Directions For Writing A Research Paper With A Literature Review

A research paper cannot be complete without a literature review. This is one of the most prolific sections of your paper that will draw a lot of attention from your teacher. At this point, there are a number of things that your teachers are looking at while they are marking your work. It is also at this point where so many students end up failing because they do not take their work seriously.

So many students who do not know what to do will often plagiarize the work of others and paste it on this chapter. Due to the amount of work that is contained here, so many of them assume that the teacher will not go through it and find this out. Sadly, teachers are trained properly and their experience in the learning environment over the years also makes it easier for them to crack down on such students.

The following are useful ideas that you must take into consideration when writing the literature review of your paper:

• Outdated citations
• Conceptual framework
• Proper evidence to your work
• Review relevant literature

Outdated citations

There are so many students who innocently fail to make the best grades because they do not know what to do. The teaching fraternity however considers this to be ignorance. When you are working on this paper, you must not use citations that go beyond a particular timeframe. Some institutions might set guidelines on this, but others might not, and you only realize so when you get penalized. In most cases, make sure that your references do not date back more than 5-8 years.

Conceptual framework

The literature review section must have a very good conceptual framework. Based on the work that you are presenting, the conceptual framework must borrow ideas from the main objectives of your paper. This way you will be able to convince your teacher that you really did the work. Besides, the conceptual framework must be presented alongside a diagrammatic representation.

Proper evidence to your work

Everything that you do in this paper must be properly cited. You should make sure you do not make any claims that cannot be substantiated by all means possible. If you raise a claim, make sure you support it.

Review relevant literature

The literature that you choose to review needs to be relevant to the title that you are working on, or the entire section will be irrelevant.