A graduating student must submit a thesis as a final year project. The student identifies and discusses a particular problem in his field of study. You all know that there are several different components of a thesis. This is why linking the existing research work, or literature review is the most important among all those structural components. A few chapters in a thesis generate a wave of fear within the students’ hearts. Discussing existing research is one of those chapters.
It won’t be wrong to say that it’s the most challenging section of a thesis. Here the author has to equip himself with tons of data for writing this. Keeping in view the importance of linking the existing research, we interviewed several students from different schools of USA. We analysed the answers, and found that there are some things that students need to follow. Today’s article will discuss all those elements, and help you in writing a good literature review as well.
Best Ways of Linking Existing Research
Linking the field’s current knowledge to the thesis is not an easy task. It requires a lot of hard work, and effort. It’s a mini project inside a thesis. There is no need to worry when you have this guide. It will discuss all the best ways that students should adopt for creating a link to the existing research. A brief description of all these ways is described by experts of a dissertation help firm as follows;
1. Search for relevant research work
The first, and foremost important thing to do is to search for relevant existing research work. It is vital because how will you link the research if you haven’t searched for it? Thus, searching before linking is crucial. Now you would be thinking, how you can search for the right data. The answer to this is pretty simple. Before writing a thesis, you will have a defined topic. You need to open a search engine, and put your topic in the search bar. The search engine will show you thousands of researches on the topic.
Linking the existing research to your thesis will come through extensive reading of those papers. And yes we know. It is impossible to read all the papers. Hence you should only look for the ones that relate to your research topic directly. Another technique to search for relevant sources is using the right keywords. Most search engines pick keywords quickly instead of the whole topic sentence. For example, the topic is “How to Link Existing Research Work in your Thesis.” Here the keyword is linking the existing research work. This is how you will move forward with your search.
2. Evaluate and Select the sources
As mentioned earlier, you cannot read all the papers. But one thing that you can do is reading the abstract of each paper. By reading the abstract or introduction, you will be able to find whether this paper is relevant to your research topic, or not. Rule out the irrelevant papers once you’ve finished reading, and download the relevant ones. This is how you can evaluate the sources that are relevant to your thesis.
When evaluating and selecting the sources, make sure that the sources are credible. Nowadays, a lot of research is being carried out worldwide without any check. Websites also allow the authors to publish without any check. But such sources or websites are not credible. This is why you need to be sure that the sources are credible while linking the existing research work.
3. Identify themes
The 3rd, and most important way is to identify the themes matching your thesis. To begin with the linking of existing knowledge, finding patterns is crucial. It is apparent that you can’t use another person’s research as a whole in order to create a link. You will take small sections and write them in your own words. As a researcher, you need to find some trends and themes in the selected papers. For example, methodology of the papers may match with the methods of your research. You also need to identify where the selected sources disagree. All these identifications, and mappings will help in linking the existing research efficiently.
4. Structure of linking
After selecting and identifying relevant sources, the process of linking starts. There are various approaches to linking the existing research work. A brief description of those approaches is as follows;
5. Chronological
It is the simplest structure of all. In chronological sequence, every source will come in its order. The order of sources can be based on different things—for example, alphabets, and date of publication. All the sources will follow an order. It is a chronological structure.
6. Thematic
The thematic approach of linking existing research to a thesis is based on themes. It enlists the sources of similar sections first. For example, five sources have the same topic. According to the thematic approach, when you discuss that topic, all the sources will come under it. This is how the thematic approach works.
7. Methodological
The following approach is methodological. In this approach of creating a link between literature and thesis, the author considers the methodology. All the sources that are having similar methodology come under one method. There could be further segregation in methods based on the qualitative, and quantitative domains as well.
8. Start Linking and Writing
Once you have performed all the steps mentioned above, it’s time to start creating the link. An important thing to note here is that all sources must be in accordance with the thesis. Regardless of the approach you used in linking the existing research work, it is now time to start writing. Linking and writing go side by side. Basically, most of the linking work has ended at step 4. Now only the aspect of writing remains.
Conclusion
After reading all the steps above, you will agree that linking existing research work to your thesis is not easy. It is more than simply listing, or describing a set of papers selected from the internet. It is more like discursive prose. This is why it’s usually not recommended to start each paragraph by naming the researcher. Hence while creating a link, you can also use author’s name between the paragraphs.
