Once again, welcome back to the course hospitality English.
Now we are coming to the final part of chapter 5,
which is to evaluate literature review.
In this part, we will focus on three sections:
they are general requirements for good literature review,
some common mistakes in literature review
and evaluation criteria of literature review.
When we write a literature review,
we should pay attention to the basic requirements.
First of all, you must make sure that your review topic is new
and that it should never be totally same to the existing review article.
Secondly, the argument must be reasonable.
Your argument must be supported by sufficient information,
be based on facts,
and never make up data and diagnosis whimsically.
Do not take your own conjecture as a conclusion.
第三，Third, your framework should be clear.
It is reflected that you should have a unified idea of what to write first,
what to write next,
and how to write,
and how to make it coherent before and after.
Next is the language requirement.
The review must be academic and cannot be ambiguous.
If you can't make the language critically,
at least it should be precise and concise to express your opinion.
As most of the reviews are ‘current situation reviews’,
70% of the references should be within 3 years.
If most of your references are outdated,
this may also mean that there may be problems with your topic.
Lastly, after the review is written,
it should be checked by relevant experts
and further modified and improved in terms of specialty and text.
This step is necessary,
because the author often has the mistake of
considering one side and losing or ignoring the other side.
Some conclusions are often absurd
and do not properly reflect the "true face" of a subject.
These problems can often be solved by proofreading.
Before we study the evaluation criteria of literature review,
we should know there are some misunderstandings
that we should be avoided when we write a literature review.
Firstly, a lengthy literature review is not necessarily a good literature review.
A good literature overview is about content, not length.
When you pursue length literature,
you will ignore logicality and conciseness.
Second, when you just summarize the literature
but don't make clear its significance,
your review is definitely unqualified.
Just tabular statement of literature,
without debate,
without summarizing the significance of the material,
when you do like this,
it means you don't understand the nature of literature review.
Keep in mind that the purpose of literature review
should be both comprehensive and critical.
Now I will introduce four evaluation criteria for literature review,
width and depth,
understanding and judgment,
simplicity and criticality,
organization, relevance and coherence.
And there are also different points under each criterion.
Let’s take a look at them in detail.
The first criterion: width and depth.
To meet this standard,
you should reference a wide range of
resources and documentation in your literature review,
and your references should include professional resources
or articles related to the subject matter.
At the same time, all of these resources should be listed
in your bibliography or references section,
and last you should give a brief reference
to most of the research related resources.
You can see that every point in the criteria is very concise,
and the next three criteria are the same,
which means that you can check your literature review
by making a table of evaluation criteria,
corresponding one by one in the table.
The second criterion is understanding and judgment.
Under this standard,
your review should prove your understanding of the field of study,
and the references in the review section should prove that
you know which materials are the most important.
Meanwhile, pay attention to the pioneering research in this field
and use the references to prove that you understand the literature you read.
At the same time,
in the review most of the space should be devoted to
the resources most relevant to your research,
and reading material should be up-to-date
and cover most of the recently published literature.
As for organization, relevance and coherence,
first, the relationship between different materials
in the literature review is clearly stated,
and second, literature review should be in a logical order,
both of these are about the organization of the review.
Then how about the relevance?
It requires that in your literature review,
it should clearly describe that
how previous studies have inspired your own research,
and the way of presenting literature should be narrated
the development course of the research related to the subject better.
The relevance also shows that
each material plays a role in the research related debate
or theoretical development to some extent.
And one more point is that
all references are to some extent relevant to the research topic.
If any of these points are not satisfied to your review,
it means that your research has been deviated.
On the other level,
there is a problem with the consistency of the literature review.
Last is the coherence,
it requires that your argument is coherent in your review.
On the other hand, make sure your language style is consistent,
especially the tense.
The last criterion is simplicity and criticality,
which requires you to evaluate the literature critically
and focus on its specific contributions and deficiencies.
At the same time, every word in your review should be valuable,
and you should change the lengthy sentences to be more concise
so that you can refer to more related research.
In addition, avoid repeating materials and long quotes,
to ensure that your review does not involve plagiarism.
And you should also pay attention to the word limit of each part
as to make the review be more concise.
More importantly,
all research outputs such as MTA thesis or dissertation,
research journal articles, and reports have words limit.
Of course, in this process,
if there is any irrelevant content,
it should be deleted.
And here are the references.
In this chapter,
we have learned what a literature review is,
collection and analysis of literature,
content of literature review,
and evaluating your literature review.
By now I hope all of you will know how to write a good literature review.
Thank you very much for participating our course.
Thank you!