How to Intro Lit Review

Summary

In this insightful video, Anthony Spinks walks us through the fundamental process of writing a literature review as part of an academic introduction. He emphasizes the importance of reviewing existing literature to understand the current state of knowledge and to identify gaps before conducting experiments. Spinks explains how to structure the review, stressing the need to paraphrase and integrate references seamlessly. The process includes selecting relevant sources (at least one academic), summarizing key points, organizing themes, and crafting a logically cohesive narrative without inserting personal opinions. With encouragement to start broad, then narrow focus, Spinks provides a detailed guide on ensuring your literature review supports your research question effectively.

Highlights

• The literature review is crucial for setting the foundation of your research by exploring existing studies. 🏛️
• Before starting your experiments, confirm if answers to your research question already exist. ❓
• Your literature review should summarize existing knowledge without introducing personal ideas. 📰
• Organize your references and points logically, focusing on your main research question. 🔑
• Each paragraph in your review should have in-text references to avoid plagiarism. ⚖️

Key Takeaways

• Start with a thorough literature review to find existing answers and gaps in your research topic. 📚
• Ensure your review has a solid structure: introduction, method, results, and discussion sections. 🏗️
• Always paraphrase and use your own words to avoid plagiarism and ensure a cohesive narrative. ✍️
• Use at least four references, including one academic source, and apply critical thinking to assess reliability. 📖
• Highlight what's known and unknown about your topic to establish the need for your research. 🔍

Overview

Anthony Spinks strikes a scholarly yet approachable tone as he dismantles the daunting task of writing a literature review. He starts by detailing its significance in academia—essentially, a review of what the world knows about your topic. It's the bedrock upon which you will lay your data's interpretations, so it’s imperative to understand the lay of the land before you break ground.

Delving into the mechanics, Spinks highlights the nitty-gritty tasks: find at least four sources with one being academic, skim for relevant content, and diligently paraphrase. The aim isn’t to simply regurgitate information but to offer a synthesized snapshot of the prevailing knowledge that sharpens the focus on what isn’t yet known. He advises to keep the research question at the forefront.

Finally, he outlines structuring the review. Begin broad and gradually zero in. Arrange the information into logical themes, ensuring each key point is supported by in-text citations. Spinks also assures that you don’t need to pursue perfection—just a basic understanding and a clear narrative flow will help scaffold the rest of your scientific exploration.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Literature Review In the 'Introduction to Literature Review' chapter, the discussion focuses on the purpose and process of conducting a literature review within a research introduction. It emphasizes understanding 'literature' as the body of existing work, experiments, and information, while 'review' entails evaluating and selecting the relevant data pertinent to one's topic. The literature review is portrayed as a mechanism for familiarizing oneself with the existing knowledge about a subject, laying the groundwork for further research or scientific inquiry.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Importance of Literature Review in Research The chapter discusses the importance of conducting a literature review as the initial step in research. It emphasizes identifying existing knowledge and findings to determine if the research question has already been answered, thus saving time and resources. The literature review is framed within the context of a typical academic report structure, which includes sections like the methods section.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Building a Knowledge Foundation In this chapter titled 'Building a Knowledge Foundation', the discussion revolves around the importance of laying down a foundation of knowledge through a literature review. The literature review is described as essential groundwork, summarizing prior work that will support the new data and results to be presented within the chapter. It also notes that literature reviews can exist as standalone articles, often summarizing or critiquing the trajectory of a particular field.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Different Contexts for Literature Review This chapter focuses on the use of literature within the specific context of academic reporting. It highlights how literature reviews differ in various contexts and maintains that unlike argumentative essays where literature serves as persuasive evidence, in this scenario, it primarily aims to inform. The objective of the task is to succinctly summarize existing knowledge within predetermined word limits, requiring the writer to present a comprehensive overview of what is known on the topic.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Key Requirements for the Literature Review The chapter discusses the key requirements for writing a literature review. It highlights the importance of focusing on what is relevant and important, as well as identifying gaps in the current knowledge. This approach helps establish the need for the research. The chapter emphasizes keeping the research question in mind while reviewing literature, which aids in deciding what information should be included in the literature review.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Scientific Investigation as a Jigsaw Puzzle The chapter titled "Scientific Investigation as a Jigsaw Puzzle" compares the process of scientific investigation to fitting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece represents a fact or an observation. With enough pieces, or data, the big picture becomes clearer, similar to recognizing an image, like a beautiful tropical beach, on a jigsaw puzzle.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Preparing for Your Literature Review The chapter titled 'Preparing for Your Literature Review' discusses the concept of a theory as a framework that explains and organizes separate facts. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing knowledge gaps in existing theories. The introduction of a literature review should provide a broad context before focusing on a specific gap in knowledge. The literature review should concentrate on pieces that directly relate to this gap, helping to delineate the boundary between known and unknown in the field.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Selecting Sources for the Literature Review The chapter titled 'Selecting Sources for the Literature Review' emphasizes the importance of identifying gaps in existing knowledge as a focal point for research. The 'unknown' in the domain of research is framed as a research question which the researcher aims to answer through primary data collection. The chapter further outlines the structure of the literature review, beginning with two paragraphs, the first of which will focus on residential electricity. This structure is designed to guide the reader from what is currently known to what is not, effectively setting the stage for the research question that follows. The chapter encourages a methodical approach to constructing a literature review that addresses known information and highlights the importance of the intended research.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Summarizing Key Points from Sources The chapter focuses on summarizing key points derived from various sources, emphasizing the importance of paraphrasing and using in-text referencing. At least four references are required, including an academic source, while maintaining originality by rewriting content in the author's own words. References are necessary for nearly every sentence. Furthermore, the chapter hints at topics such as the impact of climate change, which will be discussed more extensively later. It also touches on the distinction between various types of essays, such as argumentative essays.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Arranging by Theme and Logical Order In the chapter titled 'Arranging by Theme and Logical Order,' the discussion focuses on the distinctions between presenting information in essays or literature reviews and in argumentative essays. The transcript emphasizes that literature reviews and essays are not meant to introduce personal ideas or arguments. In contrast, in argumentative essays, there's a focus on discussing published ideas and then extending them with the writer's personal ideas. This process of extension involves critical comments or analysis, where the writer elaborates on how existing literature supports their arguments.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Writing and Paraphrasing Your Literature Review This chapter focuses on the importance of writing and paraphrasing in literature reviews, emphasizing that while initial analysis may not involve personal interpretations, ultimate integration of personal insights and arguments is essential for linking the literature to one's own research context. When reading, it's important to allow the literature to inspire new ideas or solutions related to broader research questions.
• 09:00 - 10:30: Themes for the Literature Review Paragraphs The chapter titled 'Themes for the Literature Review Paragraphs' advises on the appropriate structure and content of a literature review section in academic writing. It cautions against including personal ideas and arguments within this section, as these should be reserved for the discussion section of a paper, which appears towards the end. The chapter emphasizes the importance of focusing the literature review on existing research, and to save any new insights or implications for later parts of the work. Common mistakes include interjecting personal thoughts too early in the paper.
• 10:30 - 12:00: Conclusion and Advice for Literature Review The chapter advises on conducting a literature review and emphasizes the importance of selecting relevant sources. It recommends having at least four sources, including at least one academic source. The significance of skim reading the sources is highlighted to ensure the content matches the expectations set by the title.

How to Intro Lit Review Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Hi guys, today we're talking about how to write the literature review part of our introduction. Uh literature meaning other people's work, other people's experiments and information and research and review meaning that we're going to read it and evaluate and select the relevant points to our topic. Uh so a literature review is just getting us up to speed with what the world knows about a particular topic. Now, in any kind of research or scientific investigation, the literature
• 00:30 - 01:00 review really needs to be the first thing that we do because we're we're trying to answer a research question before we go ahead and do all the experiments and the fieldwork. We should find out if the answer's already been found. So, we're going to look through the literature to see what knowledge exists and if someone else has already answered that question for us. So our literature review, we're writing in the context of a fairly normal academic report article structure. And by that I mean we're going to have a method section. We're
• 01:00 - 01:30 going to present some data in a result section. We're going to have a discussion, etc. And in that context, our literature review is just a description of the knowledge foundation that other people have laid down that we will build upon with our own data. Literature can also be used uh in other contexts. For example, sometimes the whole article is a literature review. Um, often just called a review, which could be to summarize or even critique the direction that a field is going. Um,
• 01:30 - 02:00 or it could be the literature that we used as part of an argumentative essay. Um, where the literature is used as evidence to persuade you of a particular argument. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. Um, we're not doing that here. For us in this context, it's simply to inform about what knowledge exists. Some of the key task requirements um and instructions for this report are that you'll write about 300 words um plus or minus 10%. The purpose is to summarize what is known
• 02:00 - 02:30 about this topic. Um and it could be a lot. So focus on what is relevant and important and also what is not known. That's the other purpose. And by focus highlighting what we don't know about a topic, we're really sort of um establishing the need for our research. So always keep the research question front of mind as you sift through the literature to help you decide what information should be in your literature review. And in many
• 02:30 - 03:00 ways, this entire scientific investigation that we're doing is exactly the same as fitting one new piece into a jigsaw puzzle. So here you can see we've got lots of pieces already in place in this jigsaw puzzle where each piece represents a fact or an observation and we've got enough facts and observations such that we can pretty much see what the big picture is. A beautiful tropical beach for example and that explanation of the big picture is
• 03:00 - 03:30 what we call a theory. So a theory explains and makes sense of a bunch of separate facts, but we don't have complete knowledge. We're missing pieces. So in our introduction, we describe the broad context and then we start to zoom in to one missing piece, one knowledge gap. And so the literature that we really want to focus on is all the pieces that directly interface with that knowledge gap which helps us to define the boundary between what we know
• 03:30 - 04:00 and what we don't know. And so we're trying to provide information that lets us get as close to that answer as we can before we fall into the unknown. Um, and that unknown is our research question that we're going to have to get the answer to by generating our own primary data to fill that gap. Um, and then so the structure of our literature review is going to be two paragraphs and paragraph one will be on residential electricity with a minimum
• 04:00 - 04:30 of two references. Um, paragraph two on your sector um, and climate change. We'll talk about that a bit more at the end. We're going to have at least four references with one of them being an academic reference. We're going to have full paraphrasing, so your own sentences. You need to rewrite everything in your own words. And we're going to use int text referencing. Pretty much every sentence is going to have a reference. So just quickly, one of the key differences between something like an argumentative
• 04:30 - 05:00 essay and our literature review is that we're not introducing our own ideas or arguments here. We're just presenting the published information. That's all. So in other contexts like argumentative essays, you'll discuss the published ideas, but then you'll extend them by presenting your own ideas, sometimes called critical comments or critical analysis, where you elaborate on how the literature supports your argument. Um, it might include giving your own
• 05:00 - 05:30 interpretations or analysis where you elaborate on the point and link it to an argument. So we're not doing that here. you will absolutely in the end add your own ideas and interpretation where you link the literature to your research and link it all back to the bigger picture. Um so when you're reading the literature and that sparks some idea in your head for example um one article is discussing a particular problem and you think of a solution or vice versa some solution is
• 05:30 - 06:00 published but you suddenly think of a problem with it um or you imagine some implications that haven't been discussed or whatever. Write your ideas down. Don't throw them away, but your ideas and elaborations will come later in the discussion section towards the end. So don't add your own ideas and arguments into the literature review here. But yeah, that's a common mistake. All right, so how do we do it?
• 06:00 - 06:30 So step one, we want to select our relevant sources. So we said we're going to have four sources. More is great. Um we want to include at least one academic source. And we want to skimread the sources to confirm that they contain relevant content. Um, sometimes the title looks great, but when you have a look into it, it doesn't give you what it promises. So, skim read it just to make sure it's got what you think it has. And other
• 06:30 - 07:00 sources, so one academic source. Other sources don't have to be academic, meaning like basically meaning sort of peer-reviewed journal articles. Um, but they you still need to use critical thinking to evaluate the reliability of any source. So, every man in his blog has got an opinion on something. Doesn't mean you should be using it. Um, so look on Moodle. We'll put some resources there. Use library search, of course, journal articles. So, they're going to give you academic ones. You can use
• 07:00 - 07:30 government reports, Google, Google Scholar, or just Google uh to try and find information. TED talks, um, reputable websites and newspapers. Again, use discerning judgment to think about what what you think is reliable. Um, something like the United Nations sustainable development goals. Um, there's a website on that. Lots of great resources on climate change, energy use, stuff like that. Um, there are websites like science news and media releases like science daily. So they take sort of
• 07:30 - 08:00 published journal articles like big important articles like from nature and science big journals and it can be very difficult to read. So they kind of um rewrite them in a sort of everyday language type of way so they're much more readable. So resources like that would be great. Okay, step two then. So you've got some sources. Um step two then is to summarize the key points from the sources. So we're going to focus on information that is important and relevant to the research question. So
• 08:00 - 08:30 for example, I found an article by Parker here published 2018 and I looked through this and I found some good points relevant um and remember this is based on the model report. So the topic being beach litter and for someone that wanted to be a lawyer. So here I've got okay international I'm just noting that this was um overseas not an Australian study and they found 350 types of rubbish and litter and there was some examples plastic drink bottles plastic bags etc. And oh wow whale sharks were
• 08:30 - 09:00 threatened by plastic. That's interesting and it seems important. So you jot down these points. Now notice that I did not just write a summary of this whole Parker article. If you've just written a summary of this whole article, you're not thinking critically about what's important and relevant to your research question. There'll be a lot in every article that you read that is irrelevant to your research question. So, don't just regurgitate everything you read. Think critically and evaluate
• 09:00 - 09:30 which points you'll use. Having said that, um you can't take points out of context. Um you can't misrepresent points that you're taking. So, if the authors of the articles that you're referencing were to read your literature review, they should be like, "Oh, yeah, you've you've read it. You've understood what I was trying to say, and you haven't twisted it around." Um, okay. But don't just write a summary of their whole article. All right? So, after you've got some points,
• 09:30 - 10:00 really importantly, include with each of these dot points your intext reference. So just the author name and the year but do it with every point. And this is a critical thing for the next step. Um and what that looks like is this is Parker 2018. That's not the full reference. We'll go into the that will go into the reference list at the end. That's just the intext reference. And you'll see that we've put it uh there at every the
• 10:00 - 10:30 end of every dot point. And you see in a minute you'll see why that's critical. And if you don't do that, you're going to accidentally commit plagiarism. So, make sure you do that. Okay. So, here we go. We've got five references here. We've got all the dot points. The first one, Campbell and Kinslow 2016. We make sure that we've got the references at the end of every point. Um, and the second one, the third one, the fourth one, the fifth one. Okay. So, there's all our raw secondary data for our
• 10:30 - 11:00 literature review. The next step then step three is to arrange by theme and logical order. So this step is really about organizing the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle clearly and logically around that missing piece. So we're going to arrange key points in logical order. We're going to identify themes meaning the topics or the big ideas that each paragraph is going to focus on. And each theme needs to be important and relevant to the research question. Uh, now normally you would
• 11:00 - 11:30 need to figure out what those themes in your literature review would be, and I'm going to walk you through how you would do that. But for your literature review, we've told you what your general themes are. And a really good technique to help is to code the text. Um, which makes it simpler to arrange everything in logical order. And I'm going to show you how to do that in a minute using colors and numbers. as a general principle though. So we want to start with information that explains the broader context and
• 11:30 - 12:00 then become increasingly specific and focused on your research question. So we start wide and we focus in same as the hourglass um picture where we're starting wider focusing in. Uh and you don't have to include every point from the last step. Okay, it's okay to leave points out. So this was how the literature review in the model report was written. U we've got all our references and dot points here and we start looking through it and we see ah
• 12:00 - 12:30 okay there's stuff about people being injured by litter humans underestimating the risk. So that's about the dangers or the impacts of beach litter. Okay, whale sharks threatened uh sea turtles return to the beach to lay eggs after it was cleaned. Okay, well that's positive, but it still relates to the impacts of litter. And ah litter makes beaches ugly and dangerous. Okay, so we've got a bunch of points here that kind of could fit into some idea or theme of the
• 12:30 - 13:00 impacts of litter. So we're going to code those points with a simple color code of blue to help us keep track of them. And if you keep looking, what else can we find? All right. Well, here we find 350 types of rubbish. Okay. Then we've got examples of those plastic drink bottles, plastic bags, aluminium cans, and then down, uh, we've got some examples by Hashem with more types of litter. Under that, we've got an increase of
• 13:00 - 13:30 15.9%. So, more about litter. Then down the bottom, we've got a definition. Okay, great. So, they could fit into some sort of theme about what litter is and the types of litter. So, we've coded that green. And then this hypothetical student wanted to be a lawyer which guided their literature search. Um, and they found some information on relevant law down the bottom and found some examples of what a lawyer did to try and help solve this
• 13:30 - 14:00 problem. So, we've got all these dot points here now, and they're colorcoded, which is really good. So, we can easily organize them now by grouping them by their theme. So, at this point, we've got three big themes, and I'm happy with the order of this. We're going to start with theme one, types of pollution. I think that's a good way to introduce the topic, and that's going to be a paragraph. And then we've got theme two, the impacts of pollution. So, I think that's that's a good theme that logically flows from the first. Then
• 14:00 - 14:30 we've got this third theme on the role of a lawyer. So, an example of the career area. Okay. So, we've sorted our paragraphs. This is kind of the macro structure. We've got the general themes of each paragraph fitting together in a good macro sequence sequence, but we also need to dig into each paragraph and sort out the order of those dot points within each paragraph. This is kind of like the micro structure. So if we just look at theme one types of pollution as
• 14:30 - 15:00 an example. So then we have a look at this. We've got five dot points just lumped in together. But down the bottom, we've got a definition of litter. Now, I think that would make a good place to start the paragraph just to get everyone on the same page. And now I'm coding these dot points now with numbers. Uh then I notice we've got dot points one, two, and four talk about types of litter. And that second one
• 15:00 - 15:30 mentions 350 types. Okay. So now we're going to start broad and try and get narrow. Um it's also an international study. So again, we've started broader and wider. So I might put that one as the first of those points. Then the first dot point up the top gives us some examples of those 350 types of litter. So I might put that as the next one. And now down the bottom we've come down to Australian beaches. So a bit narrower and more specific. And there are some more examples of the
• 15:30 - 16:00 different types of litter. So that's a good sequence. And then we're going to finish it up talking about how the amount of litter has increased. So by rearranging that we get a paragraph structure where we start with a definition. We've got some examples about the types of litter qualitatively types and then we finish off with an increase in the quantity of litter. So that's a paragraph with a nice structure. So we want to go through that um and do that with both of our
• 16:00 - 16:30 paragraphs. Arrange those in order. And now at this point, you should pat yourself on the back. You've done 90% of the hard work. You've really set yourself up well. So, we've got a range of good points. We've got the int text references in. We've ordered our paragraphs logically into themes. And within each paragraph, we've got logical sequences that build up and flow. So, that leads us now to step four, which is to write it out. And at this point, we need to paraphrase. make sure we're
• 16:30 - 17:00 using our own words, our own sentences. So, we're going to synthesize or combine similar points from different authors into one point so that we're not repeating ourselves. We're going to be logical and cohesive. And we must include our intext references. And nearly every sentence in your literature review will have an intext reference. So, we've got these dot points here. These points are written by three different authors writing for different purposes. So you can't just lump them
• 17:00 - 17:30 together without using your own words. So you do have to use your own words to avoid plagiarism. But most importantly, you have to use your own words to make it flow. You've organized a bunch of facts along a logical pathway that nobody else in the world has ever set out those same facts in the same way. So you need to use your own words to make sure you logically cohesively explain that pathway. So we use our own words and sentences and end up with a beautifully
• 17:30 - 18:00 unique paragraph. You can see there's intex referencing. Um sometimes the reference is put at the end of the sentence in brackets. Sometimes the author's name is part of the sentence like Parker 2018 and you just put the year in brackets. And the very last step is to update our reference list. The references are listed alphabetically by the family name of the author. So if there's more than one author, just use the first author. And we use the Harvard referencing style. And there's lots of
• 18:00 - 18:30 examples and support to help you is available through the UW library guide. So get to know that link. Now, when you get to this point, give yourself a really big pat on the back. you've finished maybe the most challenging section of the report and set out a really good foundation for the rest of your investigation to build on. Now, we have the two paragraphs that you're going to do, we've talked about, but the first one is the theme, the general theme is residential
• 18:30 - 19:00 electricity. So, subtopics within that could be looking at, you know, articles that have studied energy usage of appliances, particular appliances. Um, it could be articles on looking at trends over time. Um, it could be to do with how much electricity houses use. Um, it could be to do with types of appliances and energy rating changes over time. Could be behavior changes over time to do with people in houses. House design, how much um the number of
• 19:00 - 19:30 people living in houses versus apartments or anything like that is fine. uh it could be to do with the carbon emissions or the energy usage of the residential sector compared to sort of like the total especially the total carbon emissions for example compared to like transportation and the industrial sector um etc. Um you definitely don't have to cover all these topics. These are just some examples of the types of points that could be relevant. Um one or two is fine. Um but just remember to arrange
• 19:30 - 20:00 your information starting broad and becoming narrower and more focused. Um, and so that second paragraph we've talked about is your career sector, your career area and climate change. Um, and so that could be to do with again how electricity usage of your sector contributes to climate change like a cause of climate change. Um, it could be something around the opportunities of your sector to reduce carbon emissions or climate change impact. So like as your career area as a solution or it
• 20:00 - 20:30 could be something to do with just the impacts of climate change on your sector, how your sector might have to adapt in the future or change just to cope. Okay, so any of those kinds of themes and topics um are fine. Um and the very last thing I want to say really quickly like lit literature reviews can be like a bottomless hole. like PhD students doing a doctorate will spend their whole first year full-time doing nothing else but writing a literature review. So, we're not asking you for that depth. We just want you to to walk
• 20:30 - 21:00 you through the process at an introductory level. Um, so you have a basic understanding of what it is and what the process of writing one is. Um, and and that's the same for every section of this report. Okay? So, don't be a perfectionist. Try not to be too anxious about it. just get stuck in, find some articles, um, think about your research question, pull out some points and and have a go. Okay, thanks guys.