Literature Review

A literature review is a key component of any scholarly research. Before you can do your own research, you must know what others have done before you. For example, if your hypothesis states that democracy leads to economic growth, you must find all relevant literature on each concept (both democracy and economic growth). The works that you find can serve several purposes.

First, they can support your hypothesis by reaching in the same conclusions, in which case you are doing replication research to affirm the findings, or doing new research on the same concepts using different ways of operationalizing. Second, literature you find may reach the opposite conclusion that you do. Again, this may be due to the way concepts were operationalized or there might be a mistake in the research design. In either case, the research that you do can correct these mistakes. Third, it is important not to focus only on literature that includes both concepts; works on just one of the concepts are important, too. Literature covering only one concept can offer other causes and explanations than the one you have hypothesized. For example, you hypothesized that democracy leads to economic growth. However, you might find an article on economic growth that doesn't mention democracy, but does offer support for other factors (women in the workforce, the protestant religion, etc.) as the cause of economic growth instead. Thus, this literature should be included in your literature review, because it offers alternative causes for the concept.
-Randy Owen