Literature review as the name suggests is the review of the literature. The literature over here is the set of work which is already existing. The literature review is written for various purposes. One of the main purposes is that a literature review allows you to have in-depth knowledge about a specific topic. Mostly, the topics have been researching and many people have done work on it according to their understanding and research. People, who are about to write about the same topic as already existent, uses this literature as a help. They need to read these work and evaluate them according to what they understood by it. It is always better to read more than one piece of literature. This is because each person has written work according to his knowledge and each work consist of the points accordingly. Going through more than one piece of literature can help you in filling all the gaps in between and prepare new authentic work.
A literature review does not mean only to read the already present text rather the research is done to write it as a report. A literature review can also be considered as a summary of already present work. You do not need to mention all the points which are mentioned in the work rather only sift and choose those points which are relevant to your topic and write them gracefully by evaluating them as you comprehended them.
Reading literature does not serve the only purpose of writing the summary of the work rather it makes you aware of various ideas. Mostly they work is written by experienced and well-knowledge people. They have used all the methods and concepts appropriately in their work. While you read literature, you get a chance to improve your knowledge regarding the topic. Along with it, you aware of the terms, methods, and concepts which are of great significance for your field of work. Also, you get to know how to apply them in your own work. By reading deeply the literature, you become able to understand and evaluate each minor detail about which concept is being used and how it is implemented over the topic, along with its benefits and drawbacks.
Literature review comes with various purposes. Another purpose of reading or writing the literature review is that you will be able to understand the research findings. Writing a research paper is not an easy task. It demands many points to be looked at in great detail. For a beginner, it is quite difficult to write a full-length research paper. Reading literature would help in noticing each point with great details. You would be able to see the techniques which have been used for writing various research findings and making them associated with your topic. The literature review will introduce many concepts and methods regarding your field and also allow you to learn about their application. This information will help you to do the same with your work. And it will become easier for you to apply all the concepts and methods in your research paper.
The literature review is always present at the beginning of the research paper. The reason behind this is that it allows the readers to make an assumption about the direction of the work. Also, writing a literature review before starting the actual research is beneficial as it allows you to look for the gaps that are present in the old work. It is always suggested to use more than one literature review. This means that you will be able to search for the research gaps in more than one piece of writing and make you able to work on those gaps in your research paper and try to fulfill those in the work.
As said the purpose of the literature review is not only to write the summaries of the literature rather it means to critically evaluate each literature. As more than one literature review is expected to be mentioned in a research paper, it is important to compare and contrast them. This technique will help you in having more knowledge about the topic and you will be able to sit the gap more often. Also, the evaluation of the literature means that you will be able to pay much focus over each detail and nothing would be missed out.
A literature review is a whole in itself. It serves many purposes but the main purpose is to have a better and clear understanding related to your topic and field, which can be helpful to you for writing your research paper and focus on everything techniques that have been used in other literature. If you want to know about your topic in detail all you can do is go for a literature review