 Hi, my name is Tracy Tagohama-Spinoza, and this is a video on how to write a literature view. Now, we all know there's different kinds of literature views. There's literature views that are used in research papers and things like doctoral thesis, for example. And there's also literature views that are articles in and of themselves, systematic literature views. I'm going to try to have a look at all of those things. Today we're going to just look at the why we write literature views, where you find quality information, what the review might look like, and how you actually put it all together. So, let's begin with the why behind the literature review. Basically, you can start a literature view once you have a really clear topic, you have a really clear research question, and you begin the literature review to identify areas of prior scholarship. This is to ensure that the question of the topic you've come up with is original, that it's something that hasn't already been discovered, right? You also want to link your new research question to things that have come beforehand, so you're not starting from scratch, you're not reinventing the wheel, you are building off of the scholarship of others. You're standing on the shoulders of those prior academic giants and looking forward to new information. A literature review also identifies new ways to interpret prior scholarships, so things that have been written in the past might have new meaning in light of your research question. How do we look at old things now that we have your new question? But most importantly, it's to determine what's already been written on a topic so that we don't rehash the same things over and over again, but we're actually doing something new and making contributions to the literature itself. The literature review also serves to provide an overview of the key topics that might be related to our own topic or to our research questions. And in doing this, we begin to identify major patterns or relationships within the pieces of literature or the types of research that's been done on our topic. We can identify the strengths and weaknesses or maybe the gaps in the literature as it relates to our own questions. And we can also become, to a certain extent, experts in identifying conflicting evidence. We say, well, maybe this said that and the other authors said the other thing. And part of our contribution becomes identifying those conflicts within the literature itself. It also gives us the foundation upon which we can now begin to explore our own research question. We can establish what we already know so that we can talk about what we don't yet know and then what we think we now know, piecing together our own interventions or experimentations matched with the prior literature. So now that we know why we do the literature review, where do we begin? Where do we get the information? So once we've defined the subject and the content or what we're looking at, the research question that we have, we can begin a search and that search can start anywhere. You can begin in your university library or the public library in the online formats that these libraries have. Or you can begin in databases, things like ProQuest or other types of journal databases. Or you might want to start with something very familiar, like Google Scholar, which is like a Google search, but only looking at peer reviewed information. And once you begin to get a firm foundation of who really are the top people in your field, you might even want to seek out recommendations from the experts. You're real people. You don't lose anything in just writing to some of these authors to figure out if they have additional recommendations for literature that should be included in your topic. Additionally, people flesh out their literature reviews sometimes by looking for specific authors on the topic, all the articles that they've written, or maybe following down the track of a specific journal, which might have a lot of articles related to your specific topic. So if you look at this as kind of a step-by-step process, where do we look for the content for the literature review? Where do you find the quality of literature? Let's look at that for a second. And then how do you organize it? How do you evaluate the quality of those sources? How do you select if you have a lot of different choices? How do you select amongst the literature that you have? Then how do you go about reading those scientific articles and taking notes on them and doing so in a voice that you can carry over into your own paper? So let's look at these one by one. Where do you find quality literature? As we mentioned before, you can look at general databases. So for example, Jester Ebsco, our broad databases, ProQuest, they have access to multiple journal articles, and they are sometimes accessible to the public. There are also other academic databases that are specifically for different types of topics. For example, for humanities and social scientists, you might want to go into project muse or to medline for the life sciences, biomedicare and neurosciences, echolint for economics or inspect for physics, engineering or computer science. These larger databases are often very good. However, sometimes they are costly to download. So be very careful about that. This is why we recommend that sometimes going through your university's library catalog might be even quicker because each library has agreements with these different structures and you'll see which ones are free, for example, for your university. Other journals specifically have databases for themselves. For example, Sage or Nature or these large editorial boards have specific websites for each of their journals. So the Journal of Neuroscience or the Mind-Brain Education Journal that Wiley publishes, all of these are online as specific websites and many of them permit that back issues are downloaded for free as well. Finally, you can also use Google Scholar as we mentioned before. It's just like doing a Google search, but different types of things will come up that are only peer reviewed. There is a whole other video on how to do a Google Scholar search, which I encourage you all to have a look at. So once we can do this, you'll realize you're going to come across hundreds of thousands of articles and you really need to narrow that search and begin to organize your files. Now, we can do this in a typical way with handwritten paper or you might want to use some tools, for example, like Mendeley, which allow you to document your findings by taking notes as you read along, highlighting different points, adding tags to different articles so you're able to find them easier or pulling them into different folders. You should think carefully about parts of the article that are important to you as you read through them and maybe make some kind of a special notation where you find particularly good quotes that you might want to use within your work. And for those of you who are feeling really ambitious about this, I would highly recommend using an annotated bibliography. Basically, you take the citation that you've come across and then as you are reading through it, you give a quick annotation, a quick summary of that article for yourself and maybe even indicate for yourself how you might use that information in your own paper. For example, this would be great for substantiating definitions in the introduction of my paper, for example. So do think about doing an annotated bibliography as you go along. If you'd like examples of note-taking designs, you might look at some of these web resources that are free and easy to download. One of the things that's particularly interesting about education is that we're asked to take notes all the time in all of our classes, but very few of us can remember when anybody explicitly taught us how to take notes. And so we might need some tips or some better ways of improving those note-taking skills. So I'd highly recommend that you look at some of these templates or some of these suggestions. They're all very different, so you might want to look at a couple of them to get a few ideas and decide what your own note-taking approach will be. So once you begin to gather these different parts of your literature view, you begin to download different articles or you look at different types of podcasts or you see interviewing structures, you're creeping closer now to the necessity of actually organizing the literature in a way that you can present it to other people. And you're beginning to have clear ideas in your head about how to do that. So some people design their literature view thematically based on the core ideas that start to jump out or the key questions or concepts that continually recur across the literature. Other people organize it based on certain debates. So the pros and the cons to a certain topic, for example, or believers or non-believers or people who support X-Idea and people who are against it, right? And yet others organize the literature around specific gaps that appear to be missing in the literature. So, you know, we know up to certain point X, but we just don't know all the rest of the story. So some people will show then this is what exists, this is what my question is, this is where the gap is in the literature. Other people organize a literature view by author. Not super recommended, but some people do it. It's kind of easier to do it that way because people come across a certain piece of literature, they have a certain author's name and they begin to summarize that particular piece of work. That's kind of like doing a book report and we all learn to do that in around fifth or sixth grade. So it's okay to do it that way, but it's not really the most sophisticated way to approach a literature view because it's often all over the place because different authors don't necessarily represent different perspectives in the field. So it might be harder to string that together and to weave a story using author design, but it's possible. Other people similarly will approach their literature review chronologically. So this is what we thought of in the 80s, this is what we thought of in the 90s, and during the century we began to think whatever and nowadays we think something new. You could do it chronologically. Again, that does tell a different kind of a story, but it's often not as powerful as the thematic design. You can bring in the chronological element when you do your analysis so you don't really have to organize your literature review in that way. And yet other people use a methodological design, so they look at studies in a comparative sense of how they were executed. So the meta-analysis in this field seem to show whatever, while the case studies seem to show something else. So you can use methodological design as a way to structure your literature review. Again, I don't think author chronological or methodological designs are as powerful as thematic designs. A final option might be to do theoretical design. So these would be circling around pivotal publications or key turning points in the evolution of thinking on this specific topic, which is kind of mixing this chronological perspective with different theoretical development. It can work, but again, it all depends on the type of story you're trying to tell with the literature. So a big decision you'll have to make as you're beginning to sort out all of the different findings that you have is whether or not you're going to order the presentation of your literature review by different themes, by the author, by chronology, by the methodological design, or by the theories that they represent. And one way to choose might be to evaluate the literature itself. So when you begin to analyze the authors and their particular levels of expertise, are you really drawn to a certain perspective or an author perspective or an author theory based on the way that they presented the information? And are their arguments well-developed and designed? And do they seem to be very clear or connected to your own research question? So are they related? And are they balanced and have they taken into consideration opposing viewpoints so that you have different perspectives within the literature review itself? Remember, humans are very prone towards bias and so we tend to look for what we want to find. So if you're looking for the benefits of bilingualism, rather than the effects of bilingualism, you're gonna find a certain kind of literature. So you have to be very careful and try to balance all of that out, right? You can also judge the quality of the literature that's involved by the source. Does this come from a peer-reviewed journal or is this something from the popular press or from a newspaper, for example? Generally in academic writing, we do not accept things that come from popular press as being higher quality on the spectrum of literature. So be very careful with that. Similarly speaking, different types of videos or podcasts have different weight depending on who is giving the video. It's not necessarily the format itself, but who delivered that message. And you evaluate the quality of the literature based on if the source itself seems to add to your better understanding of the information within your topic or your research question. And remember, it's super easy to go down all these rabbit holes when you're beginning to research things, you find one thing and it leads to another and it leads to another. Always come back and have that north. What was the objective? What is the research question you're trying to respond to? And make sure that the literature that you include in the literature review responds directly towards your research questions. And finally, another way to evaluate the inclusion or not of information is whether or not it contributes to core conceptual understanding or big ideas or definitions within the topic or the research question that you're answering. So be sure then when you're evaluating what to include, what are the key theories, models, methods, have they all been included in your literature review? Make sure you understand the results of each of the studies that you're including. What are the results and conclusions of each of those pieces of work and how do they fit into your larger framework? Make sure you can see how they're connected and linked and this goes back to the question of how you're gonna categorize or organize the information. Are you able to create a folder that has to do with certain types of information on the sub area of your main topic? For example, you might have a folder of things that add to or confirm the information of the things that challenge it. Make sure you take the time to just really think to yourself, maybe even ask yourself, so what? Is this something that's really adding to my knowledge? Does this piece of literature contribute to a better understanding or an answer to my research question or to the topic that I'm addressing? And again, globally, looking at the body of research you're developing, are there apparent strengths and weaknesses of the global research that you're coming across and of the specific studies? For example, you might find a whole lot of information but maybe they're all only one type of study. For example, there was a bunch of case studies that were done in qualitative, self-reported studies. That's one kind of information and that's data but it's very different from looking at maybe other types of information, quantitative data that might add a different perspective to your research question. So try to balance out the strengths and the weaknesses of the information that you're providing. You might also find really well-executed studies but they're conducted on a very small number of people in a specific rural town in X country. That doesn't mean it applies generally and you can make generalizations about the findings that occurred there because it's only about one particular demographic or one specific population. So make sure that you're choosing studies from the literature that reflect your context. So finally, you're gonna come to a point where you're gonna have to decide what to keep. Now, here's this physical way of sorting out files and some people really enjoy doing that. This is when I have to feel the paper, I have to print out every study and I'm gonna sit around in my room and spread out these piles. Go ahead, that's one way to do it. You can also do it electronically but key guiding point I recommend is that the logical categories that emerge based on what is needed to answer your research question should be the categories that you're developing especially if this is a thematic literature view, right? That you're organizing the body of information. And remember, as we mentioned before, literature views have distinct usage. For example, is a literature view a part of a dissertation or a thesis? The basis for research itself, can it be a methodology as in a systematic literature view or a meta-analysis or is it all of the above? And yes, of course, it's all of the above. So depending on the way you approach the literature view, you're gonna have different types of emphasis. And basically, this is determined pretty much by its link. The exact format of a literature review is pretty much the same as we described in all of these different cases. But if this is the basis, for example, as a methodology, then you basically will have to have tons of literature within the literature view because what you're trying to do is a systematic literature view which can be, for example, everything written in the past 10 years about X topic. That means that you are gonna have a lot of literature and a huge scope and multiple themes, right? But if you're looking at a very tight and specific research question, you may have only, for example, two boxes that the literature is fitting into based on the themes that come up within your research question. So the total number of sources that are required for a literature view varies broadly. I always tell my students, I will never weigh the number of sources. You have to have the number of sources that is needed to answer the question. And if you have only looked at older sources or only one type of methodology, you're likely to have some problems there. So I highly recommend that you think very carefully and plan out how you do your literature view so you approach it in a way that economizes your time and focus before you begin. So before submitting, ask yourself, have I outlined the purpose and the scope of this literature review? Have I identified appropriate, incredible resources or literature or academic and scholarly evidence for my review? Have I recorded the bibliographical details of the sources? There's nothing more frustrating than having written down this fabulous quote that fits perfectly into your paper and you don't remember where it came from. So this is also why I'd like to motivate you to use the annotated bibliography. It's really easy to lose information once you start to get multiple sources. Try to organize yourself and organize the bibliographical sources that go along with those summaries. Have I analyzed and critiqued the readings? Have I identified any gaps that came up in the literature? Have I explored multiple methodologies and theories and hypothesis and models? Or have I just limited myself to one type of research? Remember to be thorough, you have to be sure that you've looked at a variety of methodologies and theories and hypothesis and models before you submit your paper. And this is tied really neatly to the idea of varying viewpoints as well. Have I looked at multiple and dissenting opinions? Remember, I don't wanna just find what I'm looking for. Doing good research means that you're being honest with the literature and reporting what is all there. Also remember, the structure is important. Doing, digging in, getting the information, having tons of your own notes is great, but if you have not presented it to the world clearly and cleanly, it's not gonna make a big difference. This is why it's really important that there's a stage of your writing which is just in your head, that's fine. There's a stage of your writing that's just on your own paper and your own computer for yourself, but then format it nicely. Have we got this introduction? We got the body with all these themes described in them. And then do we have a conclusion that sort of summarizes all of the big ideas of the literature view? Make sure that you formatted it correctly. And finally, before you submit it, spell-tech it, make sure that you've got punctuation going for you. It's really sad to see students who have put so much work into a lit review and they're so exhausted at the end of it, they submit this kind of messy thing that it totally detracts from all the effort that they've put into it. So do take the time to present your paper well. If you've done all of that, you are good to go. And we really look forward to reading your work. If you are not good to go or if you have any questions, don't hesitate to write. We really wanna make sure that you're feeling comfortable about this stage of the research process. Thanks.