Unit 4 Literature Review Deakin University Library

The Literature Review (Deakin University) 

• reports of primary or original scholarship, and does not report new primary scholarship itself
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• empirical, theoretical, critical/analytic, or methodological in nature
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• describe, summarise, evaluate, clarify and/or integrate the content of primary reports.
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• standard chapter of a thesis or dissertation

provide the background to and justification for the research undertaken 

6 Elements: 

1. a list; 
2. a search;
3. a survey; 
4. a vehicle for learning; 
5. a research facilitator
6. a report.

Why Do it? 

• to identify gaps in the literature
• to avoid reinventing the wheel (at the least this will save time and it can stop you from making the same mistakes as others)
• to carry on from where others have already reached (reviewing the field allows you to build on the platform of existing knowledge and ideas)
• to identify other people working in the same fields (a researcher network is a valuable resource)
• to increase your breadth of knowledge of your subject area
• to identify seminal works in your area
• to provide the intellectual context for your own work, enabling you to position your project relative to other work
• to identify opposing views
• to put your work into perspective
• to demonstrate that you can access previous work in an area
• to identify information and ideas that may be relevant to your project
• to identify methods that could be relevant to your project

Requirements:

• knowledge of the use of indexes and abstracts, 
• ability to conduct exhaustive bibliographic searches, 
• ability to organize the collected data meaningfully, 
• describe, critique and relate each source to the subject of the inquiry,
• present the organised review logically,
• to correctly cite all sources mentioned