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Reviewing the Literature Topic

Reviewing the literature is a major part of any research process. It is important for many reasons, including finding the basis for your research, checking the current knowledge and thinking in your subject area and demonstrating that you can find, read and synthesise a range of literature in your subject domain. As you create your literature review, you will also be building your skills in literature sourcing, retrieval and management, i.e. effective reading, synthesis, rationale-building, organisation and writing. As you study the learning units in this topic you need to consider how you will locate the relevant literature, read and synthesise what it contains, identify gaps, manage your bibliography, and develop your argument / rationale / research questions.
Reviewing the literature > Evaluating the literature > Relevance and coverage of the literature

Relevance and coverage of the literature

Newton's Principia frontispieceYou may have sourced literature in order to answer a particular question, solve a problem or gain further insight into a particular topic or aspect of research. An effective search will provide you with the literature most suited to the purpose of your search through the selection of good key words and search terms. The more efficient the search and the more relevant and suitable the sources retrieved, the easier it will be to evaluate the literature.

Relevance

Rather than reading the whole text (Rumsey 2004) to initially assess for relevance, you might like to assess relevance by reading or checking:

  • the contents
  • the abstract
  • the summary
  • the introduction
  • the preface
  • the synopsis

or to skim read or scan the document.

How is the resource relevant to your research or the purpose of your literature search? What does it bring to the table - what new knowledge or perspective does it provide? How will you record this?

Coverage

If the source is relevant, what kind of coverage of the topic does it offer?

Coverage refers to how much of the topic or subject of interest is covered by the literature and to what extent. Consideration should be given to whether the topic is; introduced, summarised, covered in full and in great detail or whether a particular aspect of the topic is covered.

Coverage can be divided into 3 key concerns (Cooke 2001);

  • depth,
  • breadth,
  • and scope.

Grouping literature sources

As you assess the relevance and coverage of a source you might also like to divide your sourced literature into groups. In fact, whilst assessing relevance and coverage is an ideal point to do this. Grouping the sourced literature might help you to cope with large volumes of literature and may also help you to spot patterns across the literature as they emerge. As you continue to evaluate the literature, grouping will also help you to begin to build an argument. For example, if your sourced literature reveals a topical argument then it might be useful to divide the literature into groups according to which 'side of the argument' they take. Some of the literature may take a neutral stance. Or perhaps it may be more appropriate to divide the literature you have sourced into basic, intermediate and more advanced levels of knowledge. If, how and when to group your literature is subjective.
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