Performing a literature review
Posted on June 15, 2021 • 6 minutes • 1245 words
Your curious explorer comes with an important and significant process in science–The most crucial part of any research. Let us explore the process of carrying out a literature review. As discussed in my previous blog post , different scientific investigators examine small chunks of the field and it is the goal of a literature review to bridge all the knowledge in a single place. I decided to share my insights and methodology on the literature review.
Think of literature review as building a jigsaw puzzle where each piece is scholarly information and the final picture is your outcome. The literature databases are huge repositories of many such puzzle pieces. The complexity is that each scholarly article might have many puzzle pieces and the bigger picture is never fully known. It is thus clear that an investigator must first know an outline of the bigger picture to search for the pieces. Often this is achieved by assumption and the competence of an investigator to achieve accuracy, relevance and balance in his assumption. Simply put, I would say that the investigator looking for the puzzle pieces must be able to state: the keywords in a specific area of interest, and the subsections of his final write-up. This narrows down the search process.
Further narrowing the search is possible by what I call binning. The author must be able to come up with different bins into which the pieces can be kept. Binning is the most essential part of a literature review. An investigator must arrive at meaningful sub-sections to bin the puzzle pieces. It is easier to solve the puzzle when you could divide the pieces based on the object they belong to, rather than the colour they possess; a mixed approach is more beneficial. Ideally, the number and the characteristics of bins are highly variable and adopt newer values with growing information. It is important that the author restricts himself to a small number of significant bins and exclude the data which does not fit into any of the bins. This is to gain greater signal and minimize the noise created by the background information which does not come under the focus of your study. I would recommend an investigator follow a PRISMA protocol and perform the search in the standards given by the checklist .
A major chunk of your time spent will be in binning your data and modifying your bins. Though the bins could be hypothetical, one can also equate the bins to the sub-headings of your final article. One must keep track of the data mining he does. Reference management software like Mendeley or Zotero could help you store the data you browse in different libraries you create. I personally am a fan of Zotero. It helps you save citations, and the article pdfs. They assist you in giving citations and producing the bibliography of major citation styles.
The important part of your work is to prepare your first manuscript. The manuscript must be typed sewing the raw data you collected. It must have perfect continuity and must not be plagiarized. The content must be accurate with proper grammar. A 2010 study of nursing journals found that 79% of recommendations by reviewers were influenced by grammar and writing style. Never is your first manuscript your final one. The paragraphs of your manuscript might be merged, rearranged, deleted several times. It is common that you might find your manuscript not having any relevance to what you wanted it to be. The format of the manuscript and the correction strategies are not discussed here, but I shall give you a checklist of what your final manuscript must have, and a few important questions you must ask yourself at various stages of your workYour curious explorer comes with an important and significant process in science–The most crucial part of any research. Let us explore the process of carrying out a literature review. As discussed in my previous blog post, different scientific investigators examine small chunks of the field and it is the goal of a literature review to bridge all the knowledge in a single place. I decided to share my insights and methodology on the literature review.
Think of literature review as building a jigsaw puzzle where each piece is scholarly information and the final picture is your outcome. The literature databases are huge repositories of many such puzzle pieces. The complexity is that each scholarly article might have many puzzle pieces and the bigger picture is never fully known. It is thus clear that an investigator must first know an outline of the bigger picture to search for the pieces. Often this is achieved by assumption and the competence of an investigator to achieve accuracy, relevance and balance in his assumption. Simply put, I would say that the investigator looking for the puzzle pieces must be able to state: the keywords in a specific area of interest, and the subsections of his final write-up. This narrows down the search process.
Further narrowing the search is possible by what I call binning. The author must be able to come up with different bins into which the pieces can be kept. Binning is the most essential part of a literature review. An investigator must arrive at meaningful sub-sections to bin the puzzle pieces. It is easier to solve the puzzle when you could divide the pieces based on the object they belong to, rather than the colour they possess; a mixed approach is more beneficial. Ideally, the number and the characteristics of bins are highly variable and adopt newer values with growing information. It is important that the author restricts himself to a small number of significant bins and exclude the data which does not fit into any of the bins. This is to gain greater signal and minimize the noise created by the background information which does not come under the focus of your study. I would recommend an investigator follow a PRISMA protocol and perform the search in the standards given by the checklist.
A major chunk of your time spent will be in binning your data and modifying your bins. Though the bins could be hypothetical, one can also equate the bins to the sub-headings of your final article. One must keep track of the data mining he does. Reference management software like Mendeley or Zotero could help you store the data you browse in different libraries you create. I personally am a fan of Zotero. It helps you save citations, and the article pdfs. They assist you in giving citations and producing the bibliography of major citation styles.
The important part of your work is to prepare your first manuscript. The manuscript must be typed sewing the raw data you collected. It must have perfect continuity and must not be plagiarized. The content must be accurate with proper grammar. A 2010 study of nursing journals found that 79% of recommendations by reviewers were influenced by grammar and writing style. Never is your first manuscript your final one. The paragraphs of your manuscript might be merged, rearranged, deleted several times. It is common that you might find your manuscript not having any relevance to what you wanted it to be. The format of the manuscript and the correction strategies are not discussed here, but I shall give you a checklist of what your final manuscript must have, and a few important questions you must ask yourself at various stages of your work.