Writing Guide
How to Conduct a Scientific Literature Review
Writing a scientific literature review involves a critical evaluation of the published articles, and books on a particular topic. The purpose of scientific literature review writing is to summarize, synthesize and analyze the argument of other writers as opposed to supporting your own argument.
Writing a scientific literature review involves describing and analyzing the knowledge that exists including findings gaps, revealing similarities and differences as well as any inconsistencies and controversies.
It is also important to understand when writing a scientific literature review that it is not expected to be in favor of the research you are intending to conduct. It is also not supposed to be a list of sources summarized or abstracted.
The approach to writing a scientific literature review should involve five stages:
- Find models and examples
When writing a scientific literature review, be sure to check other scientific literature reviews conducted on this subject to get an idea of the types of themes that need to be a part of your research.
- Problem Formulation
A working statement should be written to form the basis of the scientific literature review.
- Literature search
This is the most time-consuming stage as there will be need to go through a lot of catalogues and indexes of university library or e-library or internet. The search may lead to many materials that may not be relevant to the research topic. When some relevant articles are found, others can be found by looking at the reference list of these articles.
- Evaluation of findings
Read the easy articles first which will help you digest the difficult articles later on. Scan the articles first in order to get the key points before reading the entire article. Read and re-read all articles so as to develop an understanding and assimilate complex ideas. This is the most important step when writing a scientific literature review. This is where most students fail.
- Literature analysis and interpretation
Understand the main ideas in each article and then proceed to write the combined analysis and interpretation and proceed with writing the scientific literature review.
Conducting and writing a scientific literature review is not difficult if one understands the purpose of the same is not to provide research in support of writer's argument but rather just the research done till date on the research topic.
