Week 2 Lecture 2: Literature Reviews and Sampling Flashcards
Reasons to conduct a literature review
(6)
Find out:
- unanswered questions/gaps/lacunae
- what is known
- relevant concepts and theories
- research methods and strategies used
- controversies
- inconsistent findings
Lacunae
= gap
What does peer-review ensure?
(2)
- worthy of being publishment
- no glaring errors of context (methodological) or style (typo etc.)
Types of literature review (10)
- narrative
- systematic
- living systematic
- meta-analysis
- conceptual
- rapid
- scoping
- critical
- expert
- state-of-the-art
Narrative literature review
= ‘tells a story’ about findings based on what you think is important to review
(+) good if expert (ignore junk)
(-) bad if not expert (emit important info)
(-) biased
Systematic literature review
= review of the peer-reviewed literature and sometimes ‘grey’ literature (gov docs, etc.)
(+) thorough, (systematic)
(+) less biased than narrative
(-) time-consuming
(-) unmanageable amount of data
Grey Literature
= information produced by government agencies, academic institutions, and also the for-profit sector that is not typically made available by commercial publishers
Meta-analysis literature review
= comparing statistics of different studies
or
comparing different literature reviews
Living systematic review
= conducted during an event to add to studies as they come out
Rapid reviews
= fast, not completely systematic, literature reviews
Conceptual reviews
= looking at theories/concepts
Scoping reviews
= review breadth of info/study types/focii
Critical reviews
= critical analysis of forms of research in a field
Expert reviews
= done by an expert
State-of-the-art Review (SoTA)
= provides a time-based overview of the current state of knowledge about a phenomenon and suggest directions for future research.
SoTA
= state-of-the-art review, timeline of knowledge + suggestions of future research directions
Cooper’s Taxonomy of literature reviews
use goodnotes tape on taxonomy diagram (6)
Method of classification of literature reviews according to:
1. Focus
2. Goal
3. Organisation
4. Perspective
5. Audience
6. Coverage
fagpoc
Cooper’s Taxonomy of literature reviews Focus catagories (4)
Research outcomes, research methods, theories, applications
Cooper’s Taxonomy of literature reviews Goal catagories
Integration, criticism, central issues
Cooper’s Taxonomy of literature reviews Organisation catagories
Historical, conceptual, methodological
Cooper’s Taxonomy of literature reviews Perspective catagories
Neutral representation, espousal of position
Cooper’s Taxonomy of literature reviews Audience catagories
Specialised scholars, general scholars, practitioners and polititians, general public
Cooper’s Taxonomy of literature reviews Coverage categories
Exhaustive, exhaustive and selective, representative, central/pivotal
Criteria for good literature reviews
8
- justify criteria for inclusion and exclusion
- distinguish what has been done from what needs to be done
- place topic/problem in broader scholarly context and in own historical context
- acquire and enhance subject vocabularly (learn the jargon and add to it) by articulating related variables and phenomena
- synthesize and develop a new perspective on the literature
- identify the methodological issues, ideas and techniques related to the topic
- provide a rationale for the practical and scholarly significance of the study
- write in coherent manner with clear structure
Exploratory research
= conducted to investigate a problem that is not clearly defined
Explanatory research
= seeks to explain why something occurs
Experimental research
= studies conducted with a scientific approach using two sets of variables
Quasi-experimental research
= estimate the causal impact of an intervention on target population without random assignment