10 Tips on Writing A Dissertation Literature Review
Have you been confused over time on how to write the literature review of a dissertation? What a dissertation is, its contents, its structure, and how long it should be, all of which will be addressed in this article. Stay connected!
What is a Literature Review?
A literature review is an essential part of any dissertation. It comes immediately after the introduction of the topic. Your literature review should give a clear idea of a field. It should contain information from academic resources to buttress your idea with viewpoints from different researchers. A literature review provides important background to your dissertation, and it as well shows where your dissertation fits in, in the field.
Contents of a Literature Review
A literature review should contain the following:
- A thesis statement (the main idea of the dissertation)
- Themes mentioned by various authors.
- Discussions of the themes and their relevance to the study you are carrying out.
- Comprehensive literature (mention the names of the authors as you pen down their opinions)
The length of the Literature Review
A literature review should take one–quarter of the whole dissertation depending on your dissertation structure and the availability of literature scope.
Follow the tips below on how to write a dissertation literature review:
- Formulate questions: formulate your research questions to avoid beating around the bush. This will make you have and hit your target.
- You wouldn't want to get stuck while writing your dissertation. Ensure you surf the net for databases, be ready to search academic libraries for relevant and useful resources.
- Significance over content: while spending time on analyzing the importance of the resources gathered for self-purpose, ensure you relate only the relevant content.
- Main themes: from the literature you have studied, point out the main themes and give necessary explanation, evaluation and interpretation to them.
- Critical approach: scrutinize critically anything you want to include in your literature review. Get only essential information from reviewed materials and discard any mere information.
- For every dissertation, there should be a part where a summary of the results is highlighted. Draw your conclusions and recommend your opinions on what you think the future trend may be.
- The validity of sources: the need to review literature to gather information from existing sources can not be overemphasized, but you must consider the validity of the sources reviewed.
- For the presentation of your findings, you need to categorize the literature reviewed into "for" and "against" classes for certain controversies.
- Theory: at the end of your literature review, you must clearly express the basis behind your findings' theoretical aspects and the standpoint you have reached.
- Source provenance: you need to prove the validity of a source. Investigate and report on the credibility of the authors and reliability of the methods.