 Welcome friends. Today I'm going to talk about literature reviews and as I spoke in my previous presentation, when we're talking about research papers, then probably literature reviews occupy a part along with the introduction. But when we have to do dissertations or thesis, then probably almost 15 to 20% of the writing is about literature reviews. And that is where literature reviews are so important that before we start talking about literature reviews, let me first discuss about what a literature review is not. So to begin with, it is not an annotated bibliography where we're just summarizing and describing sources. So here we are not only summarizing and describing, but we are going somewhere beyond that. And that's where a literature review talks about synthesizing and synthesizing sources that relate to particular themes and concepts. And if I have to draw a similarity between or if I have to draw differences between what an annotated bibliography and literature review is, people have compared them to still pictures and a movie. In a movie, we have still pictures, but we use all those still pictures to tell stories. So that is the difference. So it is a summary at one point, but that summary has to be synthesized into a cogent argument. And that's what we have to be clear about. There are very many different approaches to a similar theme and we must be very careful not to cherry pick sources, because often the impulse is to cherry pick sources that support our point of view. And probably that will not be the right thing to do because we must be open to acknowledging all the different approaches and perspectives. So we have to weave together all the arguments in the summary that we spoke of. So we have to be careful to take in the other point of view as well. If we have to draw a parallel between what a research literature review is and what the methodological sections are, then there is a very strong parallel that I can talk about. And the parallel is that just like the method section talks about the methodological choices that have shaped our project, the literature review discusses the theoretical choices that have shaped our project. So we will be talking about the theoretical foundations of our work through the literature review. And that is why the purpose is a lot more than, as I said at the beginning, it's a lot more than just summarizing all the various strands of argument in the field. For today's presentation, I have followed these six books and more. So I would want to acknowledge all these authors from Dave Harris's book on Literature Review and Research designed to Arlene Fink's book to this book by Mashi and Make-A-Boy, where they talk about literature review six steps to success. Then this book by Chris Hart, this one by Sarah Efron and Ruth David, and there are a lot more books. But for today's presentation, I have relied mainly on these six books. So right at the beginning, we must be very clear that literature review combines both summary and synthesis. Summary, as we know, is just a recap of the important information of the source. But synthesis is reorganizing and reshuffling that information that informs us how we are planning a research problem. So that way it's a combination of both summary and synthesis. There are a lot of ways literature review is important. And one of it is that it helps us distinguish what has been done and what needs to be done. So in a way, it provides me with a reason for why I'm doing this particular research. And it also helps me discover important variables relevant to the topic that I'm researching. So synthesizing is one strand that I will keep repeating as I go on with the presentation. But the research literature review is also something that helps me establish the context of the topic. And it also helps me enhance and acquire the subject vocabulary and at times it helps me understand the structure of the subject as well. So it helps me place each work in the context of its contribution to the problem that I'm discussing. And it also the review helps me to provide an overview of the relationship of the work with each other. So for example, if there is a work on computer mediated communication which suggests that the lack of social cues is what helps communication, there might be other works which speak in a different language. So my review will help me place this work in that particular dimension. And it also helps me identify the new ways to interpret prior research because it's not just about the microstructure. We are also able to see the holistic view of the subject and that is where I can relate and interpret prior research as well. And if there are gaps existing there, it will help me identify those gaps too. As I said, there could be seeming conflicts between two studies which appear very different. So the literature review will help me resolve those conflicts or to provide the common strands in those conflicts. And also it helps me identify the prior scholarship which has already taken place. So my work is not just a duplication of that work. So in that way it tells me what is the additional work that needs to be done and how I can locate my own research work within the context of the existing literature. This is from Dave Harris' book and he talks about these important structures of the literature review process. So it begins with identification of what the project is. So we start off with defining or suggesting what is the project about and what is the research question. So these are two important things that we must keep in mind before we start on the review process itself. And the second important thing to remember is what are the main general theories that set the context of my work and what are the main specific characteristics or dimensions and whether there are any specific variables that I am looking forward to. And just like a review or writing a research paper, a literature review must also have an outline and the main sections. And for each section we must have certain subsections where we write an introductory sentence and at least four or five important sources that define that section. Then we have four very important things to consider when I'm trying to synthesize the information on literature reviews. First of all is the chronology of events. So if it is any kind of an argument or a debate then how has it proceeded from one place to another. For example, if I'm talking about the public opinion theory by Walter Lippmann then from 1922 onwards what are the various strands of discussion there. So that chronology is something that I must be very clear about. And also at times the publication chronology is important where we discuss about how all these publications by year you know how they have been published. But we must be very careful about translated projects. For example, the structural transformation of a public sphere by Habermas it was written in German in 1962 but it was translated in English only in 1989. So we have to be careful about the chronology that publication year and also the thematic and the conceptual dimensions whether I can categorize them into certain thematic and conceptual categories. And of course what are the different methods they've adopted to answer the same research question. So at its very basic literature review at answers to important questions. One, I'm looking at work with whose research questions are very similar to mine. And also I'm looking at how they have approached that research question or what are their methodological approaches. So this is another thing that I must keep in mind when I carry forth with my literature review process. It's important to talk about various types of literature review before we get into the nuts and bolts of how that these reviews are carried out. So at its very basic we might think of describing the literature review thing or categorizing them into three main categories. One is the summary overview. The second is the research background and the third is the research study or the systematic review. So let's go and talk about all these three things in brief. So the summary review is something which is very common in textbooks for example it gives me a sense of the range of ideas in the subject. So what are the main fields and we are basically trying to summarize those ideas without providing any new analytic insight. Providing an analytical insight is not what I intend to do. My idea is only to summarize what has been done in that field. So this is more of an information and a lot of our research work will not be about summarizing all the work that has been done in the field but we'll have to provide some analytical insight to that work. And there there's no preference for any one kind of voice because in our literature review process we will be talking about the writer's voice the author's voice because it's important to realize that it is our work. So every sentence must be our voice and we'll talk about how to get that voice in the literature review process. So it's not about just putting others ideas one after the other but providing our inputs to those ideas and trying to categorize them or to look for contradictions or to look for certain themes there in those arguments. The other part is the research background review and that is what is probably more important for the kind of literature review that we look for in theses or dissertations. And that provides a background for this specific study that we are doing by discussing the ideas that help frame the research question. So all ideas that are related to this review process they will be there in the research background review where we are looking for those ideas. And as I said at the beginning we are looking at what are the inputs that led me to this particular theoretical formulation that I'm doing in my present research work. Research study is a formal study in itself. It is a kind of a meta-analysis or systematic reviews also as I will suggest in my next slide where it's a formal way of doing research in a manner in which we find out all the other related work that has carried on in this particular field. And the objective is to develop new knowledge and to draw conclusions from newly gathered empirical evidence. So based on this evidence this is a study in itself. And as I said one of the studies is meta-analysis and the other is the systematic review where we are providing an overview of existing work using pre-specified standardized methods. Where we identify and appraise relevant data which are linked to the theme or which are closely associated with the theme that we are talking about. So we are trying to document and critically evaluate and summarize all the research about a clearly defined research problem. So it could be the framing paradigm and everything that is related to the framing paradigm and its related concepts of second level agenda setting and emphasis framing and equivalence framing for that matter. So we are trying to document and critically evaluate using all those methods and to provide the latest updated views and kind of a typology if I can perform on that research problem. Another kind of research literature review is an argumentative review where we are examining literature selectively in order to support or refute an argument. So either we are trying to build up a contrarian argument as I suggest here or we are trying to just support that kind of an argument. So we are looking at different arguments and our review process is supposed to support or contradict that kind of opinion. Historical review focuses on examining research throughout a period of time. So it can start off right from the beginning and how it has emerged over the years. So it can be about the concept of public sphere beginning from the 50s and 60s and how it has developed to incorporate media or new media as we know it of the present age. And of course there is the methodological review where we focus not what somebody is found or what the findings are but how they came about saying what they say or what was the method of analysis. And as I said in the beginning that is also a very important part of the review process because we have to understand how different people have addressed a similar research question. And there is this type of review which is known as the theoretical review where we examine the corpus of theory that has accumulated in regard to that particular field. So the theoretical review helps us establish what are the theories that exist, what is the relationship between them and to what degree the existing theories have been investigated and whether new hypothesis can be tested in light of those theories. So that also is a very important review process. There is this work by Cooper where he has very succinctly provided these six characteristics on which we can discuss or we can classify the literature reviews. So he talks about focus and goal and perspective and coverage and organization and audience. So we can be looking at literature reviews which look at the research outcomes for example. What have been the outcomes of this particular work and also research methods that they might have adopted or theories in those particular works. Or how those theories have led to particular applications or practices. So that is one of the ways in which we can categorize different work on a particular field. We can also find out whether the goal of that particular work has been integration or whether it is criticism of particular work or whether the goal of the review process is to identify the central issues. So we can be looking at integrating all the work that is available or critiquing that work or identifying central issues in that particular field. We could have a neutral position where we are just looking at all the various strands of opinion or we could be having our own opinion as I said or we can have our own position and we might try and support our position through available evidence. We can also have a review which is exhaustive of all the content which is existing in the field or we could be looking at representative content or we could be looking at content which is central or pivotal to the field that we are studying or the research questions or the research problems that we are addressing. So it could be organized historically as we have already suggested beginning in a kind of chronological manner or we could be categorizing it in terms of concepts or in terms of methodologies also. And one of the ways in which we can think about literature reviews is also to think about whether it is addressed to specialized scholars, whether it is addressed to general scholars or to policy makers or it is addressed to the general public at large. This is another way of suggesting how to carry forth the literature review process. This is by Mackie and McEvoy and they start with selecting a topic, developing tools of argumentation, searching the literature based on certain keywords and such characteristic and then surveying that literature to look for certain trends and themes and categories and then critiquing that literature and finally writing the review. So in today's presentation I will be talking of some of these things not necessarily in this order but this is just to suggest that this is one of the ways in which we can look at the literature review process in a linear form. This is again from Efron and Rabbit's book. This is describing the review process in this particular linear fashion. So it starts off with choosing a particular topic, then locating the work in various sources or locating the research work in books or it could be articles or it could be documents and other kind of things. Then analyzing and evaluating them and finally synthesizing them. It's important for us to have the writer's voice because it is our work that must come out through the work and it shouldn't be just a collection of other people's words on the issue and finally editing and refining the literature review process. There are quite a few sources and it can range from books and monographs and dissertations and reference works and then journals and periodicals. It could be trade magazines. It could be newspapers. It could be website. It could be blogs. So there are lots and lots of sources that we can go back to for looking for ideas and looking for themes and looking for previous work that would have been done in the particular area. Another important decision that we often have to make is to find out whether to include a particular source in the review or not. Say for example if we do a Google scholar search for the keywords in the project that we are doing then we might land up with hundreds and hundreds of sources in the field. So which are the ones that we should include and which are the ones which we should exclude. So Bruce provides some kind of answer to that and the answers are that first of all whether it is topical or whether the keywords that are similar to the ones that we are looking for. Whether that work is comprehensive enough, whether they are dealing with a similar research question in a comprehensive manner and whether the breadth of that work is wide enough so that they include things related to my central theme that I am working on. Also whether it is relevant. So relevant is slightly different from topicality in that sense so we are looking at the relevance with the work that we are doing. One very important thing to remember is whether the work is current or not because if the work is not current or if you are not including enough current work in our review then there might be some very important gaps that can be easily avoided. Then whether the works that we are using for our review whether they are authoritative in our field and of course access is an important thing whether all the work that I am looking for whether they are easily accessible or not. Important to decide on the structure of the literature review process also. So this is another suggestion by these authors and they say that the first thing is to assemble and collect the data. So catalog all the important work or the most important work in the fields and you could be building list of authors you could be cataloging citations and it is important always to work with some kind of a reference manager or these citation software so that you know you can write at the beginning. You can do that in a very systematic manner that as you go on cataloging the work you keep on adding them to the bibliography or keep them adding them to your reference list. So it could be done on Microsoft Word also for example and you could be adding to the reference list there. So then in stage to you arrange and categorize the major works into categories so it could be through authors it could be key descriptors it could be chronology it could be theory it could be methods. So we arrange them into these different categories and then we organize core maps and outlines according to the theme patterns. And then finally we look for you know the arguments there and we create a storyline and that is important to create a thematic structure or to create a reasonable argument which collates all these arguments and these categories. And that is very important because that is where you know this mind mapping and this outline discovery is important. So I will briefly describe the steps that we need to do in this literature review process. The step one is to get an overview of each of the important work that we have identified. And then we group them by category and we have decided and we have already discussed that which are the categories that we can talk about. And then we conduct a more focused literature review if we find that there are gaps more focused literature search if I can use that. And before we start this process we must be very organized ourselves and we must know where to and how to tabulate all these things and I will discuss that in today's presentation also. So we are advised to use a spreadsheet or a table to compile all the notes that we take. And if we are not doing it systematically then later on when we try to compile all this information into a cogent argument then probably will be in some trouble. So of course if you are already adding it to your reference list then you are writing down the author's name, the title, the publication year, the journal identifier and also you have to on the spreadsheet to have a summary or an abstract and the methodology and the findings. So as experienced researchers we get used to skimming through the document in a manner in which we just find out what are the important information and then summarizing it and writing it into some kind of an electronic notebook also. So that notebook could be like one of these cardinal notes where and this is easily available on Google so you could be searching for cardinal notes and you can be creating these kind of notes for all the work you do where you have the main ideas on one section. You write down notes about that and then you summarize that and if you are doing this systematically then at the end of the process you will have a lot of these notes from which you can draw upon to draw into your categories or to draw into your thematic mapping and all. We have to be very flexible as we compile the notes so we can't afford to be extremely rigid in these kind of things but be very careful in copying author's exact words because we have to paraphrase them. If we use a lot of the author's own words then there will be a lot of problems with similarity and such things. Then we go for what is known as the deep analysis where we look for explicit definition of key terms in the literature that we are reviewing. We are looking for key statistics also because we might be using those statistics in the world that we are doing. We must be very aware, we must be very careful and we must pay special attention to review articles and also take note of short but important quotations. At times we might be needing those important quotations and also looking for the methodological strengths and weaknesses in the work that we are studying. Important to distinguish between assertion and evidence that whether the authors of the work that we are reviewing whether they are providing any evidence for their work or not and also to identify the major trends in the work or after reviewing or after reading or skimming through a lot of similar work what are the major trends and what are the gaps in that particular work and whether there is any relationship. At the same time we must also closely see how each article relates to our topic and we will also keep on looking back at the reference list which we keep on compiling as we carry on with the review process. At every stage we are writing down the author's name and all those things in our database. It could be Microsoft Word or it could be some citation managers that we are comfortable with. It could be Mendeley, it could be Zotero, it could be N notes anything that you are comfortable with. But then you look back and you see whether it is current whether all the updated new development in the field are there and whether the coverage is wide or whether the breadth of the coverage is good enough. So this is one very important advice from one of these authors Dave Harris and this is about starting from the core and working outwards. So this author advises not to look for those search terms and all but the argument is very simple. Let's start with a research project which is very similar to yours or whose research problems or whose research questions are similar to yours and then focus on the specific pieces that explicitly relate to the kind of work you are doing. So related work as well and then structure your review to cover the same general sources and ideas that they did with the addition of any extra concerns that you might add. So you start off with those kind of work and then you keep on adding to that and that's how you start from the core and you work outwards. So that's a very good piece of advice that rather than going from the search items and looking at textbooks and those kind of things looking at central work and then working around that central work. So there are a lot of works on how a proper search should work and in this section I will talk about search. So one of the definitions or one of the ideas is to start with the most recent research you can find on your topic. So say for example if you're doing on COVID-19 reporting then look out for the most recent research through a Google search. It could be Google scholar or whatever and then do an exploratory online search. At home it could be as I said a simple Google search and then record carefully and systematically every source you find to enable you to retrieve this information. More easily later so you have to keep on because you might come across some good work and you're very excited about that work. But later on if you don't record it at that moment you might not recall it and you strain your mind to see that what was that particular work and then a lot of valuable time is lost. So whenever you find out an important work, record it in your database. As I said it can be the Microsoft Office or MS Word, Microsoft Word reference section is one very simple way where we can just add in the new references as we go along. Or we can use some citation managers also but important to record that. And then use our research questions to find keywords which are similar to our research topics or it could be the keywords in the work that I find there through a Google search as well. We might also use a thesaurus, it could be an online thesaurus to look for similar words, keywords or descriptors and then look out for those good articles that we can find out on that particular field. And then do a discipline related database so we can talk about EBSCO for example if you're talking about media and communication and readily available search engines like Google's call for example. So this is again an important idea about when we look for that search we are looking for what are the key theories there. What are the epistemological and ontological grounds so how do they deal with questions of epistemology and ontology. What are the main questions that they've addressed till date. How is the knowledge on the topic structured and organized. What are the origins and definitions of those topics. What are the political standpoints. What are the major issues and debates about the topic and how have those approaches to those questions increased our understanding and knowledge. So that's again a very important thing to look at. So we can as I said use key descriptors as central themes to create core idea maps and this is what I'm going to describe in my next slide. So we can also reorganize them according to authors or we can you know according to citations etc. So we carry forth with this. So this is what a core map a core idea or key term map looks like. So that is the core idea it could be say for example news framing and there could be a lot of sub concepts related to this core idea. For example we could be looking at agenda setting we could be looking at priming we could be looking at equivalence framing we could be looking at emphasis framing. So we are looking at concepts related to the core idea and then we look for relationship between those concepts and that's important. Because those are the relationships that will help me define or help me refine my problems. And then we also list down the elements on those sub concepts. So if we carry forth from the core idea then then what are the related sub concepts and within those sub concepts what are the other elements. So that will help me visualize my core idea as I go along. So I can use all these databases I've already spoken about EBSCO we can use JSTOR which is very easily available. ProQuest is also a collection of databases covering social sciences and it provides index to full text articles in over 1000 social science journals. There is Sage Premier and there are other online databases also so that is what we can look for when we are doing that literature review search. One very important thing that we must understand is the analysis of an argument. So it is important to understand the argument that other authors have provided in their work. And I must also know this for the arguments that I will be providing in my kind of a work. So there are four basic things that we are looking there we are looking at the data we are looking at the claim. That we are looking at something which is known as warrant and we are looking at a backing. I will explain these terms in the next two slides but important to understand how an argument is made and how we address those arguments. So as I said in my previous slide that the first one is claims so it is an arguable statement. So it can be any kind of statement and that statement has to be backed by some evidence. And without that evidence that statement has no meaning scientifically. But there has to be an expectation that links between the evidence and the claim. So that is known as warrant or permit. And finally we have to provide some kind of backing to that warrant and to the evidence. In the next slide I will provide a live example of what these four things mean. But important as researchers to understand these four concepts about what is claim, what is evidence, what is warrant public permit and what is how do we back our warrant and evidence. So as I said in my last slide the first is the claim. The claim here is that car owners should restrict washing their cars. This is based on the data that car washes can use up to 2.5 lakh gallons of water. So this depletes water reservoirs by 20%. So this is the data and the claim is that car owners should restrict washing. And there has to be some link as I said which is known as warrant which has to link the claim and the data. And the warrant here is that water is essential and people should not waste. That is why the claim is backed by data and there is a warrant for that link between claim and data. And finally we must have a backing or we must have a reason why we are talking about that particular warrant. And backing is that water shortages can cause lots and lots of inconvenience to everybody and it is dangerous for people as well. So now to the writing part of literature review and I am very quickly going to talk about some few very important tips on writing literature reviews. So before we begin we must understand the importance of originality. So this is just to give a description of what originality means especially in social sciences. So first of all it must be produced using our own faculties. It must be produced using our own processes, very important. Without copy or imitation it shouldn't be copied. It shouldn't have been done before in certain ways. So that must be some newness to what we are doing. It must be new in style, character, substance or form. So newness we are talking about what are the dimensions of those newness. It should be authentic. It should be the result of thought. So all these elements are important in terms of originality. So we must ensure that the work we are doing is pretty original. This is one of the difficulties of the writing process is that the ideas are typically intertwined and interdependent. But when we are writing down that writing has to be done in a linear fashion because as I said it has to have a structure and it must have a particular thematic discussion or the kind of things that we have discussed earlier. So to write them out in a linear fashion is quite a task and we should be very clear about which are the ideas we should begin with and how to carry forward with that. So important to select the most important points in each of the sources and how they relate to the research problems. It could be thematic, it could be methodological, it could be chronological as I said but how that information is related to the research problem. So the most important point and then how that is related to our research problem. We will not be using direct quotes as we said right at the beginning but at times we might need to quote certain terminologies which have been coined by those authors or we might be requiring that to emphasize certain things but we must make some short quotes and if there are long quotes it's better to go for paraphrases unless there are very strong reasons not for paraphrasing them. And as I said in the beginning we must remember to summarize and synthesize because within each thematic paragraph and as throughout the review also so we must be looking at not only the trees but at the woods also at the same time so that is why summarizing and synthesizing at the same time and recapitulating the important features of any research study that is there in the review but also synthesizing it by rephrasing the study's significance and relating it to the work that I am doing. Very important to have our own voice because the literature review generally presents others' ideas and of course it is others' ideas and we are trying to synthesize those ideas but our voice should remain front and center because whenever we are weaving reference to other sources we have to maintain our own voice so one of the ways is by starting and ending the paragraph with your own ideas and own wording so you are putting your own ideas and in between you are using those evidences from others' work to just establish your ideas but it is important that our voice comes through in the literature review process so it is not only about others' contents but three or four very important things about others' works so one of this is how are they organizing their ideas what are the methods they have used to study the problem what theories have been used to explain, predict or understand that research problem and what are the sources that those people have cited in their work so all that have to be intervened and weaved into our literature review writing process I am going to talk about some of the mistakes that are generally seen in the literature review process one of it is that sources do not clearly relate to the research problem so if they are not related to my research problem they should be there in the review in the first place and often it relies on secondary analytical sources so for example our work is on public sphere it should not be only about what other people have written about Habermas' work but we must also be citing his own work so if my literature review relies only on secondary analytical sources then there is a major gap that we should have filled long ago we should not uncritically accept others' findings so we must have a point of view or we must critically examine their findings and their interpretations often people want the literature review process also to describe the search procedures but as I said in the earlier slide this may not always be necessary we must not report isolated statistical results we must think of synthesizing them so we must also include a research which does not validate our assumption we must not be cherry picking which I said right at the beginning so to sum up I will just repeat two or three very important things that I have already discussed literature review process involves these four things first of all the first thing is the problem formulation so what is the topic that is being examined and what are the component issues what are the related issues to the topic then finding material relevant to the subject being explored so looking for all relevant material which are relevant to my topic then we evaluate the data we determine which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic so they are important for my work and then discussing the finding and conclusion of a pertinent literature so of a similar literature we are also discussing the conclusions and findings so if I have to represent that in a diagrammatical format we start off with the research questions we choose keywords for search we choose which databases we should be searching for and what are the subjects that we must be looking for then we locate those things we expand at times the search if it is too narrow or generally it's the other way that it's too huge and we'll have to narrow the search so there are those boolean expressions like and for example which can be used to narrow down the sources and at the same time we have to keep on recording all the citations and create a bibliography as we go along I will talk about just some of the popular citation managers so EndNote is one of them Zotero is also very popular with many researchers and so is RefWorks and of course Benderly is what a lot of researchers talk very highly about thank you so much for your patience and I'll keep coming back with a lot more on media and communication, theory and research thank you very much