How to Analyze Literature and Develop Ideas for my Literature Review
This Resource Page will help you:
- Understand the reasons for analyzing literature and developing your own ideas for a literature review
- Analyze literature you searched for and organized
- Find strategies to develop your own ideas for literature review writin
Introduction
Once you’ve searched and organized the literature for your assignment, the next step is to analyze each source you have selected and develop your own ideas for your review.
In this resource page, we will provide you with strategies to analyze sources and develop ideas for your literature review writing.
If you need support on searching for and organizing literature, check our resource pages on how to find sources for assignments, how to evaluate and select literature and how to organize literature.
As analyzing literature involves reading your sources critically, you may also want to check our resource page on critical reading for effective reading strategies.
Why Analyze Literature and Develop Your Own Ideas?
Analyzing the content of the sources you have gathered and developing your own ideas for a literature review is a fundamental aspect of academic writing. This process is crucial because it helps you:
- Develop critical thinking, analytical, and synthesis skills while you comprehend and evaluate the arguments, methodologies, and evidence of the source.
- Ensure the originality of thoughts. A literature review does not purely summarize previous studies; it also presents your understanding of or critical perspective on the topic.
- Identify gaps, contradictions, and emerging trends in the field. The findings of your literature analysis identify the patterns and gaps in existing studies and inform directions for future research. If you are doing original research, the results from the analysis can also inform the research questions or hypotheses you can focus on to fill the gaps in the field.
How to Analyze your Sources
In addition to collecting basic information for each source you’ve selected (e.g., publication date, participants, and methodologies), you should further analyze the content and make comparisons and connections with other sources in your collection.
Below are some common strategies and tips for analysis.
Some guiding questions when summarizing the theories and findings include:
- What are the authors’ central arguments?
- What is the research design/methodology?
- How did the theories or concepts selected by the author frame their findings? (or which authors/fields of knowledge/theoretical frameworks does the author include?)
- What is the evidence presented to support the arguments?
Critically reflect on the arguments, methodologies, and evidence presented by the authors and judge the quality of the reasoning and implications. Some helpful considerations are:
- Does the evidence presented by the authors support their central arguments?
- Are the conclusions drawn by the author justified and logical?
- Do the authors show any bias? Are there any underlying assumptions or unacknowledged perspectives that might affect the work's conclusions?
- Whose voices are present? Whose voices are missing?
- What are the contributions of these findings for the field?
- What further questions arise for you?
Some questions that can help you with this analysis include:
- What limitations or gaps can be identified in the work (e.g., in the research design or implications)? How do these affect the overall argument or findings?
- What limitations or gaps do the authors acknowledge? What do they leave out (of the text)?
- Do the authors suggest areas for future research? Are these suggestions feasible and relevant?
- Are there any important questions left unanswered?
After reading multiple sources, you need to compare the information and analysis of each source to identify and evaluate emerging patterns and connections among them.
For a course paper, comparing research methods can help you illustrate future directions for research. For example, in a synthesis paper, instructors may ask you to synthesize the common research methods adopted in current studies and what potential innovations can be made in research design.
If you are working on original research, comparing research methods can help you identify the common methodological practices in existing studies and indicate the innovation of the research design of your own study. For example, if qualitative methods are dominating the area, then a mixed-method design of your study can be an innovation.
Here are some questions that can guide you:
- How do the findings of this source support or contradict those from other sources?
- What common themes or patterns can you identify when considering findings from across all sources?
- What are the common research methods adopted in the studies?
- Do research method choices lead to different findings? If so, how and why?
How to Organize your Analysis
Spreadsheet
Check this spreadsheet for an example of how you can summarize findings and record your analysis for each source in a spreadsheet. The research topic in this example is assessment practices of online mathematics and statistics courses at the undergraduate level, with a focus on students’ and instructors’ perspectives. You can first browse the overall information of the example sources and pay attention to the final two columns for findings and critical analysis.
Annotated Bibliography
Before drafting the literature review, you can also start with an annotated bibliography to summarize the findings and record your analysis of each source. To get more information about the annotated bibliography, please refer to What is an annotated bibliography and How to write an annotated bibliography resource pages.
How to Develop Ideas
While and after analyzing all the sources you have read, you will start developing ideas for your writing.
Analysis and idea development go hand in hand and don’t follow a perfectly linear process. In some cases, you might have ideas that you seek to confirm (or disprove) through your sources; in other cases, you might develop ideas as you read the literature or after organizing your analysis; often, you might do a bit of both. In any case, even when you have some ideas before your analysis, categorizing relevant information from your sources will help you further develop these ideas into detailed points and sub-points, eventually resulting in your paper structure.
Our tip: go back and forth between the literature and the analysis you organized in the previous steps to confirm, adjust and refine your ideas.
How to Categorize the Information
There are several criteria you can follow to categorize the information analyzed from your sources and develop your ideas.
Remember: The categorization criteria you choose will depend on your research questions and purpose. The chosen criteria should help you see the patterns, potential gaps, and connections among sources, as these will form the main ideas for your literature review.
In many cases, you can identify the key issues, patterns, or themes emerging from the sources you collected and analyzed. You may want to focus on these issues and themes in your review.
- Example from Literature analysis example.xlsx: a point to discuss in your paper might be the positive impact of technology on assessment during the pandemic if this is the perspective you found in most sources.
Example from Literature analysis example.xlsx: you may want to prioritize the challenges of online assessment for undergraduate-level mathematics learning because this is what most studies discussed. However, the degree of importance of information depends on your own judgment.
This is a commonly used method if you intend to provide a review of how a concept (e.g., sociocultural theory) has evolved over time.
Example: if your focus is on scholars’ different perspectives on the definition of teacher identity, or theories employed to explain this definition, you may want to categorize your analysis and structure your ideas using this method.
You can discuss how the choice of methods (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods) has yielded different findings on the same topic and investigate why such differences occur.
You can organize your ideas based on the contexts and settings of the studies you’ve read.
- Example: categorize your ideas based on geographical regions and/or institutions (e.g., k-12 schools in China; North American post-secondary institutions)
How to Organize your Ideas
After you have developed your ideas, you need to organize them so that they show the connections among your findings and follow a logical flow.
Below are some methods for organizing main ideas.
This is an example of how to use an outline to organize your ideas and visualize the connections among them. These will become the points to include in your assignment.
This is an example of how to use a literature review matrix to organize your ideas and visualize the connections among them. These will become the points to include in your assignment.
This is an example of how to use a concept map to organize your ideas and visualize the connections among them. These will become the points to include in your assignment.
This is an example of how to use a table to organize your ideas and visualize the connections among them. These will become the points to include in your assignment.
Our Tips
Regardless of the method you choose to organize your ideas, we recommend that you make an outline for your paper. Making an outline is the final step of the pre-writing stage of the literature review preparation as it provides a skeleton for the structure of your paper and the foundation to start the writing process.
- List the main ideas in bullet point format. They will become the main sections of your paper
- Under each main idea, list the specific points and supporting evidence from the analyzed sources. These will become your section paragraphs.
By making an outline, you can also check if your ideas and points are organized in a logical order and can make adjustments accordingly.
Next Steps
Once you have analyzed the selected literature and developed and organized your ideas, you are now ready to start writing your literature review. For information and strategies, check our resource pages under the "writing process" keyword.