In literature research, you research readily available data to formulate a problem definition. Some cases have been studied before, and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. By doing literature research, you can gather a lot of information. I will give you eleven tips for doing literature research:
- Much information is already available. Through literature review, you can gather a lot of information about trends, market movements, market structure, and developments without having to do the fieldwork.
- The literature review will form a clear purpose/research question and sub-questions that you want the answers to.
- Provide keywords and search terms derived from your purpose/research question. This will give you a direction to research relevant literature.
- Look for references and source citations to other publications in relevant articles. This will give you what is known as the snowball effect to new information.
- Gather current information.
- Turn the collected literature into one document, adding only the relevant information that answers the research question.
- Keep track of what information you get from where, so you and your client can see which sources were used.
- Mention the sources using the APA rules to avoid plagiarism.
- Important when you are doing desk research is to check the relevance of the data. Does this information answer your problem definition?
- Ensure to have multiple sources. This makes the data more reliable.
- Provide reliable sources, such as (scientific) articles through Google Scholar, published studies on official websites, or sources from the library.