Week 4 - LITERATURE REVIEWS

Overview of the session

To do your dissertation, you will obviously need to read a lot about your topic. You will do this early on in the process before you finalise your research question – any research you do, should build on existing knowledge and understanding about your research topic.

However, once you have identified your research question and aims, you will also almost certainly conduct a ‘literature review’ as part or all of your actual research output. In this instance, you are not reviewing the literature to simply develop your personal knowledge and understanding of a topic but rather to answer a specific research question (or test a research hypothesis). When you do this, you will be expected to conduct the review in a methodical and systematic manner: this means searching and reviewing a body of literature in a deliberate and structured way, according to a specifically determined process.

This week of the module is dedicated to conducting literature reviews, covering the key differences between different types of reviews, the steps needed to carry one out, and some practical exercises for identifying relevant documents, selecting the ones to be included, synthesising and analysing the evidence retrieved.

Learning objectives

By the end of the session, you will be able to:

• Distinguish between different types of literature review;
• Select the review that is appropriate for your topic or research;
• Identify search terms to start a search;
• Be familiar with the necessary steps of a literature review.