Review of Related Literature

REVIEW OF RELATED
LITERATURE
Meaning Of Review Of Related Literature
• A review of related literature is an analysis of man’s written or spoken knowledge of

the world. You examine representations of man’s thinking about the world to determine
the connection of your research with what people already know about it. In your
analysis or reading of recorded knowledge, you just do not catalog ideas in your
research paper, but also interpret them or merge your thinking with the author’s ideas.
Hence, in doing the RRL, you deal with both formal or direct and indirect expressions
of man’s knowledge. Fusing your world understanding with the author’s world
perception enables you to get a good analysis of existing written works that are related
to your research study. (Wallman2014)
PURPOSES OF REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE (RRL)
1. To obtain background knowledge of your research.
2. To relate your study to the current condition or situation of the world.
3. To show the capacity of your research work to introduce new knowledge.
4. To expand prove, or disprove the findings of previous research solutions.
5. To increase your understanding of the underlying theories, principles, or concepts of your research.
6. To explain technical terms involved in your research study.
7. To highlight the significance of your work with the kind of evidence it gathered to support the conclusion
of your research.
8. To avoid repeating previous research studies.
9. To recommend the necessity of further research on a certain topic.
Styles Or Approaches Of RRL Or Review Of Related Literature
1. Traditional Review of Literature

- to do a review of literature in a traditional way is to summarize present forms of
knowledge on a specific subject. Your aim here is to give an expanded or new
understanding of an existing work. Being necessarily descriptive, interpretative,
evaluative, and methodically unclear and uncertain, a traditional review is prone to your
subjectivity. This kind of review does not require you to describe your method of
reviewing literature but expects you to state your intentions in conducting the review and
the name the sources of information.
Traditional review is of different types that are follows:
1. Concept review- analysis of concept or ideas to give meaning to some national or
world issues.
2. Critical review- focuses on theories or hypotheses and examines meanings and results
of their application to situations.
3. State-the- Art review- makes the researcher deal with the latest research studies on
the subject.
4. Expert review- encourages a well-known expert to do the RRL because of the
influence of a certain ideology, paradigm, or belief on him/her
5. Scoping review- prepares a situation for a future research work in the form of project
making about community development, government policies, and health services,
among others.
2. Systematic Review of Literature
- Systematic means methodical, is a style of RRL that involves sequential acts
of a review of related literature. Unlike the traditional review that has no
particular method, systematic review requires you to go through the following
RRL steps (Ridley 2012):
a. Have a clear understanding of the research questions. Serving as the
compass to direct your research activities, the research questions tell you
what to collect and where to obtain those data you want to collect.
b. Plan your manner of obtaining the data. Imagining how you will get to where
the data are, you will come to think also of what keywords to use for easy
searching and how to accord courtesy and respect to people or institutions
from where the data will come such as planning how to communicate your
request to these sources of data.
c. Do the literature search. Using keywords, you look for the needed information from all sources of
knowledge: Internets, books, journals, periodicals, government publications, general references, and the
like.
d. Using a certain standard, determine which data, studies, or sources of knowledge are valuable or not to
warrant the reasonableness of your decision to take some data and junk the rest.
e. Determine the methodological soundness of the research studies. Use a checklist or a certain set of
criteria in assessing the ways researchers conduct their studies to arrive at a certain conclusions.
f. Summarize what you have gathered from a various sources of data. To concisely present a synthesis of
your report, use a graph such as a table and other presentation formats that are not prone to verbosity.
A systematic review of literature is a rigorous way of obtaining data from the written works. It is
a bias-free style that every researcher wanting to be a research expert should experience. Limiting itself to
peer-reviewed journals, academically written works, and quantitative assessment of data through
statistical methods, this style of literature review ensures objectivity in every stage of the research.
(Fraenbell2012)
The following table shows the way several books on RRL compare and contrast the two styles of RRL.
Standards Traditional Review Systematic Review

Purpose To have a thorough and clear To meet a certain objective based
understanding of the field on specific research questions
Scope Comprehensive, wide picture Restricted focus
Review Design Indefinite plan, permits creative Viewable process and paper trail
and exploratory plan
Choice of Studies Purposeful selection by the Prepared standards for studies
reviewer selection
Nature of Studies Inquiry-based techniques involving Wide and thorough search for all
several studies studies
Quality Appraisal Reviewer’s view Assessment checklists
Summary Narrative Graphical and short summary
answers
Structure of the RRL
The structure of the whole literature review indicates the organizational pattern or order of the components
of the summary OF THE RRL results. For the traditional view, the structure of the summary resembles of
an essay where series of united sentences presents the RRL results. However, this structure of traditional
review varies based on your subject and area of specialization. For the systematic review, the structure is
based on the research questions; so much so that, if your RRL does not adhere to a certain method to
make you begin your RRL with research questions, your RRL is headed toward a traditional literature
review structure.
Regardless of what RRL structure you opt to use, you must see to it that the organizational pattern of the
results of your review contains these three elements: an introduction to explain the organizational method
of your literature review; heading and subheadings to indicate the right placement of your supporting
statements and a summary to concisely restate your main point. (Ridley 2013)

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REVIEW OF RELATED

• A review of related literature is an analysis of man’s written or spoken knowledge of

1. Traditional Review of Literature

Standards Traditional Review Systematic Review

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