Understanding the literature review forms the basis of every research. What is a literature review should be answered before starting any research, therefore literature review is the study of the past research on the current research topic . To write good literature review you need to what it entails and its importance.
What does literature review entail?
Literature review writing is a process that follows by certain steps which include:
i. Locating related works in the field
ii. Determine researchers who worked on topic
iii. Major theories in the past research.
iv. siting the similarities and the differences
v. methodologies and research techniques used
vi. Finding research gaps in existing researches
vii. Establishing relationships between existing works
viii. Give framework for your own research
The following are of the importance of literature review:
1. Demonstrate Understanding
literature review can be used to show understanding of the topic of research. Writing a critical literature review would easily show that you have proper information on research field. This will be enough to convince readers that your research is relevant compared to the existing work.
2. Justify Your Research
literature review helps in justifying your research and formulating the research questions. By analyzing the past research helps identify research gaps in the literature then try to find the solution in your work.
3. Theoretical framework setting
By doing thorough analysis of the existing literature reviews you will get enough ideas that will form the basis of your work. The literature review will equip you with many ideas such as the strengths and the weakness of the existing studies on the same area of study. By identifying the weaknesses, you will be able to base your research on them.
4. Support Your research Findings
The climax of research is the final findings. For the result to be valid, they have to be compared to previous findings on the same field.