15 Aug The Literature Review

1. The Literature Review:

For most research projects, the process of reviewing the literature and starting to draft your review will be an early activity. Despite this early start, it is usually necessary to continue refining your review throughout your project’s life. The process can be likened to an upward spiral, culminating in the finished product, a written critical literature review of the literature. Once you have a good knowledge of the literature sources available then you could start composing your initial draft of your paper. The literature sources you are likely to make the most use of are often referred to as:

• secondary literature sources, these being formally published items such as journals and books;
• grey (or primary) literature sources, these being items produced by all levels of government, academics, business, and industry in print and electronic formats, but which are not controlled by commercial publishers; including materials such as reports and conference proceedings.

LIRN has a wide range of business and management literature sources that can be accessed easily. Make sure to plan your literature search appropriately. It is important that you plan this search carefully to ensure that you locate relevant and up-to-date literature. This will enable you to establish what research has previously been published in your area and to relate your own research to it. All our students have found their literature search a time-consuming process, which takes far longer than expected. Fortunately, time spent planning will be repaid in time saved when searching for relevant literature. As you start to plan your search, you need to beware of information overload! One of the easiest ways to avoid this is to start the main search for your critical review with the clearly defined research question(s), objectives, and your research justification.

2. Research Approach:

Your research approach has to be clear and concise before attempting to perform your search for data and supporting documents. Your research could be one of the followings:

1. Qualitative Research Paper
2. Quantitative Research Paper
3. Mixed methods Research Paper
4. Systematic Literature Review