Research101

Research is not done in a vacuum or in isolation.
It has to be positioned into the existing scholarly work.

The researcher needs to know what has already been covered in his/her field of research, like:

• what variables were analysed?
• what were the relationships amongst the variables?
• what are the existing definitions, theories and findings?

Purpose of literature review

• to explore the works of others
• to look at existing relevant works in your research area
• to identify important variables from other studies pertinent to your research
• to identify gaps, misconceptions, contradictions in the issues relevant to your research
• to assist in developing your research design

Literature review is an essential entity in research and is a part of:

• dissertations
• reports
• proposals
• papers
   

Four major steps:

1.Problem definition

• identify a research problem or idea
• formulate research questions
• identify relevant KEYWORDS

2.Search strategies

• identify your information needs
• develop information seeking strategies
• identify relevant information sources
• use KEYWORDS to conduct searches
• retrieve relevant articles, books, etc.

3.Analysis

• review and summarise articles
• take detailed notes
• focus on identifying and comparing issues, variables, theories, methods and gaps
• extract key information and tabulate key items in a matrix or summarised fashion

4.Writing

• include pertinent variables, main issues and theories
• analyse how your study relates to the available literature
• highlight gaps in research works
• compare and contrast studies and findings
• create a list of references - a BIBLIOGRAPHY
   

• Books (including book chapters)
• Journal articles (peer reviewed typically)
• Conference proceedings
• Dissertations & theses
• Reports – technical, market, etc
• Papers – discussion, working, white, etc
• Government documents
• Data – statistics, financial, raw, etc
• Standards – technical, accounting, etc
• Patents
• News articles

What are the information sources in your subject & research area?

• OneSearch – NTU Library search tool
• Subject databases – Business Source Complete, IEEE Xplore, Emerald Insight, Knovel, PsycARTICLES, etc
• Citation databases – Web of Science, Scopus, etc
• Multidisciplinary databases – ScienceDirect, Academic Search Complete, etc
• Institutional repositories
• DR-NTU
• Government or institutional websites
• Google Scholar

• Data repositories – DR-NTU (Data)
• Google Dataset Search (beta)