Literature Review

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.

Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. There are five key steps:

1. Search for relevant literature

2. Evaluate sources

3. Identify themes, debates and gaps

4. Outline the structure

5. Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyses, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

A literature review has four main objectives:

• It surveys the literature in your chosen area of study

• It synthesises the information in that literature into a summary

• It critically analyses the information gathered by identifying gaps in current knowledge; by showing limitations of theories and points of view; and by formulating areas for further research and reviewing areas of controversy

• It presents the literature in an organised way

A literature review shows your readers that you have an in-depth grasp of your subject; and that you understand where your own research fits into and adds to an existing body of agreed knowledge.

 Here’s another way of describing those four main tasks. A literature review:

• demonstrates a familiarity with a body of knowledge and establishes the credibility of your work;

• summarises prior research and says how your project is linked to it;

• integrates and summarises what is known about a subject;

• demonstrates that you have learnt from others and that your research is a starting point for new ideas.

Citation/Citation Styles

A citation is a way of giving credit to individuals for their creative and intellectual works that you utilized to support your research. It can also be used to locate particular sources and combat plagiarism. Typically, a citation can include the author's name, date, location of the publishing company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifer).

A citation style dictates the information necessary for a citation and how the information is ordered, as well as punctuation and other formatting.

There are many different ways of citing resources from your research. The citation style sometimes depends on the academic discipline involved. For example:

• APA (American Psychological Association) Style is used by Education, Psychology, and Sciences

• MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used by the Humanities

• Chicago/Turabian style is generally used by Business, History, and the Fine Arts

•  Vancouver Style Predominantly used  in the medical field. 

Reference Manager

A reference manager supports researchers in performing three basic research steps: searching, storing, and writing (M. H. Fenner 2010). It helps researchers find relevant literature, allows them to store papers and their bibliographic metadata in a personal database for later retrieval, and allows researchers to insert citations and references in a chosen citation style when writing a text. To support those steps, a reference manager should have the following functionalities

1. Import citations from bibliographic databases and websites

2. Gather metadata from PDF files

3. Allow organization of citations within the reference manager database

4. Allow annotation of citations

5. Allow sharing of the reference manager database or portions thereof with colleagues

6. Allow data interchange with other reference manager products through standard metadata formats (e.g. RIS, BibTeX)

7. Produce formatted citations in a variety of styles

8. Work with word processing software to facilitate in-text citation

A reference manager is a software package that allows scientific authors to collect, organize, and use bibliographic references or citations. The terms citation manager or bibliographic management software are used interchangeably. The software package usually consists of a database that stores references and citations. Once a citation is inserted into the database, it can be reused to create bibliographies which are typically found at the end of a scientific text.

Zotero is a free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials. 

Mendeley is popular among researchers and has additional features such as the ability to collaborate with other researchers. The free edition has up to 2GB of personal storage. 

EndNote is the standard reference management software across universities. The Library provides training and assistance. 

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. All published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is covered under this definition. 

Plagiarism can definitely be uncovered. There are special software for this. If plagiarism is detected, there are serious consequences such receiving a failing grade for your work, being kicked out of your program, or being denied your academic title. Aside from plagiarism, copyright infringement and fraud are punishable criminal offences.

So you should familiarize yourself with the conventions of quotation to know what the grey areas are and avoid plagiarism in all its forms.

1.Paid Software

• ithenticate

• Turnitin

• Ouriginal (Urkund)

2. Free Software/Online Services

• SmallSEOTools

• quetext

• Dupli Checker

• Check Plagiarism