The research report: The research process and literature review

WHEN we assign our students to do research as a capstone of their degree program, we expect them to have informed understanding of what research is and what the research process entails. We hope that earlier, the curriculum provided them a hands-on course on how to conduct a literature review to come up with a research problem.

Let’s suppose we come across a student’s research paper having an enumeration of 25 articles in the literature review. We would expect that among these articles cited, there would be those which discuss the same or similar topics. These list of articles/studies could have been clustered together using connectives such as furthermore, in addition to, similarly, etc. to organize the review. Those with differing ideas could be organized using appropriate connectives such as however, but, or on the other hand, etc. Literature review is evaluating and organizing the materials; it calls for paragraph development skills.