Compiling a Literature Review

A literature review is taking a chosen topic and finding evidence that either disputes or proves the chosen topic.  Compiling my first literature review was really frustrating at first, I had a long sentence and although I agreed with the sentence, I couldn’t find much information to help me prove the point that was stated.  I also didn’t know the best way to organise and lay out my review.  To help me with these problems I decided to reread the sentence again and then I highlighted certain keywords.  I used these keywords as a sub heading in my review this also helped me focus my review which made searching for information easier.  To organise my review I broke it down into three main headings I also added a forth heading for referencing  

The introduction

Under this heading I placed the sentence, and gave a short review about what I was going to discuss.

The main body

Here is where I placed all my findings, I made sure that I referenced any work that wasn’t my own, also in this section I broke down the sentence into its main keywords and used them as sub-heading to explain the importance of these topics.

Conclusion

Here I restated the aim of the topic and gave a short summary about my findings.  It is also important that you do not add any new information in this section.

Referencing

As my literature review consisted solely of secondary research it was important that I added this heading, this gave me a place to give credit to the people who compiled the information I used.

Organising my literature review helped me to compile my information faster it also allowed me some structure and gave me a great starting point.