Writing a literature review

I want to write ...... . in propositional way. T his some tips to write literature review ----- How to write a literature review from scratch 1. Pick a topic === " Spatial Database " It can be as broad as you like, because this is just a starting point. If you are still picking your specific topic for your PhD, that’s fine, but you should at least know roughly what area you want to explore. 2. Find your way in A quick google scholar search for your subject area could turn up as many as 1 million results. Clearly you can’t read them all, so you need to look for an easy way in. The vast majority of academic papers are written for people already familiar with the subject. They will refer to theories and methodologies assuming that the reader knows what they are. So to start with just any paper at random would be a demoralizing waste of time, as you’ll be overwhelmed by the jargon. Instead, you need something you can understand easily to give yourself a foundation of knowledge to build upon. Textbooks and review articles can be good places to start, though even these can be highly technical. If you can’t find one you can understand easily, then look for a book written for the general, non-academic public. The idea is to gain a quick, broad background knowledge before getting into more specialised technical detail. 3. History, people & ideas The idea of a literature review is to give some background and context to your own work. You need to show how your research fits into the big picture, relating it to what has been done before. You don’t need to write a comprehensive history of your subject, but it helps if you know roughly how it has developed over time. So as you read a few general introductions to your topic, you’ll start to get an overview of the key ideas and theories, who developed them, and when. Also note any conflicting ideas, any controversy or disagreement in the field, as you’ll need to know this kind of thing. Now you can start to look for specific papers. 4. Find the world-changing literature Once you know who the world changers were, you can go in search of their papers. You need to make sure you understand these key concepts, as they will help you decipher other papers which built upon these ideas. Sometimes, those world changing papers can be tough to read, but as long as you know roughly what they did and understand the key principle, that’s enough. 5. Get specific Only once you have a grasp of the key ideas in your field should you get more specific. There may be several angles you can take in your research, and you may have to explore many areas of the literature. So divide your literature search into sections to make it easier to manage. For each section, think of several keywords to try out in different combinations. 6. Filter Even when you look at highly specialised sub-topics, there may still be thousands upon thousands of papers, so you need to filter them. Here are a few ways to reduce the number 8. Use other people’s bibliographies Even if you can only find one good quality paper, read the introduction carefully and see who they cite. There may be a few gems there you didn’t find with the search engine. 9. Get to know the big players In any research field, no matter how specialised, there will be leading experts or competing research groups. Figure out who they are, and read their work. 10. Make sure your research idea is original As the saying goes, you can’t prove a negative. How can you prove that nobody else has done what you plan to do, without searching every paper ever published? 11. Write about ideas When you finally start writing your literature review, focus on ideas and use examples from the literature to illustrate them.