Literature review is a body of text that determines the aim to review the critical point of current knowledge including substantive findings as well as theoretical and methodological contribution to a particular topic (Wikipedia). Another definition of literature review is “a literature reviews is a critical search for an analytical framework, or framework which you can put to work to test the hypothesis or to systematically investigate a set of issue (Jancovicz 2000, page 178).
Literature review is a secondary source that combined with number of articles which have similar objective to form up a literature review. The numbers of articles were multitudinous cross-cultural journals, books, conferences and electronic sources of information. Therefore, literature review do not report any new experimental work, it is the review of an abstract accomplishment. Literature review able to help readers to understand the historical findings from other authors, its objective, it gives readers a draft to understand what was going on from the historical to now as well as telling the reader regarding the strengths and weaknesses of studies within the body. The following are the reasons to write a literature review:
Distinguishing what has been done from what needs to be done
Discovering important variables relevant to the topic
Synthesizing and gaining a new perspective
Identifying relationships between ideas and practice
Establishing the context of the topic and problem
Rationalize the significance problem
Enhancing and acquiring the subject vocabulary
Understanding the structure of the subject
Relating ideas and theory to applications
Identifying of the main methodologies and research techniques that have been used
Placing the research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the-art development
Michael J Baker
Writing literature review is important because it can avoid making same mistakes as other people did. As when reading the articles, sometimes may find out the errors or the some outdated information, thus, writer able to filter the information gained and amend it in his or her own articles. Furthermore, writing literature review can help to increase your breadth of knowledge in your subject area. When being allocated to do a research, writer has to understand the objective of the research first before start any findings or surveys. Writer need to read numbers of articles to comprehend the subject area in order to figure out what has been done by prior authors and what have to jot down in current research. After read the multi cross-cultural journals or books, writer has gained the knowledge in the particular area. From reading articles written by other authors, reader can improve his or her skills in linking his or her own ideas to the theories to applications and identify what research methodology to be used in the current research either questionnaire, interviews, case studies, observational trial, experiment and so on. In doing a research’s literature review, writer has to going outside to contact experts in the particular field to gain other knowledge, information, ideas before he or she start to write anything.
The Importance of Literature Review
There are few types of literature review which are narrative, systematic and meta-analytic reviews. Narrative literature review in overall is the standard review of the literature, critically appraise and summarize the literature relevant to an identified topic (Hemingway & Brereton 2009). This type of literature review is integral the points from the number of articles and presented as background reading immediately. This kind of literature review tend to begin its selected topic with explanation of the rationale and by providing some theoretical or historical framework for the research paper and the reasons to examining studies relevant to the topic (Baun & McMurray-Schwarz 2007).