A GUIDE TO LITERATURE REVIEW USING BLOOM’S TAXONOMY

Characteristics of an Effective Literature Review

• Methodologically analyse and synthesis quality literature;
• Provide a firm foundation to a research topic;
• Provide a firm foundation to the selection of research methodology; and
• Demonstrate that the proposed research contributes something new to the overall body of knowledge or advances the research field’s knowledge-base.

Why Literature Review?

• Provides a solid theoretical foundation for the proposed study (What is already known?)
• Substantiates the presence of the research problem (What is needed to be known?)
• Justifies the proposed study as one that contributes something new to the body of knowledge.
• Frames valid research methodologies, approach, goals and research questions for the proposed study.

THE OBJECTIVE OF THE LITERATURE REVIEW

The objective of this article is to help you develop a Strategy to critically evaluate and synthesise published literature into cognitively advanced literature review.

Cognitively Advanced Reviews

• Organise, integrate and evaluate previously published material:
  • Clearly define and clarify the problem
  • Summarise previous work in the area
  • Identify relationships, contradictions, gaps and inconsistencies in the literature, and
  • Suggest the next step or steps in solving the problem

What is Cognition?

• Mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension.
• These processes include thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem-solving.
• These are higher-level functions of the brain and encompass language, imagination, perception, and planning.
• According to Bloom’s taxonomy, there are 6 types.

Literature Review Approach

• Input
• Process
• Output

Input- Structured Search

• Ensure that a relatively complete census of relevant literature is accumulated.
• Process of querying quality scholarly literature databases (e.g. Elsevier/Science Direct, etc.)
• Reduce the number of studies to a subset that answers a particular research question.
• Develop a set of criteria by which to judge the identified literature (e.g. peer reviewed, focus on research question, year of publication, language, local/international, robustness of the original data, etc)

Input- Structured Search- How?

• Keywords search
• Should be the initial, not the main step for a literature search.
• Backward search
  • Backward references search
  • Backward authors search
  • Previously used keywords
• Forward search
  • Forward references search
  • Forward authors search

Backward Search

• Backward references search
  • Reviewing the references of the articles yielded from the keyword search.
  • Studying the plant milk from Bambara groundnut, the keyword search may produce the pioneering article by Jideani et al. (2000). Conducting a backward references search will mean to pull out and review all the relevant references of Jideani et al. (2000).
  • A second level backward references search should be done by pulling the ‘references of the references’.

• Backward authors search
  • Reviewing what the authors have published prior to the article.
• Previously used keywords
  • Reviewing the keywords noted in the articles yielded from the keyword search noted earlier.

Forward Search

• Forward references search
  • Reviewing additional articles that have cited the article.
  • For example a forward reference search for Jideani et al. (2000) article is by conducting an electronic library database search for all articles that included either Jideani or co-authors in their citations.
• Forward authors search
  • Reviewing what the authors have published following the article.
  • For example, a forward authors search for Jideani et al. (2000) will be conducting an electronic library database search for all articles that include either Jideani or co-authors as authors after this article.

When to end the process of gathering additional relevant literature?

• When one gets the feeling “I’ve seen this before”
• When no new citations are discovered and articles cited in newly discovered literature have already been reviewed.
• When you are not finding new concepts in your article set.