ВУЗ:
Составители:
Рубрика:
• make reasoned judgements regarding the value of others’ work to your research;
• support your arguments with valid evidence in a logical manner;
• distinguish clearly between fact and opinion.
5. Although there is no single structure that your critical review should take, it is useful to think of the review as a
funnel in which you:
• start at a more general level before narrowing down to your specific research question(s) and objectives;
• provide a brief overview of key ideas;
• summarize, compare and contrast the work of the key writers;
• narrow down to highlight the work most relevant to your research;
• provide a detailed account of the findings of this work;
• highlight the issues where your research will provide fresh insights;
• lead the reader into subsequent sections of your project report, which explore these issues.
Whichever way you structure your review you must demonstrate that you have read, understood and evaluated the
items you have located. The key to writing a critical literature review is therefore to link together the different ideas you
find in the literature to form a coherent and cohesive argument, which set in context and justify your research. Obvi-
ously, it should relate to your research question and objectives. It should show a clear link from these as well as a clear
link to the empirical work that will follow.
6. The literature sources available to help you to develop a good understanding of and insight into previous re-
search can be divided into three categories: primary (published and unpublished), secondary, and tertiary. In reality
these categories often overlap: for example, primary literature sources including conference proceedings can appear in
journals, and some books contain indexes to primary and secondary literature.
Primary literature sources (also known as grey literature) are the first occurrence of a piece of work. They include
published sources such as reports, conference proceedings, theses. They also include unpublished manuscript sources
such as letters, and memos.
Secondary literature sources such as books and journals are the subsequent publications of primary literature.
These publications are aimed at a wider audience. They are easier to locate than primary literature as they are better
covered by the tertiary literature.
Tertiary literature sources, also called search tools, are designed either to help to locate primary and secondary
literature or to introduce a topic. They therefore include indexes and abstracts as well as encyclopedias and bibliog-
raphies.
Your use of these literature sources will depend on your research questions and objectives. For some research pro-
jects you may use only tertiary and secondary literature; for others you may need to locate primary literature as well.
7. It is important that you plan the literature search carefully to ensure that you locate relevant and up-to-date lit-
erature. This will enable you to establish what research has been previously published in your area and to relate your
own research to it. Time spent planning will be repaid in time saved when searching the literature. As you start to plan
your search, you need to beware of information overload! Before commencing your literature search you should under-
take further planning by:
• defining the parameters of your search;
• generating key words and search terms;
• discussing your ideas as widely as possible.
Techniques to help you in this include brainstorming and relevance trees.
8. Once obtained, the literature must be evaluated for its relevance to your research questions and objectives. The
following questions provide a checklist to help you in this process.
9 How recent is the item?
9 Have you seen references to this item (or its author) in other items that were useful?
9 Does the item support or contradict your arguments? For either it will probably be worth reading!
9 Does the item appeared to be biased? Even if it is it may still be relevant to your critical review!
9 What are the methodological omissions within the work? Even if there are many it still may be of relevance!
9 If the precision sufficient? Even if it is imprecise it may be the only item you can find and so still of relevance!
Your assessment of whether you have read a sufficient amount is even more complex. It is impossible to read eve-
rything, as you would never start to write your critical review. Yet you need to be sure that your critical review dis-
cusses what research has already been undertaken and that you have positioned your research project in the wider con-
text, citing the main writers in the field. One clue that you have achieved this is when further searching provides mainly
references to items you have already read. You also need to check what constitutes an acceptable amount of reading, in
terms of both quality and quantity, with your scientific advisor.
Страницы
- « первая
- ‹ предыдущая
- …
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- …
- следующая ›
- последняя »
