如何準(zhǔn)備文獻(xiàn)綜述和撰寫(xiě)論文

1、Finding, formulating and exploring your topic.Different topic creations Many students have in mind something that they want to work on; others want to work with a particular scholar or research centre. In the first case, students search for a compatible supervisor. In the second, for a topic. Regard

2、less of these preliminary circumstances, the topic is very likely only roughly formulated at this stage. This is usually enough to have your enrolment accepted.Reading the literature Once you have a general idea, you could start by talking to your supervisor and other scholars. But, most importantly

3、, you have to think why you would like to work on it, or why anyone would want to do so. Ask yourself, "Why is it important? What is interesting about this? Suppose I solve it, or find it, or pull it all together, what use is it? What is its significance?" Then, with some questions such as

4、 these in mind, go and read more about it to see what is there and find out what aspects of it have been exhausted, what neglected, what the main ideas, issues and controversies are in the area. It is regarded as your supervisor's role to direct you to the most fruitful starting point in reading

5、 and surveying the literature. Cycle of literature review All of this is not a once only activity, but is a cycle you go through again and again. So you read, think, and discuss it with your supervisor and then, as a result, come closer to the formulation of the topic. And then with each cycle of re

6、ading, thinking and discussing your topic becomes more specific and focussed. This is not the final formulation and the last time you will focus your topic. But you could probably let go of this round of general exploration and embark on the next stage. Your supervisor by this time should have enoug

7、h of an idea of your topic to judge whether or not what you propose to do is feasible within the time available and has the potential to meet the required standards for a PhD. To see the full potential of your topic or, to the contrary, see that it is not going to deliver what you wanted, you do nee

8、d to begin doing your research. This, of course, is why pilot studies are often undertaken.Making sense of the literatureWe do truly wish we could tell you about a reliable or simple way to make sense of the literature. We can say, however, that you need to attend to things at two levels: · One

9、 is establishing a system that will allow you to organise the hard copies of the articles etc., and develop a data base for references, so you have easy access under relevant categories and don't chase the same references repeatedly. · The other is the more demanding task of understanding a

10、nd using the literature for your purposes. Without attending to the first task, you could easily become inefficient and frustrated. However, although it is necessary to have some way of keeping track, don't spend all your energies on perfecting your system. It may be a good idea to attend a cour

11、se for researchers on handling information. Check whether your university's library or computer centre offers such a course. The other task ahead of you - of understanding, reviewing and using the literature for your purposes - goes to the heart of your thesis. We consider this in three stages.M

12、aking sense of the literature - first pass When you first come to an area of research, you are filling in the background in a general way, getting a feel for the whole area, an idea of its scope, starting to appreciate the controversies, to see the high points, and to become more familiar with the m

13、ajor players. You need a starting point. This may come out of previous work you've done. If you're new to the area, your supervisor could suggest fruitful starting points. Or you could pursue some recent review articles to begin. Too much to handle At this stage there seems to be masses of l

14、iterature relevant to your research. Or you may worry that there seems to be hardly anything. As you read, think about and discuss articles and isolate the issues you're more interested in. In this way, you focus your topic more and more. The more you can close in on what your research question

15、actually is, the more you will be able to have a basis for selecting the relevant areas of the literature. This is the only way to bring it down to a manageable size. Very little there If initially you can't seem to find much at all on your research area - and you are sure that you've exploi

16、ted all avenues for searching that the library can present you with - then there are a few possibilities: · You could be right at the cutting edge of something new and it's not surprising there's little around. · You could be limiting yourself to too narrow an area and not apprecia

17、ting that relevant material could be just around the corner in a closely related field. · Unfortunately there's another possibility and this is that there's nothing in the literature because it is not a worthwhile area of research. In this case, you need to look closely with your superv

18、isor at what it is you plan to do. Quality of the Literature This begins your first step in making sense of the literature. You are not necessarily closely evaluating it now; you are mostly learning through it. But, sometimes at this stage students do ask us how they can judge the quality of the lit

19、erature they're reading, as they're not experts. You learn to judge, evaluate, and look critically at the literature by judging, evaluating and looking critically at it. That is, you learn to do so by practising. There is no quick recipe for doing this but there are some questions you could

20、find useful and, with practice, you will develop many others: · Is the problem clearly spelled out? · Are the results presented new? · Was the research influential in that others picked up the threads and pursued them? · How large a sample was used? · How convincing is the a

21、rgument made? · How were the results analysed? · What perspective are they coming from? · Are the generalisations justified by the evidence on which they are made? · What is the significance of this research? · What are the assumptions behind the research? · Is the meth

22、odology well justified as the most appropriate to study the problem? · Is the theoretical basis transparent? In critically evaluating, you are looking for the strengths of certain studies and the significance and contributions made by researchers. You are also looking for limitations, flaws and

23、 weaknesses of particular studies, or of whole lines of enquiry. Indeed, if you take this critical approach to looking at previous research in your field, your final literature review will not be a compilation of summaries but an evaluation. It will then reflect your capacity for critical analysis.M

24、aking sense of the literature - second pass You continue the process of making sense of the literature by gaining more expertise which allows you to become more confident, and by being much more focused on your specific research. You're still reading and perhaps needing to re-read some of the li

25、terature. You're thinking about it as you are doing your experiments, conducting your studies, analysing texts or other data. You are able to talk about it easily and discuss it. In other words, it's becoming part of you. At a deeper level than before, · you are now not only looking at

26、findings but are looking at how others have arrived at their findings; · you're looking at what assumptions are leading to the way something is investigated; · you're looking for genuine differences in theories as opposed to semantic differences; · you also are gaining an unde

27、rstanding of why the field developed in the way it did; · you have a sense for where it might be going. First of all you probably thought something like, "I just have to get a handle on this". But now you see that this 'handle' which you discovered for yourself turns out to be

28、 the key to what is important. You are very likely getting to this level of understanding by taking things to pieces and putting them back together. For example, you may need to set up alongside one another four or five different definitions of the same concept, versions of the same theory, or diffe

29、rent theories proposed to account for the same phenomenon. You may need to unpack them thoroughly, even at the very basic level of what is the implied understanding of key words (for example 'concept', 'model', 'principles' etc.), before you can confidently compare them, whic

30、h you need to do before synthesis is possible. Or, for example, you may be trying to sort through specific discoveries which have been variously and concurrently described by different researchers in different countries. You need to ask questions such as whether they are the same discoveries being g

31、iven different names or, if they are not the same, whether they are related. In other words, you may need to embark on very detailed analyses of parts of the literature while maintaining the general picture.Making sense of the literature - final pass You make sense of the literature finally when you

32、 are looking back to place your own research within the field. At the final pass, you really see how your research has grown out of previous work. So now you may be able to identify points or issues that lead directly to your research. You may see points whose significance didn't strike you at f

33、irst but which now you can highlight. Or you may realise that some aspect of your research has incidentally provided evidence to lend weight to one view of a controversy. Having finished your own research, you are now much better equipped to evaluate previous research in your field.From this point w

34、hen you have finished your own research and you look back and fill in the picture, it is not only that you understand the literature and can handle it better, but you could also see how it motivates your own research. When you conceptualise the literature in this way, it becomes an integral part of

35、your research.Writing the literature reviewWhat we are talking about here is the writing of the review. We assume that you have made sense of the literature, and that you know the role of the literature and its place in your thesis. Below are links to other sections covering these aspects. You will

36、doubtless write your literature review several times. Since each version will serve a different purpose, you should not think you are writing the same thing over and over and getting nowhere. Where you may strike trouble is if you just try to take whole sections out of an earlier version and paste t

37、hem into the final version which, by now, has to be differently conceived. In practical terms, it is necessary to have an overall picture of how the thread runs through your analysis of the literature before you can get down to actually writing a particular section. The strategy which writers use as

38、 a way to begin the literature review is to proceed from the general, wider view of the research you are reviewing to the specific problem. This is not a formula but is a common pattern and may be worth trying. Let's look at an example taken from the first pages of a literature review. This show

39、s us the progression from general to specific and the beginning of that thread which then continues through the text leading to the aims.Despite the undisputed success of quantum mechanics, many important fundamental problems and questions remain unanswered (see for example X, 1973): the measuring p

40、rocess cannot be satisfactorily described in QM formalism; there are great mathematical stumbling blocks to attempt to make QM consistent with the assumptions of special relativity; ., just to name a few. This is basically an introductory section, which starts with a statement of the problem in very

41、 broad terms, alerting us to the fact that not everything is rosy, and proceeds to sketch in specific aspects. Without doubt, one of the most widely discussed of these is this closes in on what the focus of the problem is Like most fundamental issues in physics, this question leads to challenges at

42、several levels of thought. At the philosophical level this issue poses questions about . At the physical level we are forced to examine . At the mathematical level many questions are raised about the completeness and logical consistency . The text moves on to specify issues at various levels. Althou

43、gh the focus is sharper, the coverage at the same time opens out. An important instance in which all of these challenges converge occurs with the concept of 'angle' in the description of quantum systems Thus the text has set up the situation where all aspects of the problem-theoretical, prac

44、tical, etc.-are brought together. Whatever the pattern which fits your work best, you need to keep in mind that what you are doing is writing about what was done before. But, you are not simply reporting on previous research. You have to write about it in terms of how well it was done and what it ac

45、hieved. This has to be organised and presented in such a way that it inevitably leads to what you want to do and shows it is worth doing. You are setting up the stage for your work. For example, a series of paragraphs of the kind: "Green (1975) discovered ." "In 1978, Black conducted

46、experiments and discovered that ." "Later Brown (1980) illustrated this in " demonstrates neither your understanding of the literature nor your ability to evaluate other people's work. Maybe at an earlier stage, or in your first version of your literature review, you needed a summ

47、ary of who did what. But in your final version, you have to show that you've thought about it, can synthesise the work and can succinctly pass judgement on the relative merits of research conducted in your field. So, to take the above example, it would be better to say something like: "Ther

48、e seems to be general agreement on x, (for example, White 1987, Brown 1980, Black 1978, Green 1975) but Green (1975) sees x as a consequence of y, while Black(1978) puts x and y as . While Green's work has some limitations in that it ., its main value lies in ." Approaching it in this way f

49、orces you to make judgements and, furthermore, to distinguish your thoughts from assessments made by others. It is this whole process of revealing limitations or recognising the possibility of taking research further which allows you to formulate and justify your aims.Keep your research focusedIt is

50、 always important to keep your research focused, but this is especially so at two points. First when you have settled into the topic and the time for wider exploration has to end. And then again at a later stage when you may have gathered lots of data and are starting to wonder how you are going to

51、deal with it all.Focus after literature review First, it is a common temptation to prolong the exploration phase by finding more and more interesting things and straying away from what was once regarded as the possible focus. Either you or your supervisor could be guilty of this. In some cases, it m

52、ight be you who is putting off having to make a commitment to one line of enquiry because exploration and realising possibilities is enjoyable and you're always learning more. In other cases, it could be your supervisor who, at every meeting, becomes enthusiastic about other possibilities and ke

53、eps on suggesting alternatives. You might not be sure if this is just sharing excitement with you or if you are supposed to follow them all up. Either way you need to stop the proliferation of lines of enquiry, sift through what you have, settle on one area, and keep that focus before you. It could

54、even be a good idea to write it up on a poster in front of your desk. Unless you have this really specified in the first place, with the major question and its sub-questions, and you know exactly what you have to find out to answer these, you will never be focused and everything you find will seem t

55、o be 'sort of' relevant. You have to close off some lines of enquiry and you can do so only once you decide they are not relevant to your question. We continually meet students who, when we ask, "So what is the question you're researching?", will answer, "My topic is such

56、and such and I'm going to look at x, y and z". Sometimes further probing from us will reveal that they do indeed have a focus, but many times this is not so. Thinking in terms of your topic is too broad. You need to think, rather, of what it is you are investigating about the topic. ·

57、Questions force you to find answers; topics invite you to talk about things. Focus after data collection Then, at a later stage, you could find yourself surrounded by lots of data which you know are somewhat relevant to your project, but finding the ways of showing this relevance and using the data

58、to answer your question could be a difficult task. Now you have to re-find your focus to bring it all together. Again, it is your research question and sub-questions which will help you to do this because your whole thesis is basically the answer to these questions, that is, the solution to the prob

59、lem you presented at the beginning. This may strike you as a very simplistic way to view it. However, approaching it in this way does help to bring the parts together as a whole and get the whole to work. We even recommend that, to relate the parts to each other and keep yourself focussed , you coul

60、d tell yourself the story of the thesis. Making a deliberate attempt to keep focused will help you to shape your research and keep you motivated.Apparently I have to write a research proposal. What do I need to do?The main purpose of a research proposal is to show that the problem you propose to investigate is significant enough to warrant the investigation, the