Literature Review

Writing adequate literature review is a key component of dissertation, even of any research in education. A well-written literature review accomplishes several purposes. First of all, it allows researchers to survey literature and gain detailed information regarding their interest areas. In doing so, researchers might get some insights about central issues in a field and then can relate their studies to the ongoing dialogue in the literature. It guides researchers to find gaps in previous studies and to make further discussions about how they extend previous studies. A good literature review allows researchers to establish a framework for explaining the importance of the study.

 The article written by Boot and Beile (2005) draws attentions to the importance of writing qualified literature review in dissertation. They underline the general weakness of dissertation literature reviews. Even I found Boot and Beile’s article quite informative, I feel like something is missing in the article. I wish they provided a further discussion about the ways by which doctoral candidates can overcome all the weaknesses they mentioned in the article.  In particular, I would like to have seen some lines in the article that how doctoral candidates can get benefits from the library science to write a qualified dissertation literature review. It seems to me the authors reveal problems in relation to dissertation literature review, however they end the article without proposing any solutions.   They make some recommendation in the final section entitled “ Looking Forward”, but their recommendations remain too general, and do not address their previous criticisms.

This week, I finished reading with having more curiosity about using Mendeley . Kern’s (2011) and Paulus, Lester& Dempster ‘s (2014) studies introduce digital tools including citation management programs and their benefits in terms of writing literature review. I have previously used Refworks, Endnote and Zotero.  It seems Mendeley is the most developed citation management software.  I really like that it includes its own cloud storage and can be synchronized. I look forward to gaining more information about Mendeley on this Tuesday.