No matter what kind of research, literature review is essential. Literature review plays a connecting role and is an important link in academic research and academic paper writing. Through literature review, we can understand the research status of related fields, determine the problems we want to study on the basis of previous studies, avoid unnecessary repetition and make innovations, and make our own contributions to the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Although literature review is very important, there are few management works that involve methodology and discuss how to write literature review articles. Moreover, the methodology courses in most schools rarely talk about this aspect. Therefore, we take the liberty to discuss with you some of our own experiences in writing management literature review articles. Most of what we say is immature and superficial, and it is inevitable to leave a leak. Please correct me.
The main readers of this paper should be management graduate students in universities and scientific research institutions. In fact, the embryonic form of this paper is the main opinions and suggestions we have drawn up to guide our graduate students to write literature review articles, many of which come from the guidance of teachers during our graduate study. We hope that our experience can be helpful to graduate students who are writing or will write literature review articles.
The structure of this paper is as follows: The second section briefly describes the purpose of literature review; The third section introduces six methods of literature retrieval; The fourth part is the interpretation of three levels of literary reading; The fifth section discusses the different structural arrangements of literature review articles; Section six puts forward five suggestions for graduate students to write literature review articles.
Second, the purpose of literature review
Any research is not produced out of thin air, but deepened from a certain aspect on the basis of previous research, which has certain inheritance. Therefore, literature review is the first step of research, aiming at understanding what predecessors have said, which actually determines what we can say. Specifically, we must be clear about the problems to be studied:
1. Has anyone said that?
To know whether the predecessors have said that the key is to carry out adequate literature retrieval. The appearance of Internet and the wide application of online database provide unprecedented convenience for document retrieval. At present, libraries of various universities and scientific research institutions have purchased very complete Chinese and English databases. As long as the database covers a reasonable range and is used properly, we can find almost all the documents we need without leaving home, saving the trouble of going to a big library for research in the last century. At present, Jstor, Science Direct and CN KI in domestic university libraries are all excellent online databases. If the results of literature retrieval show that others have done the research they intend to do, then there is no need to do inaction repetition, but we should adjust our thinking in time and change the research angle, focus or method.
2. What did the elder say?
. To know what our predecessors said, we must answer the following questions. First of all, what is the object or problem studied by predecessors (what), how did predecessors elaborate the research problem, and why (why); Then, what are the similarities and differences of previous viewpoints, whether these viewpoints can be classified, how to classify them, and what is the time and logical relationship between them. It is an important basis for our academic innovation to find out whether others have said it.
3. What did the elder say?
In the literature review, we should not only summarize the viewpoints, but also summarize the research methods (that is, what others say). The development and progress of methods will change the existing views in many ways. For example, the introduction of game theory research and analysis methods in industrial organization theory has changed many viewpoints generated under the SCP framework. With the increase of data acquisition methods and the improvement of acquisition technology, generally speaking, more and more research methods will be applied to a certain research object. Therefore, when we find that a certain kind of literature mainly adopts one or several research methods, but less other research methods, we should consider whether we can adopt other methods, especially newer research methods, and realize viewpoint innovation through method innovation.
4. Who said it, when and where.
This group of questions mainly reflects the influencing factors of the evolution process of related opinions, including the changes of opinions in different regions and periods. For example, on the whole, influenced by the socio-economic development stage and cultural differences, consumers in different countries and different periods will have great differences in their requirements for service quality, which will greatly affect their perception and satisfaction with service quality. In addition, understanding "who said that" also helps us to understand the emergence and development process of relevant viewpoints. For example, the "five-force model" of the school of strategic management research orientation was put forward by Porter in 1979. When we know that Porter is a Ph.D. jointly trained by Harvard Business School and Harvard Economics Department, we can better understand the inheritance relationship between this model and the SCP framework proposed by the older generation of Harvard economists.
In fact, in the process of literature review, if we can answer the above four questions, we can basically determine the innovation, main ideas and methods of the research or paper we want to write. It can be said that when the literature review is completed, more than half of the research work is completed, and the rest of the work such as questionnaire design, field investigation, data analysis and paper writing will come naturally.
Third, how to find representative literature
The first step of literature review is to find literature, that is, to collect materials to review. The common method is to directly access various databases (such as CNKI, Science Direct, Ebsco, Emerald), fill in the search term "article title, keywords, abstract" (such as "service quality and satisfaction" in Chinese database or "service quality and satisfaction" in English database), and then execute the search command. However, in the case of endless publications and numerous articles at home and abroad, we are likely to search hundreds or even thousands of related documents, so that we can't start reading and analyzing them. We suggest that we should first focus on collecting and reading representative documents, especially semi-papers that have a great influence on related research, and then collect and read less important documents. So, how to find representative literature? Tutoring is of course the simplest and most effective way. But sometimes, the topic we want to summarize is not the research field that the tutor is good at, and the tutor may not be able to provide the reading bibliography of the main literature. In this case, we suggest the following methods.
1. First find and read articles published in first-class journals.
Each discipline has its own periodical classification and ranking, and it is necessary to focus on the literature published by top journals. For example, the top English journals of management (the specific ranking may be different according to different evaluation criteria), Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of School of Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision-making Process, Journal of Strategic Management, and School of Management Review; The top management journals in China include Managing the World, China Soft Science, Foreign Economy and Management, Nankai Business Review and China Journal of Management Science.
2. Find authoritative textbooks and classic literature in a certain field they mentioned.
Generally speaking, most of the problems we study can be found in the corresponding chapters in the textbook. If you can find authoritative textbooks, you can find the documents cited by the authors of these textbooks from the corresponding chapters, which are often important documents for the development of related disciplines. If we can find the latest version of the textbook, the effect will be better.
3. Find the research results published by academic authorities.
Like other disciplines, there are several important academic authorities in various fields of management at home and abroad, such as "PZB" in the field of service quality management (that is, three famous scholars in the field of service quality research, Parasu Raman, Zesemer and Berry, who have published a large number of important original papers individually or jointly). The articles of these important scholars are often the seed papers we mentioned earlier. They have created a certain research field and influenced the development of related fields for a long time. Therefore, reading these authoritative academic documents in chronological order will be of great help to us to understand and analyze the evolution and development of academic research in related fields. If we can find and carefully read the summary articles written by these academic authorities on the development history of related research fields, we can more clearly understand the emergence and development process of different academic viewpoints in related fields.
4. Find the syllabus of research-oriented courses for famous teachers.
Research courses in famous universities at home and abroad (mainly referring to master's and doctoral programs, many of which are in the form of "seminars") will list important documents in various research fields for students to read and discuss. Of course, different teachers have different choices, and there will be some differences in the literature list. We can refer to the outlines of several courses with the same name to avoid bias.
5. Go to the library or look up the collection called Manual from the database.
Foreign publishing houses (such as Blackwell, John Wiley and Sons and Elsevier, which are famous for publishing academic journals and works) often call industry experts to write some papers that comprehensively reflect the development of the discipline. Such as Manual of Econometrics, Manual of Blackwell Strategic Management, Manual of Industrial Organization, etc. Most of these papers focus on summarizing the academic progress in a certain research field of this discipline, and the authors are all authorities in related research fields. Reading the papers in this kind of manual can quickly grasp the most important academic progress in related fields.
6. Use Google Academic.
At present, the Internet is playing an increasingly important role in academic research, which provides us with a lot of convenience. In addition to the official database, "Google Academic" in Google search engine is also a good helper to search for representative scholars and classic documents in a certain research field. Enter the keywords of relevant research objects in "Google Academic", and after executing the search command, the listed documents are sorted according to the cited times, and the importance of all relevant documents is clear at a glance. More importantly, we can also find all the papers that cite relevant literature through the links of search results, thus providing us with a good method to examine the relationship between academic development and literature in chronological order.
After comprehensively adopting the above methods, we can basically find all the representative documents. Next, we should look for more secondary documents. Although the citation rate and academic contribution of these documents are not too high, they can still deepen the relevant theoretical system to a certain extent, so it is necessary to explain their contributions in our literature review.
Finally, it must be pointed out that in the process of collecting literature, we will certainly find some ready-made summary articles similar to those we want to write. We can learn from the contents of these articles (the most important thing is the list of references in these articles) to shorten the process of collecting, understanding and reading the original documents, but we must not copy these ready-made summary articles opportunistically without looking at the original documents, which is the root cause of frequent mistakes at present and also violates the spirit of seeking truth and being pragmatic in academic research.