LITERATURE REVIEW

A literature review is a scholarly paper, which includes the current knowledge including
substantive findings, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to a
particular topic. Literature reviews are secondary sources, and do not report new or
original experimental work. Literature reviews also differ from research articles/papers in
that you are presenting, summarizing, and analyzing the research of others, rather than
presenting your own research.

Purpose of Literature review

The literature review gives you a chance to:

 Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context

 Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research

 Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists

 Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

 Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the
scholarly debates around your topic.

Steps to writing a literature review

Step One- Search for relevant literature-Before you begin searching for literature, you
need a clearly defined topic. If you are writing the literature review section of a
dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research
problem and questions.

a. Make a list of keywords-Start by creating a list of keywords related to your

research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re
interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this
list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

b. Search for relevant sources-Use your keywords to begin searching for

sources. Examples of key words clearance system, booking system, online
 clearance e.t.c Some useful databases/ academic directories to search for
journals and articles include:

i. IEEE Xplore-it is the leading academic database in the field of

engineering and computer science. You can search for not only
journal articles, but also conference papers, standards and books.

ii. Science Direct-provides access to millions of academic articles

published by Elsevier. 2,500 journals and more than 40,000 e-books
can be searched via a single interface.

iii. - is one of the two big commercial, bibliographic databases that

Scopus cover scholarly literature from almost any discipline. Besides
searching for research articles, Scopus also provides academic journal
rankings, author profiles, and an h-index calculator.

iv. Web of Science- also known as Web of Knowledge is the second big
bibliographic database.

v. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - The DOAJ is very

special academic database since all the articles indexed are open
access and can be accessed freely of charge.

vi. PubMed- is the number one resource for anyone looking for
literature in medicine or biological sciences. PubMed stores abstracts
and bibliographic details of more than 30 million papers and
provides full text links to the publisher sites or links to the free PDF
on PubMed Central (PMC). g. ERIC- (Education Resources
Information Center) - an online library of education research and
information.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question.
When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other
relevant sources
Step Two: Evaluate sources- You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that
has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most
relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

 What question or problem is the author addressing?

 What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
 What are the key theories, models, and methods?
 Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
 What are the results and conclusions of the study?
 How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm,
add to, or challenge established knowledge?
 What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible, and make sure you read any landmark
studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about
using.

Take notes and cite your sources- As you read, you should also begin the writing process.
Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review. It is
important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism.

Step Three: Identify themes, debates, and gaps: To begin organizing your literature
review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and
relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you
can look for:

 Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become
more or less popular over time?
  Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
 Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
 Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the
direction of the field?
 Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be
addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if
applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

Examples:

 Most research has concentrated on improving the HCI and a lot has been
forgotten on the backend.
 Most researchers have concentrated on web based and little has been done on
mobile based

Step Four: Outline the structure- There are various approaches to organizing the body of
a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine
several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but
each theme is discussed chronologically).

a. Chronological-The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic

over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing
and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key
debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of
how and why certain developments occurred. E.g Explaining generations of
computer, explain from manual system to current system.

b. Thematic-If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your
literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For
example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health
 outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural
attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

c. Methodological-If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that
use a variety of research methods, you might want to compare the results and
conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

i. Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative

research

ii. Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus
theoretical scholarship

iii. Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

d. Theoretical- A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical

framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of
key concepts. You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach,
or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Step Five: Write your literature review- Like any other academic text, your literature
review should have an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion. What you include in
each depends on the objective of your literature review.

i. Introduction: The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of
the literature review.

ii. Body- Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to
divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time
period, or methodological approach.

iii. Conclusion-In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have
taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
Length of the literature review should be between 15 to 20 pages.

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and
critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

Types of Literature Review

There are many types of literature review but the following types of literature review are
the most popular in business studies:

1. Narrative literature review critiques the literature and summarizes the body of a
literature. Narrative review also draws conclusions about the topic and identifies gaps or
inconsistencies in a body of knowledge. You need to have a sufficiently focused research
question to conduct a narrative literature review.

Examples

A narrative literature review of people living with HIV/AIDS

Use of internet and traditional media among young people

2. Systematic literature review requires more rigorous and well-defined approach

compared to most other types of literature review. Systematic literature review is
comprehensive and details the timeframe within which the literature was selected .
Systematic literature review can be divided into two categories: meta-analysis and meta-
synthesis.

Example

Effectiveness of Community Interventions in Decreasing Smoking Prevalence among

Adults in the United Kingdom
3. Argumentative literature review, as the name implies, examines literature selectively in
order to support or refute an argument, deeply imbedded assumption, or philosophical
problem already established in the literature. It should be noted that a potential for bias
is a major shortcoming associated with argumentative literature review.

There is no difference between educating a boy or girl child in modern society

There is no difference in job opportunities between a form four leaver and an

undergraduate

How to organize your literature review

Using an example of student registration system
2.0 Overview
2.1 Functions of existing student registration system

2.2 Components of existing student registration system

2.3 Characteristics/ Features of existing student registration system

2.4 Types of existing student registration system

2.5 Software development tools/ environment of existing student registration system

2.6 Challenges of existing student registration system

2.7 Related studies/Work

2.8 Summary
Sample Overview (Write in present continuous tense)

2.0 Overview

This chapter presents a review of literature for the online student registration system. The
chapter expounds/ explains on the functionalities, components, characteristic and types
of online student registration system. The chapter further discloses challenges experiences
in developing the online student registration system. To uncover the knowledge gap that
exists in developing the online student registration system a discussion on related studies/
related work is presented.

Related work

You are required to discuss specific authors who have developed similar systems. Discuss
as per the sections presented earlier. For instance if you had a section on functionalities.
You pick all the author who presented/ discussed functionality and bring out their
discussion. You also need to bring out the weakness of the approach they undertook.

Your related work should have between 10- 15 authors. This will be evident that you
have read at least 10 to 15 articles.

Sample Related Work

2.7 Related Works

(Uloko et al., 2018), conducted a research on the prevalence of risk factors for diabetes
mellitus in Nigeria. In conducting this research work, a total of 23 studies (n = 14,650
persons) were considered. In estimating the pooled prevalence of DM, a random effects
model was implemented and subgroup specific DM prevalence was used to account for
inter-study and intra-study heterogeneity. From the results achieved they concluded that,
the prevalence of DM in Nigeria has been on the increase in all regions of the country
affected, with south-south with the having the highest prevalence seen in the geopolitical
zones. Urbanization, physical inactivity, aging, and unhealthy diet are key risk factors for
DM among Nigerians. They recommended the urgent need for a national diabetes care
and prevention policy scheme.

(Chawan, 2018) conducted a research aimed at developing a system which can predict
diabetes at an early stage in patients with a high accuracy by combining the results of
different machine learning techniques. The research predicts diabetes using two (2)
different supervised machine learning methods including SVM and Logistic Regression. It
considered seven (7) features of the patients. They reached a conclusion that SVM
showed a better performance with accuracy of seventy-nine percent (79%) compared to
logistic regression which had a performance accuracy of seventy-eight percent (78%).

(Sneha & Gangil, 2019) conducted a research that was aimed at selecting the attributes
that aid in early detection of diabetes mellitus using WEKA which is a predictive analysis
tool. They were able to reach a conclusion which shows that decision tree algorithm and
Random Forest Algorithm has the highest predictive analysis by 98.20% and 98.00%
respectively. While Naïve Bayesian outcomes states the best in performance accuracy
with 82.30%.

(Modern, 2019) stated that, there are an enormous amount of data available in the
world today, but very few are there for the analysis of it because of which nowadays
many new fields are emerging starting from Data Science to Bioinformatics and
Cheminformatics. It can be assured that this world of AI is going to benefit a lot to
humanity, converting the toughest jobs to the simplest ones. Machine learning has led to
minimizing the errors Involved with the co-relation of different kinds of attributes. Most
importantly, it has transformed the approach of hit and trial method into a way with full
of logic and simulations. Today, using various simulations several required properties and
the after effects of many materials can be predicted, which has led us to the
maximization of a lot of resources. In this review article, they presented the machine
learning types, different algorithms and along with their uses in several in different ways.
(Kaur & Kumari, 2019) developed five different models for the detection of diabetes
using, linear kernel support vector machine (SVM-linear), radial basis kernel support
vector machine (SVM-RBF), K Nearest Neighbour (k-NN), Artificial Neural Networks
(ANN) and Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR) algorithms. Feature selection of
dataset was done with the help of Boruta wrapper algorithm, considering some
evaluation criteria namely; accuracy, recall, precision, F1 score, and Area Under the
Curve (AUC). The experimental results indicated that all the models achieved good
results with SVM-linear model providing a very good accuracy of 0.89 and precision of
0.88. From the results of this study, it can be concluded that on the basis of all the
parameters linear kernel support vector machine (SVM-linear) and k-NN are the two (2)
most accurate predictive models for diabetes. This work also suggested that Boruta
wrapper algorithm can be used for feature selection as they were able to achieve a better
accuracy with its use.

Sample Summary from the above related work

This chapter presented a detail review of literature on……………. From the above
reviewed literatures, it is important to note that, although various research work have
been carried out in the area of diabetes prediction in other countries using various risk
factors that are peculiar to their environment but not much have been done in applying
any of the machine learning techniques in diabetes prediction, using risk factors that are
peculiar to the Nigerian environment. It is also evident from the reviewed literatures that
supervised learning algorithms overtime, produced very good prediction accuracy in
research works where they were applied though not much work have been done in
comparing the prediction accuracy of these three (3) supervised learning algorithms i.e
KNN, decision trees and ANN.

Sample Summary (Write in past tense)

 Your summary should be able to capture all the areas/ sections discussed in your
literature.
  Summarize the findings in each of the section discussed which will bring out the
knowledge gap from your discussion.

2.8 Summary

This chapter presented a detail review of literature for the online student registration
system. A discussion on the functionality, components, characteristics and type of online
student registration system was presented. From the researcher, it was discovered that the
major challenges in developing the online student registration system is ensuring that
student take the shortest time possible to do registration. The knowledge gap discovered
is that there is need to develop student registration system that can ( Provide the
functionality that shows your contribution to knowledge)

Referencing styles
A referencing style is a set of rules telling you how to acknowledge the thoughts, ideas
and works of others in a particular way. Referencing is a crucial part of successful
academic writing, avoiding plagiarism and is key for assignments and research.
There are many referencing styles but they depend on the academic discipline involved.
For example

 APA (American Psychological Association) is used by Education, Psychology, and

Sciences
 MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used by the Humanities
 Chicago/Turabian style is generally used by Business, History, and the Fine Arts

Others include IEEE, Harvard, Vancouver e.t.c

For every reference you make in the reference list you need it accompanied by a citation
within text.
Importance of citation

 Giving credit (attribution) to original authors helps you avoid plagiarizing

 Citations allow your readers to find your sources
 Citations add credibility to your arguments
 It is expect it as part of standard academic discourse/discussion

Avoid plagiarism and copyright violation