The Use of Literary Review

A.     Definition of Literature Review

According to Cooper (1988) '... a literature review uses as its database reports of primary or original scholarship, and does not report new primary scholarship itself.  The primary reports used in the literature may be verbal, but in the vast majority of cases reports are written documents. The types of scholarship may be empirical, theoretical, critical/analytic, or methodological in nature. Second a literature review seeks to describe, summarise, evaluate, clarify and/or integrate the content of primary reports.'

The review of relevant literature is nearly always a standard chapter of a thesis or dissertation. The review forms an important chapter in a thesis where its purpose is to provide the background to and justification for the research undertaken (Bruce 1994). Bruce, who has published widely on the topic of the literature review, has identified six elements of a literature review. These elements comprise a list; a search; a survey; a vehicle for learning; a research facilitator; and a report (Bruce 1994).

Hart (1998) defines literature review as the selection of available documents (both published and unpublished) on the topic, which contain information, ideas, data and evidence. [This selection is] written from a particular standpoint to fulfil certain aims or express certain views on the nature of the topic and how it is to be investigated, and the effective evaluation of these documents in relation to the research being proposed.

B.     The Use of Literary Review

A crucial element of all research degrees is the review of relevant literature. So important is this chapter that its omission represents a void or absence of a major element in research (Afolabi 1992). According to Bourner (1996) there are good reasons for spending time and effort on a review of the literature before embarking on a research project. These reasons include:

1)       To identify gaps in the literature. The first reason why reviewing literary is very important in doing research because it identifies the research that our study is attempting to address, positioning your work in the context of previous research and creating a research space for our work.

2)       It gives readers easy access to research on a particular topic by selecting high quality articles or studies that are relevant, meaningful, important and valid and summarizing them into one complete report.

3)       To carry on from where others have already reached. When we do literary review we will know what other researchers have already reached. Therefore, we can carry on the next research that we will do. Reviewing the field allows us to build on the platform of existing knowledge and ideas.

4)       To identify other people working in the same fields. If we do the same research with others, we may look at the other researchers’ literary review to identify other people working. It can be used as references of our research. A researcher network is a valuable resource.

5)       To increase your breadth of knowledge of our subject area. In writing literary review, we write some theories that relate with our subject are. By writing the theories in our literary review, so that we know deeply about our subject are.

6)       To provide the intellectual context for your own work, enabling us to position our project relative to other work.

7)       To identify opposing views.

8)       It provides an excellent starting point for researchers beginning to do research in a new area by forcing them to summarize, evaluate, and compare original research in that specific area.

9)       To put our work into perspective.

10)    To demonstrate that we can access previous work in an area

11)    To identify information and ideas that may be relevant to our project. In literary review, we write some information and ideas that may be relevant to our project. The information may be from books, journals, etc.

12)    To identify methods that could be relevant to our project. When we write the literary review, we can know what method that we will use in doing the research.

As far as the literature review process goes, ultimately the goal for students is to complete their review in the allocated time and to ensure they can maintain currency in their field of study for the duration of their research (Bruce 1990).