Research Proposal Writing: Literature Review

• Literature search


  An effective and logical way of searching from the published data to determine the coverage of high standard references on a particular topic
• Motives behind conducting a literature search

  • Making evidence-based guidelines through drawing information
  • Searching research method procedures
  • As part of academic evaluation
• Literature search plays a vital role in conducting good reliable research
• Literature search can be tedious and tiring that could lead to scholar being a lack of enthusiasm or even abandoning the research topic if not supported in a step-wise approach
• Considering that the available published data are gigantic, selecting fitting articles to your research is viewed as an art
• Formulating the research question

  • Considering the type of evidence needed (quantitative, qualitative, case studies, randomized and controlled trials)
  • Considering the type of question to ask to avoid drowning in search results
• Sources for literature search

  • Journal articles
  • Conference proceedings
  • Technical reports
  • Theses and dissertations
  • Standards
  • Patents
  • Websites
  • Institutions that can afford subscription costs
  • Institutions that cannot afford subscription costs
• Journal articles


  Written about very particular topics and usually shorter than books, published in reputable peer-reviewed publication institutions indexed by Scopus or ISI
• Conference proceedings


  Collection of scholarly papers contributed by researchers and published after an academic group conducted a gathering such as convention or conference, reviewed by experts before acceptance
• Technical reports


  Written documents submitted by researchers to the funding agency that sponsored the project, including details of the research project from the implementation and the results, not peer-reviewed unless published in a journal
• Theses and dissertations


  Scholarly work made by a graduate or post-graduate scholar as part of their requirements for obtaining a degree
• Standards


  Collective effort by experts in a specific field to create agreed, consistent, and documented technical specifications used as guidelines, rules, and definitions
• Patents


  Right reserved exclusively for an invention, a process, a product, or an improvement of both process and product for a limited period, wherein the owner can prohibit others from selling, using, and making the patented invention
• Websites


  Need to evaluate and validate information, looking for author/organization information, contact info, and checking the URL domain
• Institutions that can afford subscription costs

  Have very wide access to different scholarly works through databases of renowned publishers like Elsevier, ScienceDirect, IEEE, allowing researchers to find highly reliable scientific journals and information
• Institutions that cannot afford subscription costs

  Mostly rely on open access journals from Google Scholar and ResearchGate, researchers need to find alternative ways to get reliable information such as collaborations and contacting authors, making it harder to come up with high-quality research
• Searching strategies


  1. Systematic - Establishing and tackling the process in an organized and preplanned means, careful consideration of databases, search methods, search terms, and validating results

  2. Finding the best search terms

  3. Using truncation, masking, phrase search, and proximity operators
• Search terms


  Keywords vital for determining closest or relevant literature
• Finding the best search terms

  Spend considerable time working on search terms
• Truncation


  • Use of wildcard symbols like asterisk (*) or question mark (?) to replace one or more letters in a word, usually at the end of keywords
• Truncation


  • magnet* (finds magnets, magnetic, magnetism, etc.)
  • conserv* (finds conserved, conserving, conservation, conservable, etc.)
• Masking


  Another form of truncation where a symbol replaces a single letter in a keyword, usually in the middle
• Phrase search


  Searching for the exact text entered, by enclosing a word or phrase in quotation marks
• Proximity operators


  Specifies the distance in number of words between search terms
• Boolean operators


  AND, OR, NOT - used to combine search terms to broaden or narrow the search
• AND

  Narrows down the search, denotes intersection of keywords
• OR


  Expands the scope, denotes union of keywords (one or both must be present)
• NOT

  Limits the scope, denotes difference, filters out irrelevant results
• Retrospective search


  Looking at most recent articles and moving backward
• Citation search


  Locating applicable work by looking at what has been cited in an article and who has cited it since
• Targeted search


  Searching a specific, focused field of the literature, requiring detailed understanding of the subject
• Searching for literature is a crucial step in performing successful, credible research
• There are several reliable sources that can be used as references
• Alternative ways to collect information can be used if the institution cannot afford subscription costs
• Using different searching strategies helps minimize effort and get specific information for proposed topics
• Mastering searching techniques requires frequent use and practice as a researcher
• The literature review is an important part of the research proposal.
• It provides background information on the problem being studied, reviews previous studies related to the problem, identifies gaps or limitations in existing knowledge, and justifies the need for further investigation.
• A well-written literature review demonstrates that the proposed research has not been done before or adds new insights to what is already known about the subject matter.