如何准备文献综述和撰写论文

1 Finding formulating and exploring your topic Different topic creations Many students have in mind something that they want to work on others want to work with a particular scholar or research centre In the first case students search for a compatible supervisor In the second for a topic Regardless of these preliminary circumstances the topic is very likely only roughly formulated at this stage This is usually enough to have your enrolment accepted Reading the literature Once you have a general idea you could start by talking to your supervisor and other scholars But most importantly you have to think why you would like to work on it or why anyone would want to do so Ask yourself Why is it important What is interesting about this Suppose I solve it or find it or pull it all together what use is it What is its significance Then with some questions such as these in mind go and read more about it to see what is there and find out what aspects of it have been exhausted what neglected what the main ideas issues and controversies are in the area It is regarded as your supervisor s role to direct you to the most fruitful starting point in reading and surveying the literature Cycle of literature review All of this is not a once only activity but is a cycle you go through again and again So you read think and discuss it with your supervisor and then as a result come closer to the formulation of the topic And then with each cycle of reading thinking and discussing your topic becomes more specific and focused This is not the final formulation and the last time you will focus your topic But you could probably let go of this round of general exploration and embark on the next stage Your supervisor by this time should have enough of an idea of your topic to judge whether or not what you propose to do is feasible within the time available and has the potential to meet the required standards for a PhD To see the full potential of your topic or to the contrary see that it is not going to deliver what you wanted you do need to begin doing your research This of course is why pilot studies are often undertaken Making sense of the literature We do truly wish we could tell you about a reliable or simple way to make sense of the literature We can say however that you need to attend to things at two levels One is establishing a system that will allow you to organise the hard copies of the articles etc and develop a data base for references so you have easy access under relevant categories and don t chase the same references repeatedly The other is the more demanding task of understanding and using the literature for your purposes Without attending to the first task you could easily become inefficient and frustrated However although it is necessary to have some way of keeping track don t spend all your energies on perfecting your system It may be a good idea to attend a course for researchers on handling information Check whether your university s library or computer centre offers such a course The other task ahead of you of understanding reviewing and using the literature for your purposes goes to the heart of your thesis We consider this in three stages MakingMaking sensesense ofof thethe literatureliterature firstfirst passpass When you first come to an area of research you are filling in the background in a general way getting a feel for the whole area an idea of its scope 2 starting to appreciate the controversies to see the high points and to become more familiar with the major players You need a starting point This may come out of previous work you ve done If you re new to the area your supervisor could suggest fruitful starting points Or you could pursue some recent review articles to begin TooToo muchmuch toto handlehandle At this stage there seems to be masses of literature relevant to your research Or you may worry that there seems to be hardly anything As you read think about and discuss articles and isolate the issues you re more interested in In this way you focus your topic more and more The more you can close in on what your research question actually is the more you will be able to have a basis for selecting the relevant areas of the literature This is the only way to bring it down to a manageable size VeryVery littlelittle therethere If initially you can t seem to find much at all on your research area and you are sure that you ve exploited all avenues for searching that the library can present you with then there are a few possibilities You could be right at the cutting edge of something new and it s not surprising there s little around You could be limiting yourself to too narrow an area and not appreciating that relevant material could be just around the corner in a closely related field Unfortunately there s another possibility and this is that there s nothing in the literature because it is not a worthwhile area of research In this case you need to look closely with your supervisor at what it is you plan to do QualityQuality ofof thethe LiteratureLiterature This begins your first step in making sense of the literature You are not necessarily closely evaluating it now you are mostly learning through it But sometimes at this stage students do ask us how they can judge the quality of the literature they re reading as they re not experts You learn to judge evaluate and look critically at the literature by judging evaluating and looking critically at it That is you learn to do so by practising There is no quick recipe for doing this but there are some questions you could find useful and with practice you will develop many others Is the problem clearly spelled out Are the results presented new Was the research influential in that others picked up the threads and pursued them How large a sample was used How convincing is the argument made How were the results analysed What perspective are they coming from Are the generalisations justified by the evidence on which they are made What is the significance of this research What are the assumptions behind the research 3 Is the methodology well justified as the most appropriate to study the problem Is the theoretical basis transparent In criticallycritically evaluatingevaluating you are looking for the strengths of certain studies and the significance and contributions made by researchers You are also looking for limitations flaws and weaknesses of particular studies or of whole lines of enquiry Indeed if you take this critical approach to looking at previous research in your field your final literature review will not be a compilation of summaries but an evaluation It will then reflect your capacity for critical analysis MakingMaking sensesense ofof thethe literatureliterature secondsecond passpass You continue the process of making sense of the literature by gaining more expertise which allows you to become more confident and by being much more focused on your specific research You re still reading and perhaps needing to re read some of the literature You re thinking about it as you are doing your experiments conducting your studies analysing texts or other data You are able to talk about it easily and discuss it In other words it s becoming part of you At a deeper level than before you are now not only looking at findings but are looking at how others have arrived at their findings you re looking at what assumptions are leading to the way something is investigated you re looking for genuine differences in theories as opposed to semantic differences you also are gaining an understanding of why the field developed in the way it did you have a sense for where it might be going First of all you probably thought something like I just have to get a handle on this But now you see that this handle which you discovered for yourself turns out to be the key to what is important You are very likely getting to this level of understanding by taking things to pieces and putting them back together For example you may need to set up alongside one another four or five different definitions of the same concept versions of the same theory or different theories proposed to account for the same phenomenon You may need to unpack them thoroughly even at the very basic level of what is the implied understanding of key words for example concept model principles etc before you can confidently compare them which you need to do before synthesissynthesis is possible Or for example you may be trying to sort through specific discoveries which have been variously and concurrently described by different researchers in different countries You need to ask questions such as whether they are the same discoveries being given different names or if they are not the same 4 whether they are related In other words you may need to embark on very detailed analyses of parts of the literature while maintaining the general picture MakingMaking sensesense ofof thethe literatureliterature finalfinal passpass You make sense of the literature finally when you are looking back to place your own research within the field At the final pass you really see how your research has grown out of previous work So now you may be able to identify points or issues that lead directly to your research You may see points whose significance didn t strike you at first but which now you can highlight Or you may realise that some aspect of your research has incidentally provided evidence to lend weight to one view of a controversy Having finished your own research you are now much better equipped to evaluate previous research in your field From this point when you have finished your own research and you look back and fill in the picture it is not only that you understand the literature and can handle it better but you could also see how it motivates your own research When you conceptualise the literature in this way it becomes an integral part of your research Writing the literature review What we are talking about here is the writing of the review We assume that you have made sense of the literature and that you know the role of the literature and its place in your thesis Below are links to other sections covering these aspects You will doubtless write your literature review several times Since each version will serve a different purpose you should not think you are writing the same thing over and over and getting nowhere Where you may strike trouble is if you just try to take whole sections out of an earlier version and paste them into the final version which by now has to be differently conceived In practical terms it is necessary to have an overall picture of how the thread runs through your analysis of the literature before you can get down to actually writing a particular section The strategy which writers use as a way to begin the literature review is to proceed from the general wider view of the research you are reviewing to the specific problem This is not a formula but is a common pattern and may be worth trying Let s look at an example taken from the first pages of a literature review This shows us the progression from general to specific and the beginning of that thread which then continues through the text leading to the aims Despite the undisputed success of quantum mechanics many important fundamental problems and questions remain unanswered see for example X 1973 the measuring process cannot be satisfactorily described in QM formalism there are great mathematical stumbling blocks to attempt to make QM consistent with the assumptions of special relativity just to name a few 5 This is basically an introductory section which starts with a statement of the problem in very broad terms alerting us to the fact that not everything is rosy and proceeds to sketch in specific aspects Without doubt one of the most widely discussed of these is this this closescloses inin onon whatwhat thethe focusfocus ofof thethe problemproblem is is Like most fundamental issues in physics this question leads to challenges at several levels of thought At the philosophicalphilosophical level this issue poses questions about At the physicalphysical level we are forced to examine At the mathematicalmathematical level many questions are raised about the completeness and logical consistency The text moves on to specify issues at various levels Although the focus is sharper the coverage at the same time opens out An important instance in which all of these challenges converge occurs with the concept of angle in the description of quantum systems Thus the text has set up the situation where all aspects of the problem theoretical practical etc are brought together Whatever the pattern which fits your work best you need to keep in mind that what you are doing is writing about what was done before But you are not simply reporting on previous research You have to write about it in terms of how well it was done and what it achieved This has to be organised and presented in such a way that it inevitably leads to what you want to do and shows it is worth doing You are setting up the stage for your work For example a series of paragraphs of the kind Green 1975 discovered In 1978 Black conducted experiments and discovered that Later Brown 1980 illustrated this in demonstrates neither your understanding of the literature nor your ability to evaluate other people s work Maybe at an earlier stage or in your first version of your literature review you needed a summary of who did what But in your final version you have to show that you ve thoughtthought about it can synthesisesynthesise the work and can succinctly passpass judgementjudgement on the relative merits of research conducted in your field So to take the above example it would be better to say something like There seems to be general agreement on x for example White 1987 Brown 1980 Black 1978 Green 1975 but Green 1975 sees x as a consequence of y while Black 1978 puts x and y as While Green s work has some limitations in that it its main value lies in 6 Approaching it in this way forces you to make judgements and furthermore to distinguish your thoughts from assessments made by others It is this whole process of revealing limitations or recognising the possibility of taking research further which allows you to formulate and justify your aims Keep your research focused It is always important to keep your research focused but this is especially so at two points First when you have settled into the topic and the time for wider exploration has to end And then again at a later stage when you may have gathered lots of data and are starting to wonder how you are going to deal with it all FocusFocus afterafter literatureliterature reviewreview FirstFirst it is a common temptation to prolong the exploration phase by finding more and more interesting things and straying away from what was once regarded as the possible focus Either you or your supervisor could be guilty of this In some cases it might be you who is putting off having to make a commitment to one line of enquiry because exploration and realising possibilities is enjoyable and you re always learning more In other cases it could be your supervisor who at every meeting becomes enthusiastic about other possibilities and keeps on suggesting alternatives You might not be sure if this is just sharing excitement with you or if you are supposed to follow them all up Either way you need to stop the proliferation of lines of enquiry sift through what you have settle on one area and keep that focus before you It could even be a good idea to write it up on a poster in front of your desk Unless you have this really specified in the first place with the major question and its sub questions and you know exactly what you have to find out to answer these you will never be focused and everything you find will seem to be sort of relevant You have to close off some lines of enquiry and you can do so only once you decide they are not relevant to your question We continually meet students who when we ask So what is the question you re researching will answer My topic is such and such and I m going to look at x y and z Sometimes further probing from us will reveal that they do indeed have a focus but many times this is not so Thinking in terms of your topic is too broad You need to think rather of what it is you are investigating about the topic QuestionsQuestions forceforce youyou toto findfind answers answers topicstopics inviteinvite youyou toto talktalk aboutabout things things FocusFocus afterafter datadata collectioncollection Then at a later stage you could find yourself surrounded by lots of data which you know are somewhat relevant to your project but finding the ways of showing this relevance and using the data to answer your question could be a difficult task Now you have to re find your focus to bring it all together Again it is your research question and sub questions which will help you 7 to do this because your whole thesis is basically the answer to these questions that is the solution to the problem you presented at the beginning This may strike you as a very simplistic way to view it However approaching it in this way does help to bring the parts together as a whole and get the whole to work We even recommend that to relate the parts to each other and keep yourself focussed you could tell yourself the story of the thesis Making a deliberate attempt to keep focused will help you to shape your research and keep you motivated Apparently I have to write a research proposal What do I need to do The main purpose of a research proposal is to show that the problem you propose to investigate is significant enough to warrant the investigation the method you plan to use is suitable and feasible and the results are likely to prove fruitful and will make an original contribution In short what you are answering is will it work The level of sophistication or amount of detail included in your proposal will depend on the stage you