I attended this seminar on Writing your literature review conducted for all new graduate research students in the Faculty of Engineering & IT. The session was conducted by Ms. Jane Moodie and it covered aspects such as: what is a review and the best way to structure and how write a good review.
Date: Monday 18 April, 2016
Time: 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Venue: Room 133/14 Alliance Lane (Building 72), Clayton
The session was conducted in an interactive manner and comprised of practical activities and I was able to relate the discussion to my current research experiences. The first half of the session focused was on when to do a literature review and what do you want to learn from conducting your literature reviews?
We also learnt that in a research paper, literature review is used in the introduction (to discuss background and link to the gap), in the methodology (to justify the approach) and in the discussion ( to compare or interpret results).
In order to link the literature review to you own research (usually in the introduction of a paper), the argument can be introduced in the following manner (by starting with):
- Discussion with the research context.
- Overview of groups of important study.
- Studies closer to your own research
- GAP where you research fits in.
Additionally, the study can be grouped as:
- from distant (topics) to close
- different approaches employed
- different analytical techniques used
- combination of the above.
The session concluded with the following important message about how to conclude the writeup:
- summarise what is known about this topic
- summarise what is NOT known about this topic
- identify an important GAP in current understanding
- state clearly what is now needed (your study!)
The following is my diagrammatic interpretation of how a good literature review can be structured:
Fig 1: Structure of a literature review.
I found this session extremely beneficial and I look forward to employing these approaches in my research investigation and write-up.
