How to Write a Literature Review For Your Thesis

A Literature Review is a study of the original and primary scholarship on a particular topic. It does not study the topic itself, just the research that has been conducted on that topic. The aim of a Literature Review is to review, analysis and evaluate these sources to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and to identify a gap in the current literature that the thesis aims to fill. The Literature Review provides the background to and justification for the research.

A review of the relevant literature on a particular topic is a vital component of all research degrees. There are many reasons why a review of the current literature should be conducted before beginning a research project. These include:

* To identify any gaps in the literature

* To avoid unnecessarily repeating work that has been carried out already

* To identify important research, sources, views and theories in your field

* To identify other researchers working in the same field

* To allow you to understand and explain the context into which your thesis will fit

* To develop ideas on how best you could undertake your own research

There are four stages to conducting the review. The first stage is to define your project. To do this you will need to know the topic or field you wish to write your thesis on. The second stage is to search for the literature. This involves searching through libraries, journal databases, the internet and other places to find all the relevant sources on your topic. You will be looking for books, monographs, journal articles, conference papers, theses, reports, papers, and studies.

The third stage is to evaluate and analyse the literature you have found. You will evaluate the sources to identify their strengths and weaknesses and to discover which sources make the most significant contribution to the field. You will analyse and interpret the literature in order to discover what information is relevant to your thesis. At this point, you will begin dividing the literature into categories. The fourth stage is to write the Literature Review itself.

The introduction should contain:

* A definition of the topic or field and the objectives of the Literature Review

* A introduction to the overall trends, conflicts, conclusions or themes that will be discussed

* An indication of how the sources have been divided for discussion

* An indication of the gap found in the literature that the thesis aims to fill

The body should contain:

* A division of the literature into categories for review

* A summary and analysis of each of the sources, a discussion of their strengths and weaknesses, an explanation of what they contribute to the field, and a description of how the sources differ from each other

* A discussion of the gap identified in the current literature and how your thesis will attempt to fill it

* Remember to structure the body of the Literature Review as you would an academic essay, making sure it is well organised and structured

The conclusion should contain:

* Conclusions regarding which sources make the most valuable contribution to the understanding and development of the area of research, maintaining the focus established in the introduction

* A summary of the gap identified in the current literature and how your thesis will attempt to fill it

Once you have written your Literature Review, the final step is to have it professionally edited by an academic editor. This will ensure that your work is presented in the best possible way, in formal academic language, and free from grammatical and other errors.

Our PhD qualified academic editors will professionally edit your essay, assignment, thesis or dissertation. We provide online Essay Editing and Thesis Editing for high school, college, university and postgraduate students worldwide.

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Writing Your Master's Thesis - Creating a Bibliography and Writing a Literature Review

Before you even start writing your actual master's thesis, you will need to compile a bibliography of all the research sources and materials that are relevant to your thesis topic. In addition, as part of your master's thesis, you will be required to write a literature review, which may be part of your thesis proposal or even part of your thesis itself depending on the preferences and standards followed by your academic department and your faculty advisors.

Prior to embarking on either one of these very important projects, it is vital to understand the difference between a bibliography and a literature review. A bibliography is simply a list of sources that you have consulted in the course of researching your master's thesis. In this context, "consulted" is defined very broadly. It doesn't matter whether you got a lot of information from a book or just a little. It doesn't even matter whether the information that you gleaned from a particular research source never even makes it into your thesis.

Any book or article that you looked at, even briefly, in the course of conducting research for your master thesis belongs in the bibliography. It doesn't matter whether you read the whole book or just skimmed a chapter, whether an article was helpful or added nothing to your understanding of your topic. When it comes to putting together a bibliography, you must err on the side of over-inclusiveness. Note that a bibliography is not the same as a "reference page" or a "works cited page" that you might include in a run-of-the-mill term paper. A bibliography for a master's thesis should include all relevant resources that you encountered while researching your topic, whether you actually cite them or not.

A literature review on the other hand is much more selective than a bibliography and much more difficult to put together. A bibliography, essentially, is just a list of books and articles put in standard citation form. You don't need to understand or appreciate or even to have read a source in order to include it in a bibliography. A literature review, on the other hand, is a written analysis and synthesis of the research sources that are most pertinent and helpful to your master's thesis topic. In your literature review, you will not simply list sources as you do in a bibliography.

Rather, you will discuss and analyze the importance of each source to the topic that you have chosen to write about. More than that, a well-written and well-constructed literature review does not simply list important sources and discuss their contributions to the field. In writing a literature review, you should be able to draw connections between the various sources that you discuss and analyze. In other words, it is vital that you explain for your reader how the points made and theories proposed in one research source build on or add to those found in another book or article. You should be able to identify and discuss trends and commonalities that appear in the works that you discuss in a literature review, as well as note any disagreements among scholars that are exemplified in these works.

A literature review should provide a brief history of the development of scholarship and academic theories in your chosen field, with emphasis on most recent discoveries, controversies, or proposals. After reading your literature review, your faculty advisors should come away completely informed about the state of research in your field as it stands today. With this understanding, the readers of your master thesis will be prepared to ascertain what your own research and writing has added to your chosen topic and judge the value of your work in advancing scholarship in your academic field.

Mike Shane is a self-made entrepreneur, a well known writer and consultant. His area of writing includes master thesis, dissertations, articles, and books. Every year he publishes a list of master's thesis, books and dissertations.

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