Skip to main content

Reviewing Research Literature

From Locke et al. (1999) on reviewing the literature:
In writin a research proposal, the author is obligated to place the (research) question or hypothesis in the context of previous work in such a way as to explain and justify the decisions made. That alone is required. Nothing more is apprepriate, and nothing more should be attempted (page 68).
...sound proposals devote most of the literature review to explaining (a) exactly "how and why the research question or hypothesis was formulated in the proposed form" and (b) exactly "why the proposed research strategy was selected." What is required...is a step-by-step explanation of decisions, punctuated by reference to studies that support the ongoing argument (page 68).
...there is no place for the "Smith says this..." and "Jones says that..." paragraph-by-paragraph recital...This is the place to answer the reader's most immediate questions: What is it the author wants to know, and why has this plan been devised to find the answer? (page 69)
...the writer's task is to employ the research literature artfully to support and explain the choices made for this study, not to educate the reader concerning the state of science in the problem area. Neither is the purpose of the section to display the energy and thoroughness with which the author has pursued a comprehensive understanding of the literature (page 69).


Keywords: ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Thought on a Reasoner-enabled Version of Del.icio.us (and perhaps Technorati)

I have been adding more bookmarks to my del.icio.us account and have begun tagging them with RDF-like object/datatype properties. Adding more and more object/datatype properties to the bookmark, a provoking thought popped up: It would be nice if tagging can be assisted by ontologies and a logic reasoner. Look at del.icio.us/thitiv . The _hasAffilication:CUPhoto property should be a subproperty of _hasAffiliation:Chula (provided that CUPhoto stands for Chula Photo Club .) Also, aticles on 'tagging' are subclass of articles on 'metadata'. But articles on 'metadata' are not essentially the articles on 'tagging'. 'Friends' versus 'people' is also another example. Bookmarks about my friends are of course bookmarks about people. But not all the people I know or found on the Internet (through search engines) are my friends. Ontology-assisted tagging sounds promising to solve this problem. In principle, this problem is partly related to...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0 provider is not registered on the local machine" Error on Windows 7 (64-bit) + Office 2010 (64-bit) + Visual Studio 2010

If you use (1) Windows 7 (64-bit), and (2) Office 2010 (64-bit), and  (3) Visual Studio 2010 to write an ASP.NET code to connect to Access or Excel database using the Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0 provider and consistently get the "Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0 provider is not registered on the local machine" error, try installing the 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components , which is basically a Microsoft Access Database Engine 2007 Redistributable for Windows (32-bit) from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=23734 Many forums suggested by Google Search suggest installing the Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable for Windows (32-bit, 64-bit) downloadable from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=13255 but it wouldn't help because Visual Studio 2010 is a 32-bit application; what you need is a 32-bit Data Connectivity component. The 2010 download will not allow you to install i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tips: Mac OS X: Full ANSI Color Support in Terminal.app

I'm trying to switch my Java development platform from Windows XP to Mac OS X Tiger. Wondering how to colorize the Terminal screen, I spent some time googling. From the discussions at the end of this page: macosxhints.com - Add full ANSI color support to Terminal.app Here's a summary of how to enable it: With bash shell as default, simply add export TERM=xterm-color [I prefer this for Linux compatibility] or export TERM=dtterm in the ~/.profile (single-user) or /etc/profile (system-wide) Color terminal is enabled. Use ' ls -G ' (the -G enables color output) to test. Add alias ls='ls -G' in the profile file for convenience. Keywords: mac-os-x , unix , terminal , shell , tips
1 comment
Read more