This article reminds me of Dr Syazwan's teaching. Learned the knowledge but yet to apply it for my PhD. InsyaAllah, will do one and put up here.
I know most of you have your own ways of summarizing the literature review. some of em are quite comprehensive. :) cant compete with that.
what do u hope to achieve with your literature review?
if you're writing a review paper to be published, the comprehensive approach is very tempting. however, if you're using it for the purpose of doing research ie helping you in solving your research problem, or helping you direct your research better then you may not need to list out everything you've read.
so, when should i use this?
inshaaAllah, this technique is okay if you wanna organize the literature review in your MIND. remember, the mind can't really suspend too much facts at one time. so, this approach is more of a lightweight process.
the approach exploits the concept of'layering' in literature review. looking at all the journals, articles etc that u've collected can be a bit overwhelming right? so, we're gonna layer them pretty much like a cake.
image from freedigitalphotos.net
how can i do it?
so, how do you do it? remember the acronym I-BRING.
what does it mean? Idea - Basic Related Important New Goal
now, let's take a look at how we can use each of em step by step.
Idea
what's the central idea for your literature review?
first of all, you gotta decide on the main idea that u wanna focus on. this is the central idea of your literature review. supposed u have one and it's all about "driving". so, we're gonna visualize that now. ahh look at that. assume that (faridah, 2010) is the paper that you wanna attach to the idea. so you have the idea in the centre and the ring circling it. wassup with the ring?
Basic
what's the basic ideas that are related to this main idea?
yeah, once the central idea is clear, try figuring out what are the basic ideas that explain the central idea. when you're doing try your best to stay FOCUS. forget about the new technology and what not. just ask yourself. "what is the basic idea that explains the central idea?" there can be a few, but for the sake of illustration, let's just say that three things are basic to driving. they are... the car you're driving, the cost of driving and finally the traffic. so, you can now update the diagram this way inshaaAllah. ahh that's the first layerof the literature review.
Related
what is related to the basic idea?
now that you have the basic idea etched properly in your mind, along with the key reference, it's time to go to the next step. let's expand it a bit by looking at the ideas that are related to the basic one. Again, try to stay focus when you do this. don't clutter it too much. at most, just take three ideas that are related to the first layer. this would be the second layer. Why are we using the lines to mark the layers? to remind us that we should stay focus in doing the literature review. i know, it's really tempting to talk about 1001 things under the sun when it comes to citing something but again, stay focus!
Important
what are the important ideas for me?
ok, in this step we won'd be adding any more layers yet to the cake, urm.. i mean the literature review. instead, we're gonna accentuate the ideas that are important to our own research. accentuate in the sense that we're gonna make it stand out from the rest. so, to do this, it's important to contemplate, what is it that you're doing for your research? let's say you're doing research on how to exploit the time of driving to save the cost of petrol. can you see how that would affect the pic below?
see that now, all the related ideas are in bold. they are time - traffic - driving - cost - petrol.
New
what are the new things that others are suggesting?
now comes the final layer! the third layer. in this layer you put all the new ideas that are emerging in research. for instance, to save cost of petrol in driving, we could do two things. first, we could work only 4 days a week. going to the office only four days a week instead of 5 or 6 times would save petrol. another alternative is to go to work at non-peak hours, when everyone else is not on the road. this way, there would be less traffic and so inshaaAllah.. less petrol would be consumed. Oh, and notice the question mark inside the idea (?) . it means that the idea is new and is still being explored.
Goal
does the diagram fit your research goal?
the last step is to check the summary you just made for yourself. does it fit your research goal? if it doesn't then you may need a revision. always remember that in summarizing the literature review you need to know two things :
- what's my goal for research? (the literature review must fit the goal of research)
- how do i plan to use the summary? (comprehensive one is for writing, this one is for helping you think about research.
anyway, hope it helps. try it out now. you don't need to draw it nicely like the example. it's best to sketch it with a pen and paper. oh, and when you draw it on paper, you don't have to draw the orbits too. just remind yourself that you need to do it in layers ... Basic, Related, Important and New.
if you have any questions, just ask. i'll try to answer if i can inshaaAllah. and if you wanna know the rationale behind the usage of this approach, feel free to do your own research on schema theory, cognitive load theory and radial diagram.
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