Practical Research 1: Literature Review

• This toolkit focuses on learning from others and reviewing literature in Practical Research 1.
• It's designed to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills through qualitative research.
• Chapter 2 of a research paper involves the review of related literature.

Literature Review

• A literature review summarizes studies related to a specific research area.
• It identifies and summarizes relevant research on a topic.
• It surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources.
• Literature reviews should enumerate, describe, summarize, evaluate, and clarify previous research objectively.
• It acknowledges previous researchers' work.
• Mentions of previous work demonstrates that authors have assessed that work.
• A review of related literature involves collecting, selecting, and reading books, journals, reports, abstracts, and other reference materials.
• Information gathered includes background knowledge, theories, data, results, and gaps in studies.

Importance of Literature

• Significance and rationale of related literature find similarities and differences between past and present studies.
• It helps get ideas into the problem's critical and controversial aspects
• The review identifies research problems and gives background analysis.
• An extensive reading enriches background knowledge, enabling a good groundwork for a research endeavor.

Selecting, Citing, and Synthesizing Literature

• An effective literature review selects relevant write-ups, scrutinizes content, and cites information sources.
• It identifies similarities and differences between selected literature.
• A thorough development of skills in searching, reading, paraphrasing, and writing is needed.

Steps for an Effective Review

• Searching for the literature can involve the Internet, books and peer-reviewed articles.
• Sources also include journals, publications, unpublished works, conference proceedings, leaflets, posters, and blogs.
• Focus, isolate to key themes, choose articles related to interests and conduct with experts.
• Peer reviewed materials are more valuable than other general articles.

Citation

• Acknowledgement identifies individuals who contributed to the making of the manuscript.
• References or Bibliography is a whole list of literary materials including all books, journals, theses, and dissertations along with other sources mentioned above.
• Information needed includes: Author's name, Publication date, Page number, Publisher and Place of publishing
• APA (American Psychological Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), and the Chicago Manual Style are three basic methods of referencing.
• Citation, or In-text-citation involves referring to the author in the body of the text.

Synthesizing

• Paraphrasing, quoting and summarizing are good techniques for developing your review of related literature
• You may want to change words, structures, format, sentences, orders to have new ideas or meanings
• In quoting, you should write the page number of copied texts, ideas must be essential and quoted judiciously
• Summarizing is a shortened version of the original text, picking only the most important details of the text.
• Transitional devices, active verbs, and present perfect tense (APA) should be used to link the author's thoughts

Ethical Standards

• Ethical standards of research establish values and expectations so information is generated correctly in accordance with moral principles.
• Principles such as honesty, integrity, and respect for intellectual property should be a key focus.
• These include integrity, confidentiality, anonymity, and privacy through informed consent, voluntary participation, beneficence, justice, and rights to review.

Scientific Misconduct

• Scientific misconduct might rise when ethical standards are not followed.
• Plagiarism: Claiming another person's ideas.
• Fabrication of data: Producing data without actual experimentation.
• Falsification of data: Faulty gathering of data due to carelessness.
• Non-publication of data: Choosing not to include conflicting data.

Ethics Review

• Ethical review committees may require:
  • Checklist for Adult Sponsors
  • Student Checklist
  • Human Participant's Form
  • Research Institution and Qualified Scientists Form
  • Research Plan
  • Risk Assessment Form
  • Research Abstract - Research Logbook