Importance of Literature Essay Example for Free

Importance of Literature Essay1 Introduction In this article we provide gurgle close the importance of lit re insures as a way of summarsing the take of the art of a field. We pass on examine ways of constructing literature reviews and we lead see in the links provided examples of literature reviews. 2 definition of literature review A critical summary and an assessment of the current state of knowledge or current state of the art in a particular field. The ability to carry out a literature review is an important skill for any student. It will provide you with a context in which to place your assignments regardless of the faculty you are studying. Practic every last(predicate)y any assignment in any module you take will involve hearing what other people have written on the airfield of your assignment, gathering information to refute or support specific arguments, and writing about yourfindings. For small surpass projects, ( comparable module assignments), you will not be expected to provide a definitive enumerate of the state of research in your selected topic.You will be required to provide evidence that you have read a certain amount of relevant literature in the topic, that you have understood that literature, and that you stool summarize the visible you have read in a coherent way. The literature review is precisely that summary. In range to do a literature review you will exigency to spend time drill the literature relevant to the topic you are researching. Understanding the literature in your research topic will impede you from repeating previous errors, or redoing work which has already been done.It will excessively give you insights into aspects of your topic which business leader be worthy of exploration and future research. 3 Purpose of a Literature Review there are several purposes to writing a literature review. To provide the reader with an up to date account and discussion of the research findings in a particular topic. This top executive sound pretty esoteric exclusively you will find that in writing a literature review you will learn about the ways other people have constructed their give research projects. Seeing what others have done tycoon help you understand your own assignment.You might be able to see the methods that other much go through researchers have used and you might decide to follow on their footsteps and copy their methodological approach. You might also be able to detect conflicting points of view expressed by different authors. These conflicting points of view might be the indicators of diverging theories within the aforesaid(prenominal) topic. You neediness to be aware of these conflicting theories as well as of the arguments supporting these theories in line of battle for you to assess their value and make up your own mind on the topic.Being aware of the theories will help you later in your life as a student when you will have to design a larger research project like y our dissertation. You might also be able to discuss relevant research carried out in the same topic. It is important to be able to discuss relevant research because very practically it is very concentrated (as students and as researchers) to keep abreast of everything that is published every year in a topic. The job of the author of the literature review is to summarize and discuss the major historys published in that topic over a stated period of time.The discussion will take into account the methods and the results or findings of the most relevant research. The referee will assess whether the methodology is appropriate and whether the results seem valid. The reviewer therefore evaluates the quality of the research as opposed to merely listing documents. The reviewer may also discuss material published in other fields which are related to the main topic. This process is very important since very often research in the social sciences is multidisciplinary, i. e. knowledge gets g enerated from many disciplines and needs to be integrated.For example in order to be able to research and issue a literature review on a unbelief like Why do teenagers smoke? The reviewer might need to read material from journals in psychology, medicine, and sociology. 4 Mechanics of Writing a Literature Review You need to read. You need to read because it will give you ideas, and because it might improve your writing style. You need to develop some basic reading strategies. You need to decide where to read what to read whom to read how to find what you need to read.Your University or College library might be your first port of call in deciding where to read, but as you progress in your argument you might need to read in other libraries. You might also chose to photocopy material from these libraries and read it at home. The advantage of using photocopies is that you can underline the material and make notes. The question of what to read is more tricky. Books, journals, rep orts, popular media, computer-based material, internal reports, letters, conference proceedings etc. You will probably need to read all these when you are constructing a literature review.When you try to determine whom to read you need to be aware that anyone can be mistaken in their interpretations or their opinions. It is therefore important that you can be able to define how authoritative is the person that you are reading. You should also be able to ascertain their motivation in writing. This might help you determine if the person has a biased perspective on an issue. You should be guided on what to read (at least as a starting point ) by your module coordinator(s) and seminar tutors however, that is only sign guidance, after that you should be capable of finding your own material.Once you have set-up your basic reading strategies, you will need to be able to understand what you read. This is slightly more complicated than it seems because you will need to be able to develop t ricks to scan a lot of documents very fast, and decide if a particular document is good rich to merit careful reading. It takes practice to be able to look at a document in the library and determine if it is good enough for you to spend serious time reading it. Have a look at the table of contents and index of the book. Look at the innovation and concluding chapter .Scan some of the topics from the index and determine if the material is adequate. These hints will give you a piddling knowledge about the content of a document, however you will not be able to write a literature review based on superficial knowledge. You will have to read enough to know enough about what has been written and summarize it in an intelligent fashion. In other words, you need to know enough to be able to be critical about it. Once you select a document for serious reading, you will need to summarize and criticize it.