarly
work involves thorough examination, analysis, and synthesis of existing literature relevant to a
particular topic. However, the complexities involved can sometimes overwhelm even the most
seasoned scholars. Below, we delve into the common challenges faced when crafting a literature
review.

1. Information Overload: The abundance of scholarly articles, books, and other sources on any
given topic can be overwhelming. Sifting through this vast sea of information to identify
relevant sources requires time, patience, and discernment.
2. Narrowing Down the Scope: Defining the scope of the literature review can be tricky.
Striking a balance between inclusivity and specificity is crucial. It's essential to cover enough
ground to provide a comprehensive overview while avoiding the trap of being too broad or
too narrow in focus.
3. Synthesizing Information: After identifying relevant sources, synthesizing the information
cohesively is another challenge. Integrating various perspectives, methodologies, and findings
into a coherent narrative requires analytical skills and critical thinking.
4. Maintaining Objectivity: It's important for researchers to maintain objectivity throughout the
literature review process. However, personal biases and preconceptions can inadvertently
influence the interpretation of the literature, making it challenging to present an impartial
analysis.
5. Time Constraints: Writing a literature review is a time-consuming process that demands
meticulous attention to detail. Balancing this task with other academic and personal
commitments can be challenging, leading to time constraints and potential stress.
6. Writing and Organizational Skills: Crafting a well-written literature review requires strong
writing and organizational skills. Ensuring clarity, coherence, and logical flow while adhering
to academic conventions adds another layer of difficulty.
7. Citing and Referencing: Accurately citing and referencing sources is crucial in academic
writing. However, navigating different citation styles and ensuring consistency can be
daunting, especially for those new to scholarly research.

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In conclusion, while writing a literature review poses numerous challenges, it is a valuable skill that
contributes to the advancement of knowledge in any field. By recognizing these challenges and
seeking appropriate support when needed, researchers can navigate the literature review process more
effectively and produce high-quality scholarly work.
Reviewed articles may be summarized in the form of tables, and can be further structured using
organizing frameworks such as a concept matrix. On the same note, while reading literature reviews
written by other authors, you will see the areas that have been explored so much as well as the areas
that have little research done on them. Together with the three potential advantages of literature
reviews, the right-hand box of Figure 1 includes the two main publication forms of reviews. Focus
on how the writing is descriptive first, then critical, and in examples of literature review end, gaps
are identified. You may need to ask your examiner or professor the following questions. Here, you
will find several examples that meet, or in most cases, adhere to the criteria described earlier. It also
helps highlight the noteworthy areas of the research as well as gaps. Are you an instructor who has
received an exemplary literature review and have permission from the student to post. Pivotal
publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field. If
this is not going beyond the requirements of writing a sample of literature review, why not. However,
given the general nature of the work by Massaro et al. (2016), it cannot delve into all the strands of
accounting research. Whilst systematic reviews have become regarded as the highest standard of
evidence synthesis, many literature reviews fall short of these standards and may end up presenting
biased or incorrect conclusions. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture
of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. If the background knowledge is poor at the
beginning of the study, broad but clear research question can be reasonable. In turn, other reviews
have been less concerned with specific accounting phenomena and more interested in the application
of a certain method theory to accounting research. Similar to the traditional literature review, the
primary objective of a systematic literature review is to identify, critically appraise, and thereafter,
provide a summary of existing sources of evidence regarding a specific problem. You will need to
search the cognate literature before claiming there is “little previous research” on your topic. Even
when paraphrasing an author’s work, you still must provide a citation to that work. V. Common
Mistakes to Avoid These are the most common mistakes made in reviewing social science research
literature. Having an extensive literature review section, you are convincing your instructor on your
knowledge and ability to conduct research. Another insight might be to identify some irregularity in
the specifics of the review sample (cf. The need for consistency and coherence becomes more
obvious when we consider the risk of something called “method-slurring.” This is the problem of
blurring distinctions between qualitative approaches. It is the endless possibilities to learn more about
people that qualitative researchers resonate to. Please check course or programme information and
materials provided by teaching staff, including your project supervisor, for subject-specific guidance.
This entire process enables you to determine what is relevant to your research. This can be arranged
in various ways (e.g. thematically, chronologically or methodologically). Now use scissors to cut out
each part of the excerpt and sort them according to the topics. Common problems coming up with a
research question include: Deciding about the research area among a range of issues that are heeded
in your field of interest Not capable of pointing toward any interesting area or topic sufficient to
focus a major piece of work on Knowing about the area you want to concentrate on (e.g. emergency),
but not a certain topic Knowing what area and topic is specifically difficult to articulate a clear
question. Systematic review has become the highest standard of evidence synthesis and is well
established in the pipeline from research to practice in the field of health. In essence, a literature
review is more than just a summary of previously done research since, in addition to establishing the
strengths and weaknesses of a subject, it also conveys to the reader the established ideas and
knowledge on a particular topic. Hence, there is often no clear-cut or objective criterion of whether a
research item should be included in or excluded from a review sample.
Hence, the following advice comes with the limitation that parts of it are subjective. You can take
50-100 kinds of literature into consideration, but don’t delve too much. Journalists aren’t usually
scholars, which means they aren’t specialists on the topics they write about; hence newspaper stories
aren’t scholarly sources. This section aims to highlight important choices, including the extent of an
author’s criticism of the literature and the decision on whether to publish the review as a standalone
paper. Students ought to change the perception that writing a literature review is one of the most
minor parts of a research paper. In this post, Neal Haddaway highlights 8 common problems with
literature review methods, provides examples for each and provides practical solutions for ways to
mitigate them. Five key themes were found in the literature: poor communication can lead to various
negative outcomes, discontinuity of care, compromise of patient safety, patient dissatisfaction, and
inefficient use of resources. The arguments you should focus on in your sources should be either
supporting or refuting your stance, be a deeply embedded assumption, or philosophical problem
already established in the literature. Considering the ever-rising volumes of accounting research, I
suspect that demand for such reviews will remain high in the future. Conclusions: The paper
provides personal comments on the experiences of a researcher in conducting pure qualitative
research in the field of health. Here at Grad Coach, we’ve reviewed thousands of literature reviews
and seen a recurring set of mistakes and issues that drag students down. Keywords can be combined
using the Boolean operators, “and”, “or” and sometimes “not” to narrow down or expand the search
results. The paper begins with a general introduction and then proceeds to the literature review,
designated by the authors as their conceptual framework. Academic writing The Critical thinking
page has advice on how to be a more critical researcher and a form you can use to help you think
and break down the stages of developing your argument. Your sentences should transition easily and
bear logic. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. For
example, you may want to cite a collection of newspaper articles to demonstrate the emergence of a
recent trend. It will fight against extra irritating factor and work faster. A strong literature review
shows your reader that your project has a solid foundation in existing knowledge or theory. How to
Write a Literature Review A literature review for a research report is often a revision of the review
for a research proposal, which can be a revision of a stand-alone review. Literature Review Examples
For the following types of literature review, I present an explanation and overview of the type,
followed by links to some real-life literature reviews on the topics. 1. Narrative Review Examples
Also known as a traditional literature review, the narrative review provides a broad overview of the
studies done on a particular topic. All the materials from our website should be used with proper
references. Source: Overview: This narrative review analyzed themes emerging from 69 articles
about communication in healthcare contexts. Some databases to search for journals and articles
include: Your university’s library catalogue Google Scholar Project Muse (humanities and social
sciences) Medline (life sciences and biomedicine) EconLit (economics) Inspec (physics, engineering
and computer science) You can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search: Read the
abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. For instance, Repenning et al.
(2022, p. 243) detail that they aim to focus their review on the role of emotions in accounting
research, and thus, exclude research items focusing on “other affective states, such as moods,
sentiments, and attitudes”. Even when paraphrasing an author’s work, you still must provide a
citation to that work. V. Common Mistakes to Avoid These are the most common mistakes made in
reviewing social science research literature. Start with assembling all the works of literature to be
reviewed, conduct a coherent analysis, find gaps to put up, then organize your literature review
paper, and finally write a “PERFECT” draft. Your synthesis is key in providing new interpretations
of the studies, demonstrating gaps, or discussing flaws in the existing studies. With the increased
knowledge of and experience in the topic as you proceed, your understanding of the topic will
increase. Regardless of which use case is pursued, my experience of crafting, supervising and
reviewing literature reviews is that authors usually decide upfront which use case to follow because
all three use cases usually lead authors in different directions.
The three main components you’ll need to complete before beginning your outline are the Theme,
Thesis, and Source Material. Put differently, the choice of the use case and central topic of the
literature review shapes the remainder of the review process ( Booth et al., 2021; Hiebl, 2021;
Simsek et al., 2021; Tranfield et al., 2003 ). This process is detailed next. 3. Process and systematicity
of literature reviews identify a review topic; search for and select the relevant literature; analyze the
relevant literature; and report the review findings. Or to use the knowledge covered in other articles
to give the reader a quick review so they can better understand your topic. Most lit reviews use a
basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the
introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your
attention on the body. Look at how the review is done by covering key information from the study
while. In addition, it offers potential remedies to frequent challenges when conducting such reviews.
By Publication Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a
more important trend. Also, the first draft should not be considered the final or near-final version.
Note that more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. Despite the
increasing popularity of systematic reviews in the environmental field, evidence synthesis methods
continue to be poorly applied in practice, resulting in the publication of syntheses that are highly
susceptible to bias. The majority of health researchers face many loopholes in justification. A review
organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the
point being made. Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all
your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. For instance, in the first two versions of a
recently published review paper I co-authored ( Ndemewah and Hiebl, 2022 ), we tried to convince
the reviewers that we followed evidence-based thinking in the paper and would, thus, rather not use
a predefined theoretical lens to analyze our review sample. Since this engagement with the existing
literature lies at the heart of most literature reviews, I include their findings when discussing the
potential advantages of literature reviews. For instance, review articles are appealing to authors and
editors of accounting journals because they usually attract higher citation rates than other research
articles ( Dechow et al., 2020; Guffey and Harp, 2016 ). Comprehensive knowledge of the literature
of the field is essential to most research papers. It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography,
where you compile full reference information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for
each source. Regardless of which use case is pursued, my experience of crafting, supervising and
reviewing literature reviews is that authors usually decide upfront which use case to follow because
all three use cases usually lead authors in different directions. Integrative Review Considered a form
of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an
integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated. However,
given the growing prevalence of the “an A is an A” mentality in business schools ( Aguinis et al.,
2020 ) and perceived need to produce A-level journal “hits” to gain tenure ( Alvesson et al., 2017 ),
such action may not be advisable to junior accounting researchers interested in literature reviews of
qualitative accounting research. Often times, you will ask yourself these questions. I have a little
question, if anyone can help me out, which of the options in the body of literature can be best fit if
you are writing an architectural thesis that deals with design. The above-discussed tips will, without
a doubt, bring you closer to success. Do not forget to cite your sources while discussing them
accurately. Each approach has to demonstrate its consistency to its foundations and will reflect them
in data collection, analysis, and knowledge claim. It also helps highlight the noteworthy areas of the
research as well as gaps. Similar to use case (ii) reviews, these use case (iii) reviews usually focus
solely on the accounting literature and typically only include research published in accounting
journals in their review samples. The introduction section can then present these ideas so that it is
clear to examiners that you’re aware of how your research connects with existing knowledge. 2: The
Body Section The body of your literature review is the centre of your work. Insights from real-life
experiences in conducting qualitative research in health reveal these issues.

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