Literature Review and Research Question/s
The purpose of this exercise is to utilize the literature review in helping you formulate and delimit your research question/problem. As we have highlighted, a researchable problem is supposed to fill an important gap.
You may utilize PubMed as a starting point in your literature review. Please refer to the YouTube links posted in our VLE (under Preliminary steps in Quantitative Research) for further guidance. Nevertheless, you can use other comprehensive databases from the UPM library or your own institution (e.g., Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCO, ScienceDirect, ProQUEST). It is actually advisable to use more databases to ensure you ticked all the possible studies previously conducted in line with your research topic.
Here are the instructions:
1. Create a literature review matrix from 8-10 articles you have gathered. (Note: You can go beyond 10 if you want)
Sample matrix:
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Country |
Title / Authors |
Research Design |
Type of participants and sample size |
Setting |
Data collection Method |
Instrument/s used |
Key findings |
Limitations/ gaps |
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Note: You may modify as you see fit [e.g., may use symbols with legend instead, to delete some columns and make it easier to read through]; add or delete some columns.
2. Synthesize the 10 articles into 1-3 paragraphs (lengths could vary depends on your writing style, but try to be direct to the point and concise), highlighting 3 major aspects:
a. What is known about the topic?
b. What is not known about the topic?
c. How can the research/knowledge gap be filled?
3. State your research topic, study purpose, and aims
*Please submit your outputs as a PDF File, using the file name: "Initial RRL_Surname" on or before September 05 at 12:00 NN.
This is a formative activity to help you build your research topic; hence, it is not graded. Nonetheless, this will significantly enable you to be on track in developing your research proposal, and will support your presentation of your research topic/problem next meeting.
Please do not hesitate to send me a message for any questions/clarifications.