How to Write a Literature Review Purczak Publishing
Want to publish a literature review? Think of information technology equally an empirical paper
What to consider if you want to publish a literature review newspaper
[Invitee post by CYGNA member Tatiana Andreeva]
When you've been reading a lot on a detail topic – for case, reviewing the literature for your research projection or for your PhD – at some betoken it looks like you have enough textile and reflections to publish this work every bit a separate paper. Recognize this? If you ever tried it, you lot might know that publishing a literature review paper in an academic journal is a tricky task. The literature review publications come up in and so many forms, and at that place is no single cheat-sail or established format similar for empirical papers that you could follow to ensure success in publication.
Through my own journey of trial-and-error on this path, as well as through reviewing for journals and for PhD students in my course, I came up with an idea that will help you to increase the chances of publishing a literature review: think of a literature review every bit simply another empirical research projection. Think of it as an empirical study, in which your information comes not from your usual fieldwork only from the articles that you review.
Many literature reviews can exist thought of every bit a qualitative empirical study, in which the papers included in the review substitute interviews or field observations that y'all would usually collect and code. Some literature reviews, east.g., meta-analyses, are more similar a quantitative empirical paper, in which various numbers you extract from the papers in your dataset substitute your survey information.
Seeing literature review in this way has three important implications for how we call back about our literature review, and how we tin can blueprint it to increase its chances of being interesting to others - that is, of existence published.
Starting time with a relevant research trouble and an interesting inquiry question
We acquire early on in our academic career that any empirical paper should accept a clear research problem and a clear enquiry question. We frequently hear from periodical editors and reviewers that simply having a gap in the literature, or the fact that something has not been researched before, are non good enough to justify doing nonetheless another empirical study. They say: you need to have a problem that your study can accost, and you need to take a question that nosotros currently don't accept an reply to. Only then your empirical study can add value to existing enquiry.
When nosotros think of a literature review as of an empirical study, just with the unlike blazon of data at hand, we realize that the very aforementioned rationale applies. From this perspective the arguments that I often see in literature reviews – that there is no literature review in this item area or that the existing literature reviews are quite dated – are not sufficient in the journal'due south eyes to justify the publication of a literature review on a topic. If you aim to publish your literature review, start by thinking – what is the problem I would like to accost? What would be my research question about this problem, that other readers would find interesting?
Design a methodologically-sound data collection and analysis protocol
When we retrieve of whatsoever empirical report, nosotros know that if we want to take reliable findings that will be accepted by our peers as trustworthy, nosotros need to follow a transparent and well-thought data collection protocol. Nosotros also need to carefully choose and correctly apply relevant data analysis method. This goes without saying, right?
The same applies to the literature review! If we want our readers to trust our conclusions from the literature review, we need to make sure that the information we collect speaks to our research question, is of good quality, representative of the field, etc. The growing attending in concern and management field to the systematic approach to literature reviews (Denyer & Tranfield, 2009; Rojon et al., 2021) reflects the rising expectations of the quality of the data used in literature review papers. Indeed, this approach offers exactly that: a clear data collection protocol, transparently communicated, so that someone else could replicate your report. For example, practise the very same matter in 10 years and see how thinking on the topic has changed.
In the literature on doing literature reviews you will read that systematic literature review is only one of the types of literature reviews. Yet all recommendations on doing different types of the literature reviews share the thought that the information that yous base of operations your conclusions on has to be collected in a rigorous and transparent manner (e.grand., Callahan, 2014). In this post you can find more references on how to ensure that your literature review "information drove" protocol meets the quality expectations.
So now yous have all the papers y'all take carefully selected, how do you go about analysing them, then that peer academics would recognize your conclusions as reliable and robust? This is the trickiest function, and we accept limited methodological communication published on this. In this post I've mentioned some papers that discuss specific methods of literature analysis. For example, I found that a sophisticated coding rubric leveraged our literature analysis to a different level (Sergeeva & Andreeva, 2016), only must acknowledge that developing this rubric was one of the most challenging tasks of this review paper. In O'Higgins et al. (forthcoming) nosotros used a combination of qualitative content assay with Pearson's chi-squared (χ²) goodness of fit test in guild to validate some of our conclusions. The trick is - equally with any empirical study - your selection of the belittling method needs to fit with your research question. In sum, the message is: choose your method for analysis of the selected literature advisedly, utilize it rigorously, and explicate it transparently.
Think of the theoretical contribution across description of the findings
When nosotros think of our usual empirical work, be information technology qualitative or quantitative, we are well-aware that merely the clarification of our information wouldn't do. We know that nosotros need to leverage what our data shows to explicate how information technology informs the broader theory, how it compares to previous studies, what is new that we see from this information?
Again, the same logic applies to the literature reviews. In practice though, we often find information technology difficult to apply this advice to our literature review papers, because the description of the field in itself seems to be novel, especially if nobody did such a review earlier. In my feel, this argument does non persuade editors and reviewers of the journals, and often rightfully then.
For example, think of a typical quantitative empirical paper: a descriptive statistics table must be provided, but no 1 would claim a contribution based on it, right? Cropanzano (2009:1306-1307) offers a adept do that explains why reviewers often don't buy the clarification of the field equally a novel contribution. He suggests: imagine somebody who read all the primary manufactures in your dataset, would they still learn anything from your literature review? And if the answer is "no", then it's likely that your review paper doesn't have yet the level of contribution that is needed to plough it into a publication.
I think this practice can also assistance to stimulate your thinking of what a theoretical contribution of your literature review could be. For example, recollect – what it is that I see in this literature that others are non likely to see? In this blogpost you can find some papers that offer insights on how to leverage your literature review to accept a theoretical contribution.
References
Callahan, J.50. (2014). Writing literature reviews: A reprise and update. Homo Resource Evolution Review, xiii(3), 271–275. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534484314536705
Cropanzano, R. (2009). Writing nonempirical manufactures for Periodical of Management: General thoughts and suggestions. Periodical of Management, 35(6), 1304–1311. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206309344118
Denyer, D., Tranfield, D. (2009). Producing a systematic review. In Buchanan, D., Bryman, A. (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational research methods (pp. 671–689). London, United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland: Sage.
O'Higgins, C., Andreeva, T., Aramburu, N. (forthcoming). International management challenges of professional service firms: a synthesis of the literature. Review of International Business and Strategy.
Rojon, C., Okupe, A., McDowall, A. (2021). Utilization and evolution of systematic reviews in management inquiry: What exercise we know and where practise nosotros go from here? International Journal of Management Reviews, i– 33. https://doi.org/x.1111/ijmr.12245
Sergeeva, A., Andreeva, T. (2016). Knowledge sharing: bringing the context back in, Journal of Direction Inquiry, 25, 240-261. https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492615618271
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Copyright © 2021 Tatiana Andreeva. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Wednesday 15 Dec 2021 xix:26
Tatiana Andreeva is Associate Professor in Management and Organizational Behavior and Research Director at the School of Business at the Maynooth University, Ireland. Her research addresses the challenges of managing cognition in organizations, with a particular focus on how and why employees share (or hibernate) their knowledge with coworkers, and what managers can practice to facilitate (or prevent) these behaviours in unlike contexts. She is as well interested in how the shift to remote work and digitalisation of the organisational processes influence these bug. Tatiana teaches a range of organisational behaviour, knowledge direction and research methods topics, including a PhD course on "Research issues, literature reviews and theory building in concern and management enquiry".
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Source: https://harzing.com/blog/2021/04/want-to-publish-a-literature-review-think-of-it-as-an-empirical-paper
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