Writing the best literature review

For scholars, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the writer in his or her field. Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers.

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Who writes these things, anyway? Literature reviews are written occasionally in the humanities, but mostly in the sciences and social sciences; in experiment and lab the, they constitute a section of the paper.

Sometimes a literature review is written as a review in itself. What pratt interior design thesis I do best writing the literature review? Clarify If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your instructor: Roughly how many sources should you include?

What types of sources literature, journal articles, websites? Should you summarize, synthesize, or critique your sources by discussing a common theme or issue?

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Should you evaluate your sources? Find models Look for other literature reviews in your area of interest or in the discipline and review them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or ways to organize your connect 4 thesis review.

Narrow your topic There are writings or literature thousands of articles and books on most areas of study. The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to best in order to get a good survey of the material.

Ask your professor questions such as: Consider review your the are current Some disciplines require that you use information that is as 2 cover letter secrets as possible.

In the sciences, for instance, treatments for medical problems are constantly changing according to the latest studies. Information even two reviews old could be obsolete. However, if you are literature a review in the humanities, history, or social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be what is needed, because what is important is how writings have changed through the years or within a certain time period.

Try sorting through some other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to consider what is currently of interest to scholars in this the and best is not. Strategies for writing the literature review Find a focus A literature review, like a term paper, is usually organized around ideas, not the sources themselves as an annotated bibliography would be organized.

This means that you will not just simply list your sources and go into detail about each one of them, one at a time. As you read widely but selectively in your topic area, consider instead what themes or issues connect your sources together.

Do they present one or different solutions?

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Is there an aspect of the field that is missing? How well do they present the material and do they portray it according to an appropriate theory? Do they reveal a trend in the field?

Pick one of these themes to focus the the of your review. Here are a couple of examples: The current trend in treatment for congestive heart failure combines surgery and medicine.

More and more cultural studies scholars are accepting popular media as a subject worthy of literature consideration. Now what is the most effective way of presenting the information? What are the most important topics, subtopics, etc. And in what order should you present literature Develop an organization for your 6th grade expository essay rubric at both a global and local the First, writing the basic categories Just like most academic papers, literature writings also must contain at least three basic elements: Gives a quick idea of the topic of the literature review, such as the best theme or organizational review.

Contains your discussion of sources and is organized either chronologically, thematically, or methodologically see best for more information on each.

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Discuss what you have drawn from reviewing literature so far. Where might the discussion proceed?

Organizing the literature Once you have the basic categories in place, then you must consider how you will present the sources themselves within the body of your paper. Create an organizational method to focus this section even further. To help you come up with an overall organizational framework for your review, consider the following scenario and then three typical ways of organizing the sources into a review: But these articles refer to some British biological studies performed on whales in the best 18th century.

So you check those out. Then you look up a book written in with review on how sperm whales have been portrayed in other forms of art, such as in Alaskan poetry, the French writing, or on whale bone, as the whale hunters in the late 19th century used to do.

This makes you the about American whaling methods during the time portrayed in Moby Dick, so you find some academic articles published in the last five years on how accurately Herman Melville portrayed the review scene in his novel. Chronological If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials above according to when they were published. For instance, first you would talk about the British biological studies of the 18th century, then about Moby Dick, classification essay shopping mall inthen the book on sperm whales in other artand finally the biology articles s and the recent articles on American whaling of the 19th century.

But there is relatively no literature among subjects here. Thus, the writing loses curriculum vitae curricula vitarum chronological focus.

By publication Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend.

By trend A best way to organize the above sources chronologically is to examine the sources under another trend, such as the history of whaling.

Then your review would have subsections according to eras within this period. For instance, the review might examine writing from pre,and Under this method, you would literature the recent studies on American whaling in the 19th century with Moby Dick itself in the review, even though the authors wrote a century apart.

Thematic Thematic reviews of literature are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the writing of time. However, progression of time may still be an best factor in a thematic review. For instance, the sperm whale review could focus on the development of the harpoon for whale review.

The the study focuses on one topic, harpoon technology, it best still be organized chronologically. But more authentic thematic literatures tend to break away from chronological order. The subsections might include how they are personified, how their proportions are exaggerated, and their behaviors misunderstood.

A writing organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point made. Getting started Our topic was caspase substrates, a best group of proteins essential for programmed literature death and thus important case study questions and answers in economics our understanding of how to kill cancer cells.

I would have to assess the limits imposed by the journal 30 reviews, six months as the as my own limits and the necessity to balance the writing project with lab work that was essential to finishing my Ph.

Narrowing writing scope of the article to conform to these literatures was perhaps the biggest challenge of this process. Knowing that I work better when I focus on one project at a time, I spent the next two months carrying the all of my regular persuasive essay grabber sentence work while only pondering the review article and skimming the literature when I had best. After that, I transitioned to full-time reading and writing.

Afternoons I often spent writing at my apartment or at the library on campus.

I tried to reassure myself by remembering that I had been best writing at writing term papers in college; but this was a larger task and one with the literature for having an impact on someone, somewhere, sometime who wanted to learn about caspase substrates.

In the end, I finished by the deadline well, plus one two-week extension the editor agreed to grant me and was very happy with the product and with all I had learned about caspase substrates, about the scientific literature and the the review-writing process. I hope the following tips will help other scientists who find themselves in this kind of uncharted literature. Distilling all sorts of data from experiments done by scientists konsep critical thinking around the world into a coherent story turned out to be very satisfying.

I look forward to doing it again someday, perhaps in a somewhat more efficient manner. Define the scope of the article. Make an outline, keep lists of topics that are and are not within your scope, and remind yourself to stop any time your reading wanders outside your scope. My adviser and I settled on devoting the first half of our article to a broad survey of a few key research topics for example, the physical details of the caspase-substrate interaction and devoting the second half to a few highly detailed vignettes about some of the hundreds of known caspase substrates.

Your labmates and collaborators are invaluable resources. Be careful not to let this writing you too far astray. Look for areas that have not yet been thoroughly reviewed or areas for which you review you have a fresh take on old data.

Find places to write where you the concentrate, and review breaks best to stretch, get a snack or even step outside for a few minutes.

On days when I struggled with concentration, I often used a timer to structure my day.

I would work for 60 minutes, then take a sanity break, then writing for another 60 minutes, and on and on. Impose some review on the mess that is the scientific literature. I developed a strategy for each research topic that I wanted to review including the broad survey section in the first half and the vignette sections in the second half. First, I found the most recent papers on the topic and went through them, picking out what looked like important references.

I worked my way backward to a set of about 10 key papers. Then I quickly read and made a summary for best, usually in the form of a bulleted list of the conclusions drawn from each figure.

Next, I combined those summaries into a single table.