Western University College

Department of Business Administration

Research Methods in Business
Administration
(ReMt. 214)
Individual Assignment 5

Worked by:
Nahum Abraham
Section B
Submitted to
MR.Kagnew Tarekegn
MAY 20, 2020
1.How do you understand review of literature and review of related literature?
A literature review is a comprehensive summary of previous research on a topic. The literature
review surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources relevant to a particular area of
research. The review should enumerate, describe, summarize, objectively evaluate and clarify
this previous research. It should give a theoretical base for the research and help you (the author)
determine the nature of your research. The literature review acknowledges the work of previous
researchers, and in so doing, assures the reader that your work has been well conceived. It is
assumed that by mentioning a previous work in the field of study, that the author has read,
evaluated, and assimilated that work into the work at hand.

A literature review creates a "landscape" for the reader, giving her or him a full understanding of
the developments in the field. This landscape informs the reader that the author has indeed
assimilated all (or the vast majority of) previous, significant works in the field into her or his
research.

"In writing the literature review, the purpose is to convey to the reader what knowledge and
ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The
literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (eg. your research objective, the problem
or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the
material available, or a set of summaries.

A review of related literature (RRL) is a detailed review of existing literature related to the
topic of a thesis or dissertation. In an RRL, you talk about knowledge and findings from existing
literature relevant to your topic. If you find gaps or conflicts in existing literature, you can also
discuss these in your review, and if applicable, how you plan to address these gaps or resolve
these conflicts through your study.

To undertake an RRL, therefore, you first need to identify relevant literature. You can do this
through various sources, online and offline. Ensure you are saving all applicable resources
because you will need to mention them in your paper. When going through the resources, make
notes and identify key concepts of each resource to describe in the review.

Before starting the review, determine how you want to organize the review, that is, whether you
wish to discuss the resources by themes, dates, extent of relevance, and so on.
When writing the review, begin by providing the background and purpose of the review. Then,
begin discussing each of the identified resources according to the way you decided to organize
them. For each, you can mention the title, author, publication, and date before describing the key
concept and points. You may decide to list sections and sub-sections as in this sample or keep it
more free-flowing as in this sample. [Note: In case any of these links don’t open, you may need
to register yourself on the respective site(s).]

2. Why researchers review related literature?

A literature review may consist of simply a summary of key sources, but in the social
sciences, a literature review usually has an organizational pattern and combines both
summary and synthesis, often within specific conceptual categories . A summary is a
recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a
reshuffling, of that information in a way that informs how you are planning to investigate a
research problem. The analytical features of a literature review might:

 Give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations,
 Trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates,
 Depending on the situation, evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most
pertinent or relevant research, or
 Usually in the conclusion of a literature review, identify where gaps exist in how a
problem has been researched to date.
The purpose of a literature review is to:

 Place each work in the context of its contribution to understanding the research problem
being studied.
 Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration.
 Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
 Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature.
 Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies.
 Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.
 Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research.
 Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important].
3. Discuss basic types of sources for literature review.

Sources of literature Characteristics Examples

Reports
Theses

Emails

Conference proceedings

Company reports

Unpublished manuscript sources

High level of detail
Little time needed to publish Some government publications
Primary sources for the literature

Journals
Books

Newspapers
Medium level of detail
Medium time needed to publish Some government publications
Secondary sources for the literature

Indexes
Databases

Catalogues

Encyclopedias
Low level of detail
Dictionaries
Considerable amount of time needed
to publish Bibliographies
Tertiary sources for the literature
 4. Mention the steps of reviewing related literature you are supposed to follow in your research.

 Define your subject and the scope of the review.

 Search the library catalogue, subject specific databases and other search tools to find sources
that are relevant to your topic.
 Read and evaluate the sources and to determine their suitability to the understanding of topic
at hand (see the Evaluating sources section).
 Analyze, interpret and discuss the findings and conclusions of the sources you selected.

5. What are the difficulties of reviewing related literature?

Challenge #1 It is not easy to concentrate on the details of the text

Our attention span is short. Above all, we want to be entertained, and our attention spans are far
from perfect. When reading a book or an extended article you might notice that it is increasingly
hard for you to concentrate. This lack of attention makes you lose some details, which are
necessary for writing a successful literary review. There two options — either you are too
“excited” or not “excited” enough. The excitement here means the activity of your cognitive
system, its ability to focus, to concentrate on the material, often a boring one.

Possible solution: Analyze your state, decide whether you are too excited or not enough. If not
enough, add some triggers, for example, turn on music to make your brain more active. It will
fight against extra irritating factor and work faster. If you feel over-excited try to reduce the
number of annoying factors influencing your mind.

Challenge #2. Google search doesn’t show relevant results

Though they say that everything can be found in Google, when it comes to literature review
writing, it is not particularly accurate. The amount of information is excessive, and it is
particularly challenging to find some relevant results and worthy references.

Possible solution: The first and the most obvious one is to start using the Google Scholar search.
It is the basic level. To have even better results don’t wait till you need to write a literature
review and sign up for several relevant scientific newsletters. This way you will have a list of
references in your email, and later you will be able to use them without wasting too much time.

Challenge #3. Sorting information

Even using the most advanced techniques, you will still have lots of redundant information
which is hard to sort. If you don’t sort it well enough, you will have a true mess in your works
cited page.

Possible solution: When choosing sources, it is recommended, first of all, to rely on some more
extensive fundamental source in which the selected topic is considered, and move further in the
direction from general to particular — from necessary provisions to more specific ones. It is
better to refer to sources whose authors have the most significant scientific authority in this field.
Subscripts will help you find more relevant sources for your paper.

Challenge #4. Managing a proper balance

Make sure your literature review has both modern, provocative works and fundamental ones.
You should maintain a proper balance of the most actual studies and the most prominent
researchers of the past, which contributed to the development of the particular topic.

Possible solution: Talk to your supervisor. There are two basic ratios 1:2 or 2:1. It means that
either you have to describe two modern works for each fundamental ones or reverse. It depends
on the requirements of your educational institution and your professor, so it is better to deal with
the needed ratio from the very beginning, not to rewrite it further.

Challenge #5. Formatting

Unfortunately, even if you pay the utmost attention to sorting and analyzing the content relevant
to your field and topic of study, but fail to make the needed formatting, you will not gain points
you hope for.
Possible solution: The only magic trick we can offer here is to use some online formatting
services. Choose the ones which have the most fields to fill and which work with different
releases of the particular style guide: not just MLA but 8th edition MLA, for example.

Check on this list before you start writing a literature review with someone’s help or by yourself
and you will be done with it faster and more efficient than you’ve ever expected to.

6. What are the purposes of a conceptual framework in carrying out research?

theoretical framework is a broad and established set of rules, truths, or principles on which the
study is founded. Examples include Newton’s laws of motion in physical sciences and Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs in social sciences. Thus, for instance, a physicist could use Newton’s laws of
motion, or one of the laws, to study the appearance of comets, the speed of asteroids, or the
gravitational pull of a black hole. Similarly, a sociologist could use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
to study the life cycle of social media platforms. Note that you can use multiple theoretical
frameworks as needed for your study.

The theoretical framework leads into the conceptual framework, which is a specific exploration
of an aspect of the theoretical framework. In other words, the conceptual framework is used to
arrive at a hypothesis. Let’s look at a couple of classical examples. Archimedes used theories
about gravity and buoyancy (theoretical frameworks) to understand the behavior of different
objects when immersed (conceptual framework), which led him to a method to accurately
identify a gold object under immersion (hypothesis). Similarly, Pavlov used stimuli and response
(theoretical frameworks) to study conditioning in animal subjects (conceptual framework), which
led him to predict that upon being conditioned to one set of stimuli, the animal would later
respond in the same way to the presentation of any one of the stimuli (hypothesis).