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How To Write A Literature Review For A Research Thesis

As choosing a general thesis topic is comparatively trouble-free, but coming to a decision of specific and realistic research questions necessitate significant attention and extensive enquiry. Appropriate and relevant research questions and the methods adopted to answer those questions must be structure in the framework of previous research on the selected problem statement. The thesis literature review is one of the most challenging tasks in the thesis writing process. It requires a lot of time, consideration and attention. Always keep in mind that a systematic and thorough refined literature review is the foundation of solid research. A methodical literature review provides the authentication to your research work and also grants you with the research framework of the previous researchers. This can help you to refine your topic as you review the prior studies and make you specific on your research work. Following are the step to write a good literature review

Finding the previous researches:How To Write A Literature Review For A Research Thesis

The first step to write an effective literature review is start finding the research work of different authors. You can find the articles of their work on one of the largest search engine that is google.com; you can also put your query on yahoo.com or any other search engine. The best source of searching the previous studies is Google scholar where previous research articles are uploaded there. Another other largest data base for research scholar articles is emerald or digital libraries like HEC digital library. Another source is soople.com where you put the topic of your thesis. The best way to find the free articles is write “.pdf” at the end of your topic in the search bar.

Reading the found articles:

The best way to read the articles of the authors that you find is read their abstract to identify that are they related to your topic. Then read the key words of their topic. While searching, identify your topic key words. Key words could be the main problem of the research or the words that are describing the purpose of the study. After that, you can use either type of reading the articles that is by fisher’s method, toulmin’s method or any other method.

Organizing the literature review:

There are several ways with the help of which you can systematize your thesis literature review. The three most common are:

1) the historical format of the research work,

2) the conceptual format, consist of research propositions or hypothesis; and

3) the methodological format.

Literature reviews can be of both types that are quantitative or qualitative. A quantitative review explains the significance of the research problem at the beginning of the study that ropes the theory, predicts the research questions, and explains the outcomes of other author studies. The two common types of quantitative literature reviews are narrative reviews and meta-analyses. The literature review also provides the mediating variable of your research work. The whole literature review basically provides the framework of your investigation in which is provides and supports the independent variable, mediating variable and dependent variable.

Writing up the literature review:

Once you have collected the data from the previous research works, now you have to work out on writing it up. This is one of the most demanding tasks while writing a thesis. There are few things you have to consider while writing the literature review. Firstly, you should paraphrase each and every word you pick from the other researches. Secondly you have to mention the name of the author from which you have picked that work, phrase or sentence. This is something ethically considered worldwide. You have to give the index references and also end references which consist of the author name, year of publication, and the topic of it article, the journal name, the volume number, then issue number, and then the page number. The last and the most important thing before submitting a thesis literature review is having spelling and grammatical errors. So to focus on that with full concentration is very important.

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