Literature review is your best friend

Literature Review is a scholar’s version of googling answers before writing your own. You find past published research papers that are relevant to your research proposal. You read through the published work of other researchers, students, and scholars who have conducted research like yours. You write their collective opinion in your language in the section named “Literature Review”. This comes up at almost the very end of an internship report/research paper.

What will happen, when in the middle of writing the Literature Review you find out that your Research Proposal has already been disproven by another paper/researcher? All your work up until then will become invalid. It happened to me. It also happened to Sheldon and Amy in Big Bang Theory. Learn from our mistakes.

You have to look through at least ten published papers to write a fairly good literature review. It is more daunting than it sounds. You have to look through at least 30-40 papers and some 10 or 20 news articles to find only 10 that are relevant to your Research Proposal or Scope of Study, but surprisingly this process will teach you many more important things other than just your research topic.

The hidden treasures to look out for during Literature Review

1. Finalizing the Research Proposal

You might find out that your research topic has already been proved wrong or ineffective by some other researcher. For example, your research topic might be “Why does consuming fast food create financial mismanagement among students” and you find a research paper that tells that there is no correlation between financial management and fast-food consumption. Knowing this before getting started on the report will save you from wasted time and effort. You might also get inspired to transform your research proposal into a better one.

2. Learning Formal Report Writing Style

The published papers are usually written by exceptional report writers. If you can translate some of their systematic report writing skills into your own, you can write a very good internship report. They are a good source of learning how to write an excellent Executive Summary or how to state the Observation of your research in a professional and impartial manner.

3. Grasp the meaning of “Methodology”

There is a lot of confusion about the terms “quantitative vs “qualitative” method, primary and secondary data in a research paper. Seeing real examples of them, in various different papers will help clear your concept. You can find inspiration from all of them and choose which methodology works best for your research.

4. Composing a Vault of Well-constructed Questionnaires

A well-written survey question will allow your respondents to answer honestly without being forced to pick a side. During your literature review, you can see how answering each question provides a little insight into the research topic, teaching you how to construct a good questionnaire The combined number of questionnaires from 10 papers can be more than 50. You don’t have to create your questionnaires from scratch, you will have access to a lot of relevant inspiration.

To summarize, if you do your Literature Review right after submitting your draft proposal, you will
– Buy time to strengthen your Research Proposal
– Learn how to write a report from the bests
– Finish four big parts of research in one go (Proposal, Literature Review, Methodology & Questionnaire)
– Learn how to write a relevant & flexible questionnaire

Come back next Sunday to learn more nerd tricks!