Literature Review for a Research Proposal: A Quick Guide
Writing a Literature Review in a Research Proposal
The longest section
in your research proposal will be your literature review.
Your literature
review should be about 3-5 pages of the most relevant literature in your field.
It should cover some basic ideas linked to your topic, and touch on the
keywords you’ve provided on your cover page. You need to demonstrate the
breadth of your research here; show your reader that you’re a serious academic
who knows something about your field. This will probably take the most time to
complete in your research proposal, but it shouldn’t take longer than a few
weeks if you work in a focused way. I’ll give you some tips about completing a
literature review quickly in the next paragraphs.
It’s important to
remember that you don’t have to know everything before you start writing a
literature review. For now, it’s just used to show your supervisor and the
review committee that you’re familiar with all of the major scholars in your
field, that you’ve read the ideas that you need to know before you start your
writing, and that you’re considering all angles of your topic when you write
your thesis.
What I advise my
students to do is to get as many articles as possible that relate in some way
to their topic, and then read the abstract and the first paragraph of each of
those articles. This should take no longer than five minutes per article.
Usually, you’ll get a good enough sense of what the article is about to include
a short reference to it in your literature review, and to make a note for
yourself in your research notes where you can summarize the main idea of the
article and decide whether it’s worth coming back to. Then, for those articles,
books or dissertations that seem especially relevant and worth returning to,
read the entire piece and add a more nuanced paragraph or two in your
literature review where you summarize the contents and explain the relevance to
your topic of study.
Your literature
review also has to have a logical flow to it. You are moving from one idea to
the next in a logical way. That’s why you should plan your literature review in
the same way that you plan an essay: it has to present all of the information
in a way that eventually demonstrates why your research is needed, and why it
will add to the field in a meaningful way. You could think of a literature
review in your thesis proposal as an extra justification for why you should be
doing your thesis: you demonstrate through looking at a wide range of
literature that the work you are doing is important, relevant and necessary.
The way I plan a
literature review is by listing various headings in a word processor document which
cover broad topics or themes of my research. Then, as I read a new article,
book or dissertation, I add citations under each of those headings, or relevant
quotes that I think will be important for my study. Sometimes, I’ll add 10 or
20 quotes from the same article, all of them under different headings. This
allows me to have a lot of wiggle room; I can see how the various articles
relate to one another; I can cut ideas out and paste them somewhere else, or
even add new headings as I go along. Once I have a rough outline, I can start
fleshing out each of the headings into a few paragraphs, and then rearrange
them to improve the logical flow of my literature review. There are some
resources on logic and coherence on the Academic Coaching website that might
help you with this section, so head over to writeyourthesis.com if you’d like
extra help here.
Every few
paragraphs, you could include a sentence or two criticizing the articles,
showing the areas where they are incomplete or where further studies could be
done, and then explaining briefly how your research will address those
concerns. This will help the reader to know that you’ve read widely and that
you understand your field of research, and that you’re already engaged in a
debate with other prominent thinkers in your field. You’re already acting like
an academic by showing that you are thinking critically about the information
you are reading.
Review Your Learning:
·
Your literature review shows your knowledge of
the field
·
You should point to gaps in knowledge or
research
·
Present your ideas logically, flowing from one
to the next
·
Refer to the most prominent scholars and the
major theories and studies in your field to show the breadth of your knowledge
·
Criticize and debate with the ideas you present
at some points