Strengthening Your
Literature Review

you have investigated in your
research

conceptually

empirically

the definitions

should be linked

there will be

alternative, and sometimes inconsistent,
definitions in past work.

Your reviewers and readers
are aware of
this

the exceptions

are when a paper is focused on
construct development

Subtopic

The coverage

ls to reviewers how well you know
this body of past research.

It
detracts from your authoritativeness
as a subject expert

if a reviewer identifies some key articles

That being said, it is not
desirable to be exhaustive

If you are
studying something like succession

for example, an
exhaustive reference
list

would be overwhelming and
drown out the
rest of your paper

You need to include the
definitive

on a topic and also the articles
that are relevant to your narrow

research questions

It is unfortunately too common

have

with only a handful of articles published
in the past 5 (or even 10!) years.

If you have presented your paper
at several conferences

it
has already gone through a review
process at a previous
journal

your original reference list is likely to be 3 or
4 years out of date

Make
sure you do
a new literature

and your ideas can seem stale.

new knowledge in their paper

signal that the authors are up to date in the topic

The literature review

is a difficult part of a paper to
write

the methods section

has a relatively prescribed
structure and content

content of your paper’s literature
review are mutually dependent

You need to think about the extent to which you are
going to portray prior research as complementary

A frequently used structure

is to group studies with
the same findings

contrast those to studies that have
different findings

only some of your readers
will be expert in your particular topic

you need to have a clear logical
progression when you are laying
out your arguments

It is helpful to have another
scholar read over your
literature review.

and, indeed, your entire paper)
before you submit it to a journal

to check whether
your ideas are clear and
well constructed.

frames

an article by positioning
it against past research

positioned at

the start of an article and so
not only are important in themselves

cite previous
articles
published in the journal.

your paper needs to be relevant
to the area of specialty

be useful

A focused review on a specific topic

To build on existing
conversations.

authors should familiarize themselves
with at least the last 2 years of articles

for a Journal

It is

essential to have interesting and
relevant research questions

motivated by a gap

Identify arguments about why it is
an important gap to fill.

Doing a literature

maintain a wide and up-to-date
understanding of your subject area

Literature review needs
to be

shaped by your research
questions

you need to be
clear

focused your questions
what your going to ask.

be as specific as possible

think about what your reviewers
and readers will value.

great researches

motivated by a
“real-world” issue

A strong literature review

is the outcome of a creative
process

makes a contribution in itself.

a description of relevant articles that
have been published in the past

the authors
relate articles
to their research questions

A
literature review

should provide

new insights by integrating multiple strands

making sense of
different approaches

concepts

findings from prior
work.