Literature Review Services and gap analysis

Pubrica Research Team develops a good review that can be an invaluable tool to the practitioner, providing a succinct summary and analysis of the pertinent information in a given area.

The reasons for undertaking a literature review are numerous and include eliciting information for developing policies and evidence-based care, a step in the research process and as part of an academic assessment. Its goal is to bring the reader up-to-date with current literature on a topic and form the basis for another goal, such as the justification for future research in the area. At Pubrica, develop a good literature review that gathers information about a particular subject from many sources. Our team has experience and expertise in writing clinical literature reviews that are well written and contain few if any personal biases. The team has a strong research background, therefore the articles are chosen to contain a clear search and selection strategy.

Our Comprehensive Literature Review Services

• Identify a gap in previous research
• Outline the main arguments in your field
• Show that you are familiar with the literature on your topic
• Indicate who the main writers are in a particular area
• Evaluate previous studies
• Position your work in relation to other writers
• Identify areas of controversy
• Support your own work by citing other authors
• Highlight current literature and use older sources where relevant
• See what previous methodologies have been used and to avoid making the same mistakes as previous researchers
• Demonstrate that you can do research
• Avoid plagiarism and demonstrate your referencing skills
• Provide a clear theoretical framework
• Demonstrate your understanding of the key ideas and concepts in your topic
• Define your terms, drawing on other writers’ definitions
• Make you more confident that your area of research is worth studying

Importance of Literature Review in Scientific Research Writing

Literature review forms the nucleus of all scientific research. As a systematic investigation to reach new conclusions and establish facts, every scientific research builds on existing knowledge. Unless one wants to reinvent the wheel, precise awareness on the extent of wisdom on a subject is necessary to carry on research that adds value to the field.

A literature review for scientific research can be defined as a survey of scientific books, scholarly articles, and any other systematic scientific sources relevant to a particular issue, area of study, or theory, to provide a description, summary, and critical evaluation of a concept, school of thought, or ideas pertaining to the research question in investigation. In extension, the literature review familiarizes the author to the extent of knowledge in their field. When presented as a part of the paper, it establishes to the readers the author’s depth of understanding and knowledge of their subject. 

The scientifically relevant literature in a field consists of the previous studies in the area, established schools of thoughts, scholarly articles, and scientific journals among other things. The literature review varies from field to field. In hard sciences, the literature is mostly facts and the review may be simply a summary of the critical sources. While in soft sciences, the survey provides an overview and synthesis of various schools of thoughts and their interconnection. A summary or an overview is the brief account of all informational highlights from key sources, while synthesis is the restructuring or reorganization of the information in a way that informs the dissertation’s plan of investigating the research problem.

The following are reasons how literature review adds value and legitimacy to the study:

• Literature review enables the interpretation of old literature in the light of new developments in the field; this helps in establishing the consistency in knowledge and relevancy of older materials.
• The progress of knowledge in the field is mapped and how the dialectics of contradictions between various thoughts within the field helped establish facts is identified during the course of reviewing the literature. This helps in calculating the impact of new information in the field.
• The literature is primarily scrutinized to identify gaps in the knowledge of the field. This gap is further explored during the research to establish new facts or theories that add value to the field.
• The concept of conducting a scientific and systematic study necessitates scrutiny of existing knowledge, thus, facilitating the need for literature review
• The literature review also helps in identifying the current study’s place in the schema of the field.

Conclusion

The literature review also validates the study by providing information on its relevance and coherency to the existing knowledge and methods in research. In turn, it establishes the author’s expertise in the field and provides legitimacy to carry forward the wisdom of the area using scientific and systematic methods.

The literature review while elucidating the continuance of knowledge, also point out areas that require further investigation and hence, aid as a starting point for future research.