The Literature review is a vital part of the research process.  You will gain important insights by reviewing assortment of literature available on your topic of research. By reviewing literature you will gain an approach, knowledge, and more awareness on your chosen topic for research. An in-depth literature evaluation will help you in setting the stage for a better-designed study and will help improve your chances in obtaining significant results.  Therefore, it is worth the time and effort to analyze it in right fashion.

Reviewing the literature involves finding the sources, analyzing, amalgamating, and interpreting. You might find incompatible and contrasting views expressed by different authors on your topic. These conflicting points of view might be the indicators of swerving theories within the same topic. To shape up a genuine research, you need to be aware of these conflicting theories as well. Remember, verity of arguments and your views add flavor to your thesis. Being aware of those theories will help you later in your life; you will be able to talk and apply your knowledge in your work from different perspectives.

The literature review is science as well as art. You can have it as chapter at the beginning of your thesis or it can even be involved as veiled literature review throughout the thesis. The literature review should be balanced with your thought process on the topic, your ideas are most important. Some researchers stuff half of their thesis with literature review. Keep in mind that the literature (secondary data) is somebody else’s idea and not yours. It is not new information either. Therefore, try to give something new by taking support of existing literature.

One common way to approach literature review is to start out broad and then become more specific by narrowing down the focus. This style of writing is called ‘An Inverted Triangle’. Usually, when researchers get a hang of their topic, they recognize that the readers/referees will skim the thesis to find points of relevance. The inverted pyramid style of writing presents the essential facts in the first paragraph, with a hope of drawing the reader into the narrative. This style is used in the majority of thesis/research papers.

This type of writing fashion enhances your writing: all the facts are presented in order of importance, with the most important information leading the narrative. This style of writing is quite creative and functional. The first paragraph usually answers who, what, when, where and why. The rest of the narration provides detailed descriptions, quotations from witnesses or experts, and background information that relates to the opening paragraph.

You will find literature from variety of sources such as previous research thesis, newspapers, periodicals, books, journals, abstracts, Internet, Wikipedia, news bulletins, television, radio etc.

A careful and exhaustive review of the literature helps you in following manner:

• Enables you to focus on the purpose of your study more precisely.
• It develops a conceptual or theoretical framework that might be useful to touch upon your research objectives.
• It also helps to identify key variables for easing your methodology.
• You can find inter relationships among the chosen variables to quantify the study.
• If you find a previous research on similar topic of yours, you can meaningfully extend it.
• A literature review helps you conclude relationship on current and past scenario.
• And, most importantly it helps you prepare validated questionnaires for collecting primary data.

Four of the most common formats of literature review are:

Historical Format: Here the review is organized chronologically.  This is preferred when focus is on the progression of research methods or theories, or a change in practice over time.

Conceptual Format: Review is organized according to relevant concepts and theories.

Methodological Format:  Where literature review organizes and shapes the format that of an empirical paper. This is used most often used in meta-analytic reports.

Hypothetical Format: The role of this form is to examine the quantity of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue. The hypothetical literature review helps to establish rationale based upon what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what extent the existing theories have been examined, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested.

Lastly, this might sound a bit obscure but you will find that by reviewing other’s thesis, you will learn about the ways other people have constructed their own research work. Seeing what others have done, type of approach adopted by them, logic in organizing chapters might help you understand your own assignment. You might be able to see the methods that other, more experienced researchers have used and it might give you a fair idea to follow your own research methodology. As a researcher, you are required to write the literature review to summarize and discuss the major documents published in that topic in the past and present. The narration will take into account the methods and the results or findings of the most relevant tips. Your referees will assess whether the methodology is appropriate and whether the results seem valid. Don’t merely list books, documents, periodical, journals, and websites do read relevant points and discuss them. If your merely list unread references, your examiner might search for those references in your thesis and might raise objections.

In the words of Lawrence Clark Powell – “To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength”

Can you imagine a society in which arts and humanities do not exist; can you imagine your world without music, art or literature? If religion and philosophy would be absent, the study of history would be nullified, and intellectual debate would never happen. How dry our world would be without passion of humanities. We all give maximum importance to science, math, and technology and consider the arts as a lesser branch of study; we naively discount the value of the humanities and attempt to minimize their importance in education. But, the fact is they are so significant in our daily life.

The humanities are one of the academics disciplines  that study human culture, using techniques that are of significance; these techniques are mostly exploratory. Humanities have a significant historical element as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences. The humanities branch includes ancient civilization, literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, communication studies, cultural studies, law, linguistics, religion, visual and performing arts such as music and theatre. The humanities are also referred as social sciences.  Scholars in the humanities are described as humanists; this term also describes the philosophical position of humanism.

Humanities education gives insights into how their society is different

Humanities education gives students insights into how their society is different. The world consists of several religions, cultures and races. Educators also list several other benefits to the study of the humanities. Since the humanities involve the gaining of large amounts of information about the world and humanity, it requires that students develop critical thinking skills in order to process and analyze the information. This is a skill that translates into other realms of a student’s life, and it can provide benefits to other areas of study.

Research into the human experience adds to our knowledge about our world. Through the work of humanities scholars, we learn about the values of different cultures, about what goes into making a work of art, about how history is made. Their efforts preserve the great accomplishments of the past; help us understand the world we live in, and give us tools to imagine the future. This has given birth to Futures Studies which is also called futurology and futurism. It is the study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them.

Today, humanistic knowledge continues to provide the ideal foundation for exploring and understanding the human experience. Investigating a branch of philosophy might get us thinking about ethical questions. Learning another language helps us gain an appreciation for the similarities in different cultures. Contemplating a sculpture makes us think about how an artist’s life affected his/her creative decisions. Reading a book from another region of the world helps us think about the meaning of democracy and its importance for our survival. Listening to a history course helps us understand the past, while at the same time it offers us a clearer picture of the future.

A report commissioned by Oxford University’s Humanities Division found that numbers of Oxford graduates of English, History, Philosophy, Classics and Modern Languages are employed in key economic growth sectors of finance, media, legal services and management. This number rose substantially between 1960 and 1989. By the end of the period, 16-20% was employed in these sectors. It is believed to be the first report of its kind as it evaluates the contribution of the study of the humanities to boost the economy by looking at career paths and mid- and end-career destinations of graduates, rather than the three years immediately after graduation as used by the government’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

The research has involved using the University of Oxford alumni database to examine the employment history of 11,000 Oxford humanities graduates who matriculated between 1960 and 1989 to give full career paths to track, and has also involved focused in-depth interviews with 50 alumni, thereby engaging quantitative and qualitative measures of humanities graduates’ impact on the British economy and society. The head of humanities at the University of Oxford says that it is widely recognized that the humanities have intrinsic value as well as utility in the well-being of the world and it has a great impact and value in any economic crisis.

Mark Edmundson – a renowned Professor of English at University of Virginia says that serious thinkers opt for Humanities to broaden their minds and learn to how to live the rest of their lives. A serious thinker himself, Edmundson has felt firsthand the pressure on colleges to churn out a productive, high-caliber workforce for the future. Through his articles and paper presentations he reminds us that there is more to education than greater productivity. With prose exacting yet expansive, tough-minded yet optimistic, the liberal arts are more important today than ever. Titled as “Why Teach”?  Edmundson’s collected writings on the subject, including several pieces that are new and previously unpublished. What they show, collectively, is that higher learning is not a rut – some staid. It is a necessary remedy for our troubled times. Why Teach? is thus brimming with the wisdom and inspiration that make learning possible. When it comes to choosing a career, we all ask this common question – will humanities help me achieve a desired career in life? It depends on what that career is. Humanities will enable you to advance in writing skills, speaking skills and thinking. And, most importantly it will strengthen your ability to recognize further opportunities to learn. It will give you the ability of researching – to find information and ideas, and the ability to critically distinguish between various sources of ideas. It will help you structure your thoughts coherently and express yourself in ways that are appropriate to the occasion. It will help you build up reading skills which will further give you an ability to understand language and systems of meaning, whether they occur in literal texts, or in other forms. Humanities students learn to read images, culture, and a host of other things, besides written texts. It will make you adaptable – your ability to apply knowledge skills to vide variety of contexts.

And here’s another thing to keep in mind – the humanities today are not the humanities of the past. Sad, but the image that many people have of humanities is of a pursuit that has no relation to practical human concerns. The fact is humanities disciplines are involved in research projects of all sorts, with just about every discipline in the university. Philosophers work with scientists and engineers, historians work with medical professionals, creative writers work with digital media engineers. The fact is every technical and scientific discipline, at some point or other, must help the humanity and hence becomes a humanities discipline! Every scientific advance is an advance for humans, and is meaningful in our history, for the betterment of our lives. Every invention happens within the context of human meaning. Every business trades on human narratives and human desires as expressed through language and symbol. The humanities matter everywhere. This discipline of studies therefore is far from being marginal. It is central to all human life.

In the words of Terry Eagleton – a prominent British literary theorist and critic “The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.” So, guys stop underrating importance of Humanities.