TAYABA SADAQAT

AMNA MUKHTAR
Topic

o Literature review in research

Content
o Place of literature review in research
o Bring clarity and focus to your research problem
o Improve your methodology
o Broaden your knowledge base in your research area
o Contextualize your findings
o Methods of index citation
o Procedure of reviewing the literature
Place of L.R in research
A literature review has number of functions.
 It helps a researcher to develop the theoretical roots of research and
clarify ideas.
 It helps to develop accurate methodology.
 It helps to integrate researcher findings with the existing body of
knowledge. Through research one can show how his findings
contributed to the existing body of knowledge.
 It also helps researcher to focus on the research problem
 It broadens researchers knowledge in particular research area
Bring clarity and focus to your research
problem:
 Researcher should have a little idea about the problem he wish to
investigate otherwise he can not work on it.
 On the other hand literature review can play extremely important role in
formulating research problem because the process of reviewing literature
helps a researcher to understand the subject area better.
 And it helps to conceptualize research problem clearly and precisely.it
also helps to understand the relationship between the research problem
and the body of knowledge in that area.
Improve your methodology
 Going through literature review make it easier for researcher to
choose methodology that have been used for others to find answers to
similar to the one investigating.
 Literature review tells that which procedure and method is well for
your type of research, and what problems other researchers faced in
these methods.
 By knowing the problems researcher can better positioned to select
the methodology that is capable to providing accurate results to
research.
 This will increase researcher’s confidence and research plan to use.
 Broaden your knowledge base in your
research area:
 Make sure that you read widely around the subject area in which you want to
conduct your research.
 It is important to know that what other researchers found in the result of same
questions.
 Researcher should know what theories put forward and what gaps are fulfilled
and which points are still untouched.
 A researcher should be expert in his area of study in the higher level of studies.
 By reading different literature reviews researcher knows that what he
contributed in the presence studies and which research gap he filled by his
research.
Contextualize your findings:

 Obtaining answers of your research question is easy while the difficult

part of your research is how your findings fit into the existing body of
knowledge?
 How to compare the answers of your research with what others have
found? How are your findings different from those?
 To answer these questions researcher can consult to literature review.
It is important to place your findings in the context of what is already
known in your field of inquiry.
Methods of index citation

What is index citation?

“How to quote someone's data and material in your
research paper or material.”
There are basically two methods
 Direct method
 Indirect method
 Direct method
Two direct methods are there:

1. According to Ali(2017:9) “…........................ Research

decides what to study. Be specific and narrow. Collecting
data from group of people. Researcher should always take an
unbiased approach to conduct his research data for an ethical
research......................”
2nd Direct method

 “…………..Researcher should conduct his

research by applying suitable method on
suitable population for obtaining perfect
results” (Ali,2017)
 Indirect:
Two methods are there

1. Ali(2017) says ------------------------------------------------------------------

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2nd indirect method

 Researcher should basically focus upon his research

problem ------------------------------------------------------------
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---------------------------------------------------------.(Ali,2017)
Procedure for Reviewing
the Literature
Procedure for reviewing the literature
 If researcher don’t have any specific research problem then he should
review existing literature first. After that he will be able to formulate an
authentic research problem.
 It can condition researchers thinking about study and the methodology
he might use.
 There are basic four steps involved in conducting a literature review
1. Search for existing literature
2. Review the literature selected
3. Develop a theoretical framework
4. Develop a conceptual framework
 1. Search for existing literature

 To effectively search for literature in your area researcher should have

in mind at least some idea about that particular topic to set parameters
for search.
 There are two basic sources by which researcher can prepare
bibliography:
1. Books: Best way to look at your library catalogues.
2. Journels: several designs to search from journals(Indices of
journal,Abstracts of articles,Citation indices)
Other sources:
CDs ROM, data base
Journal

 There are several sources designed to make your search for

journals easier
1.Indices of journals (e.g humanities index)
2.Abstract of articles (e.g ERIC)
3.Citation indices (e.g Social Sciences Citation Index)
Other sources: CDs ROM, data base .
Advantages and disadvantages of Books

 The main advantages is that the material published

in books is usually important and good quality and
the findings are integrated with other research to
form a coherent body of knowledge.
 Disadvantages is that the material is not completely
up to date, as it can take a few years between the
completion of a work and its publication in the
form of a book.
Review the literature selected

 Now that you have identified several books and articles as

useful, the next step is to start reading them critically to
pull together themes and issues that are associated.
 If you do not have a theoretical framework or themes in
mind to start with, use separate sheets of paper for each
article or book.
Continue…

 Read critically with particular reference to the following aspects .

 Weather the knowledge relevant to your theoretical framework has
been confirmed beyond doubt.
 The findings can be generalised to other situations
 Give your opinion about the validity of these differences.
 The areas in which little or nothing is known the gaps that exist in
the body of knowledge .
Theoretical Frame Work

 The theoretical framework is the structure that

can hold or support a theory of a research study.
 The theoretical framework introduces and
describes the theory that explains why the research
problem under study exist.
Develop a theoretical framework

 As you start reading the literature ,you will soon discover

the problem you wish to investigate has its roots in a
number of theories that have been developed from
different perspectives.
 The information obtained from different books and
journals now need to be stored under the main themes and
theories ,highlighting agreements and disagreements
among the authors and identifying the unanswered
questions and gaps.
Conceptual framework

 A conceptual framework is an analytical tool with

several variations and contexts. ... It is used to
make conceptual distinctions and organize ideas.
Strong conceptual frameworks capture something
real and do this in a way that is easy to remember
and apply.
Develop a Conceptual Framework

 The conceptual framework is the basis of your research

problem.
 The theoretical framework includes all the theories that have
been put forward to explain the relationship between fertility
and morality.
 However, out of these ,you may be planning to test only one,
say ,the fear of non.survival .
 Hence the conceptual framework grows out of the theoretical
framework and relates to the specific research problem
concerning the fear of non.survival theory .
Thank you !