List the purposes of literature review.

a) To help refine further research question(s) and objectives;
b) To highlight research possibilities that have been overlooked implicitly in research to date;
c) To discover explicit recommendations for further research. These can provide you with a superb justification for your own research question(s) and objectives;
d) To help avoid simply repeating work that has been done already;
e) To sample current opinions in newspapers, professional and trade journals, thereby gaining insights into the aspects of your research question(s) and objectives that are considered newsworthy;
f) To discover and provide an insight into research approaches, strategies and techniques that may be appropriate to your own research question(s) and objectives.

OR
• To determine what has already been done related to the research problem being studied. This will help the researcher to:
- Avoid unnecessary and unintentional duplication.
- Form the framework within which the research findings are to be interpreted.
- Demonstrate his or her familiarity with the existing body of knowledge.
• Helps reveal the strategies, procedures and measuring instruments that have been found useful in investigating the problem in question. This will help the researcher to:
- Avoid mistakes that have been made by other researchers
- Benefit from other researcher’s experiences
- Clarify how to use certain procedures, which one may only have learned in theory.
• Helps to suggest other procedures and approaches, which will help, improve the research study.
• Familiarizes the researcher with previous studies, which facilitates interpretation of the results of the study. If there is a contradiction, the literature review might provide rationale for the discrepancy.
• It helps the researcher to limit the research problem and to define it better.
• Helps to determine new approaches and stimulates new ideas. The researcher may be alerted to research possibilities, which have been overlooked in the past.
• Approaches that have been proved to be futile will be revealed through literature review.
• Specific suggestions and recommendations for further research can be found by reviewing literature.
• It pulls together, integrates and summarizes what is known in an area. Thus helping to reveal gaps in information and areas where major questions still remain.

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Kavungya answered the question on March 7, 2019 at 07:21