Skip to Main Content

Building a Better Lit Review with VOSviewer

What is a Literature Review?

Both a process and a product

  • Reviewing the literature is the process of searching, analyzing, and synthesizing works from a body of knowledge.
     
  • A literature review as a standalone publication is a survey of the scholarly literature published on a given issue, research topic, or theory that, rather than providing new research insight, lays the groundwork for an in-depth research project analyzing previous research.
     
  • A literature review is also the component of your assignment, article, or other academic work which synthesizes what you found in your research, providing a description, summary, and critical evaluation of relevant works in order to contextualize your research in light of meaningful findings/trends and current knowledge gaps in the literature.

Why Conduct a Literature Review?

Learn

  • Familiarize yourself with a new discipline, theory, method, etc.
  • Acquire and enhance subject vocabulary
  • Establish the context of a topic

Get inspired

  • Identify methods of future research—distinguish what has been done from what needs to be done
  • Justify the significance of a problem

Plan and refine

  • Discover important variables relevant to a topic
  • Identify main methodologies and research techniques that have been used
  • Attempt to surface and thus avoid ineffective approaches in your methods as you design a project

Planning Your Literature Review

How will you stay organized during this project?


Decide how you will keep track of your project information and research process 

e.g., a process document where you keep a list by date of what work you did on a project (e.g., where you searched and what search terms you used and whether your results were useful) to remind you of what you have already done and still need to do, and to help prevent you from duplicating work unnecessarily.


Decide on folder and file organization and naming conventions and then set up your folders/files. Below is an example folder and file structure. 

COURSE PARENT FOLDER: Google Drive > Courses > YYYY-Semester > Course_Name-Professor_Last_Name

  • ASSIGNMENTS FOLDER: Assignments
    • Literature_Review
      • Process_Files 
        • README (GoogleDoc)
        • Process (GoogleDoc)
        • Draft (GoogleDoc)
      • Visualization_Files
        • Data_Files
          • YYYYMMDD-Database_Name-Term1_Boolean_Term2 (TXT)
        • Images
          • YYYYMMDD-Database_Name-Term1_Boolean_Term2-Analysis_Type-Any_Special_Parameters (PNG)
      • Submission_File 
        • Your_Last_Name-YYYY-Semester-Course_Name-Literature_Review (PDF)
  • OTHER TYPES OF FOLDERS (e.g., Class_Readings)
  • SYLLABUS FILE (e.g., Course_Name-Professor_Last_Name-SYLLABUS (PDF))


Decide what citation management method/tool you will use and set it up as applicable.

 

Define your research question

Search the literature

Write your review