Doing A Literature Review Mr Charles Matseke Program

Doing A Literature Review Mr Charles Matseke Program Manager: Africa-China in International Forums 12 November 2018: UJCI Workshop

Study Objectives • To define and unpack what a literature review is • To understand the need for a literature review • How to write a literature review • The do’s and don'ts when writing a literature review • Discussion: Rethinking the importance of a literature review

What is a literature review? • Lit review, also known as “critical review essay”- summarises and evaluates a body of writing’s about a specific topic • A literature review “paints a picture” of what is currently known about your particular research question and what has been written on it by experts and scholars in the field.

What is a literature review • Professor Kgethi Setati, the Vice-Principal of Research and Innovation at UNISA, has referred to the literature review as “a conversation that you’re having with authors”. • NB: A literature review is an in-depth analysis of the literature – you have to critique, contrast, find authors who agree with each other and those who disagree and interrogate why this is so.

Key elements of a literature review • A literature in general has two key elements: Ø first, your literature review should concisely summarise the findings or claims that have emerged from prior research efforts on a specific subject

Key elements of a literature review Ø Secondly, your literature review should at least reach a conclusion about how accurate and complete that knowledge is; it should present your considered judgement about what’s right and wrong, what’s inconclusive, and what’s missing in the existing literature.

Why is it important to conduct a lit review? q It can give you a general overview of a body of knowledge with which you are not familiar with q It can reveal what has already been done well, so that you do not waste time “reinventing the wheel”.

Why is it important to conduct a lit review? It can give you new ideas you can use in your own research and how you formulate your research question(s) q It can help you determine where there are problems or flaws in existing research q. It can enable you to place your research in a larger context, so that you can show what new conclusions might result from your own research q

How to formulate a lit review • Remember, the literature review is an attempt to summarise the existing state of knowledge about a subject and, in research proposals, to frame the proposed research’s expected contribution to knowledge……

How to formulate a lit review • The Do’s and Don'ts when formulating a review v Read some existing review essays to see how other researchers have carried out this task, v Imitate what you think works well, and avoid those things that strike you as ineffective or unnecessary.

How to formulate a lit review v You can also ask your instructor or supervisor to suggest literature reviews that they believe provide good models to follow. v After reading the existing literature, make sure your review succinctly summarises the study’s main claim, mean that you should be able to describe in a sentence or two the central argument of each item you read

How to formulate a lit review v The formulation of your review should discuss only the studies that have a direct bearing on the “central focus of your review or your proposed research”. v. In addition, rather than summarising the studies in their entirety, the review should focus only on the aspects of those studies that are relevant for your purposes.

How to formulate a lit review • A literature review should impose some intellectual order on the material, therefore: ü It can be helpful to think about grouping individual studies into larger “camps” or “schools of thought”. ü This can be done in terms of different theories and debates they invoke, propose or defend. ü Also through different methodologies

What questions should a review attempt to answer • A review should simply be clear about what each item you are reviewing was trying to do? . for example- was the work concerned with theory? If so, was it explanatory or did it have some other objective?

What questions should a review attempt to answer • A literature review should identify the main argument in each work, does it have a thesis? If so, how strongly does the study say its findings supports the hypothesis? And what qualifications or reservations does the author report?

What questions should a review attempt to answer • A good review can also summarise the existing studies in terms of three categories; v Areas of consensus or near consensus- on some areas authors may agree and conclusions can be positive or negative v Areas of disagreement or debate- there may not be a consensus on what is right v. The existing gap in literature- Niche

Discussion: Rethinking the importance of a literature review Lessons learned today Room for improvement Partnership and Unity What could work better in the future • Good and Bad lit review examples • •

Thought for the day • Just wake up and show up“God will see you through”Lillian Dube.