为什么和怎么做文献综述

Literature review 1: Learn and think. Why we do literature review, and how 
do I start?
 

Hey, it’s Dr. Liu here with Better LIFE Research TIPS. I work with both graduate and undergraduate students, help them doing research and getting published.  As a lifelong learner, I enjoy teaching. I believe teaching is a great way of learning, because it always forced me to learn more, and forced me to clarify my thoughts further and further.

Writing literature review is a must-have and a transferrable skill for every researcher. Literature review is often a part of the introduction to a research paper or a thesis. In fact, no matter whether or not there is a section called “literature review” in your paper, it is often the most important part of your research. Today I want to talk about what is literature review, why we do it, and how do I start in order to conduct an effective review.

I will start from a famous quote by Confucius. Confucius may be the greatest philosopher and educator in ancient China, who lived in more than 2000 years ago. He said “Learning without thinking leads to confusion; while thinking without learning ends in danger.” In Chinese, it is said “学而不思则罔，思而不学则殆”. If you are too ready to believe anything you learned, that is called credulous. For each topic or each problem you try to solve, there may be tons of information available in literature, and there may point to different directions. Without our own thinking, it is very easy to be misled, or get drowning in a sea of information. On the contrary, thinking but without learning from others will make a person uninformed, or even ignorant. Even if you are a genius, you still do not want to waste your time to reinvent a wheel. This quote of Confucius is a perfect summary on why we do literature review, and what we should include in our review. He pointed out the two key elements: learning and thinking. When we write our review, we want to demonstrate to our reader that we have learned, and we have also used our own thinking.

In the learning part, it is very important that we include all the major works in literature that are relevant to our specific topic. If we missed a relevant and well-known key major work in our review, the review is  not professional. We should try our best to keep our references up to date, including recent published works. And it is also important to be objective. That means, we should include not only studies that agree with us, but also studies that do not agree with us. Including a view from different side will give us more credibility in our review.

In the thinking part, first we need to apply our critical thinking when we select the information from literature to put into our review. It is important to always keep an attitude of skepticism, because all scientific finding are tentative and can be incorrect. We should treat all the results we get from literature as potential evidences for our arguments. Therefore, before using them, we should check the validity and reliability of these results. Also, there are no perfect studies. Each study has it own limitations, we may need to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. And finally, we need to decide their significance and relevance. How significant the work is and how relevant it is to our research will determine how we should use them in our review. After we collect all the evidences we want, we often need to further analyze them by comparing and contrasting. By comparing, we focus on looking for similarities. We may be able to identify patterns, rules, or trends in studies. We may use inductive reasoning here. By contrasting, we focus on looking for differences. We may be able to identify essence of a subject, or factors that make the difference. We may use deductive reasoning here. By putting different studies together, we may also be able to identify research gaps, or generate more insights through abductive reasoning. A lot of thinking and reasoning can be done here.

Another quote I want to use is from a Chinese scholar who lived in around 1000 years ago. He said, “There are two ways of studying, the first way is I explain the 6 classics;  The second way is I use the 6 classics as my footnote. “In Chinese, “我注六经, 六经注我”. The 6 classics are the existing knowledge widely accepted by the community at that time. In the first way, we try hard to develop better understanding of the existing knowledge, but we are still just a consumer of the existing knowledge. In the second way, we start to use the existing knowledge to present our own opinion, and we become a producer of new knowledge. Research is about producing new knowledge. It is a more advanced way of studying. This quote actually defined the principle of literature review. Literature review is not just a summary of other people’s opinion, it is not a summary of existing knowledge, it is actually a mechanism we use to connect the existing knowledge to our current problem, and then connect to our proposed solution, which is a new knowledge. Your target reader usually is more interested in the current problem you try to solve rather than the existing knowledge itself. In your review, you need to engage your reader’s interest by guiding the discussion of existing knowledge to the current problem, from general to specific, and then further direct their interest from a broad problem to the specific solution you proposed, again from general to specific. And that is the logic and an effective structure for literature review. After you have done your research. You may need to put the new knowledge you produced into the pool of the existing knowledge. That is a reverse process, as it moves from specific back to general. And that is the task of the discussion and conclusion section in your paper.

Thanks for watching, I am Dr. Liu with research tips for the underdogs. In the next video, I will explain cycles of the review process, and what do I mean by reading from thick to thin, and then from thin to thick. Until next time, keep studying for a better life.

To Subscribe Dr. Liu ResearchTIPS:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMJUogKw0lXduef7nu3I7A/?sub_confirmation=1