In this guide, you’ll learn about the most common literature reviews dos and don’ts to stay on the right track as you work on the assignment.
Up until now, we’ve written guides on
- How to write comprehensive literature reviews
- The role literature reviews play in research writing
- The elements of a literature review
Plus, there’s a lot more.
With the help of these posts, you can come up with the best study of already existing literature, which is singlehandedly significant in writing a research paper or dissertation project.
Problem is:
Not all students get their literature review right 100% of the time, and that’s because they make some LR mistakes that they should avoid in the first place.
So in this guide, you’ll learn about the dos and don’ts of literature review, so you can write what makes sense and earn the A-grade level marks for the entire paper.
5 Literature Review Dos and Don’ts
As a college or university student, you wish is to score the best grade for your literature review, either as a standalone assignment or as a part of a research paper or dissertation.
So here are the writing rules to observe to get that A for the assignment:
1. Write Relevant and Focused Content
One of the reasons why students fail to score top marks for their literature review chapters because they fill the assignment with irrelevant content.
If after reading your review the reader asks the “so what?” question, there’s a high chance your work isn’t as focused as it should be in the first place.
Make sure you stay on topic from the very beginning.
The right approach to ensure your content is on point is to take another closer look at your research question, aims, and objectives, and then re-evaluate your theoretical framework to see if it related to these components.
Reevaluation may demand extra time, but spending more time on the assignment is the only way to make sure your work actually focuses on existing research that addresses the topic under investigation. Often, it helps to circle back to your research question, aims, and objectives to ascertain that your study of existing literature is on point.
2. Do Make Sure Your Literature is Current
Many students don’t feature current literature in their work, and that’s just a wrong way to get the work done by modern standards. While it’s significant to acknowledge landmark research and studies in your writing, your work should also include current literature.
Including current literature in your work gives you the opportunity to compare and contrast old and recent research data and share your thoughts on the evolution.
Finding and incorporating current literature in your work doesn’t have to be difficult at all.
- Google to Google Scholar and search your topic.
- Select one of the “Since…” links on the top left to filter the result based on a given date.
Keep in mind that what’s current won’t mean the same thing to all students. In fact, depending on your area of study, you might filter the results to show you research literature that are a year older, two years older, or more.
There’s a reward to doing this.
More often than not, a mix of class and recent research enables you to write a more comprehensive literature review.
3. Don’t Give Descriptions, Integrate and Synthesize Instead
Giving descriptions is one of the biggest problems in literature review writing. Quite too often, students focus on outlining what researchers said and end up making their literature review less comprehensive.
You need to do a lot more than just describing.
Your literature review needs to feature an integration of multiple existing research and show exactly how all the pieces fit together.
Don’t hesitate to go the extra mile to mention the missing pieces and the areas that simply don’t fit together, not to mention give reasons why you believe researchers have conflicting opinions on those areas.
Identifying conflicts in existing literature is a great way to find gaps that current and future research should address. By including a mix of perspectives in your work, you demonstrate that you did enough research that not only offers balanced review but also provides a clear perspective of the current knowledge on the topic.
4. Don’t Rely on Low-quality Sources
One of the most common mistakes students make is relying on low-quality sources, such as daily news articles, opinion pieces, and regular blog posts, to write literature review. In doing so, professors often end up rating their work as either incomplete or academically unsound.
Even if you think a recent news article or an interesting blog post you read recently can make a good fit for your literature review project, it most often unlikely to be as significant. So, you need to be more skeptical when it comes to picking your sources.
The most important rule here is that you refrain from using daily news articles, opinion pieces, and regular blog posts as your source of information. If you must use them, then do so only sparingly.
In fact, the right sources for reference are those that help you to build a strong theoretical framework because they’re academically sound. If anything, we can’t stress enough how important it is to consider peer-reviewed articles for your research.
You also have the liberty to explore books written by established and academically recognized authors who are experts in the area you’re investigating. And although your professor won’t mind if you draw information from government websites, you need to make sure those sites have a good reputation for being objective with what they publish.
5. Don’t Make These Stylistic and Writing Mistakes
There are stylistic and writing mistakes that you must avoid when working on a literature review. You should:
- Never use emotional phrases in your work. Your goal with this project is to present classic and current research on your research topic. Given that you’re relying on information that already exists, you don’t have the room to include subjective and emotional words in your writing.
- Avoid writing your personal opinion in the review. Literature reviews have to be objective and based on facts drawn from already exiting research around your topic.