10 October 2013
It is a common misconception that the primary goal of the literature review in the Introduction section of an original scientific article is to educate readers. Why readers will be somewhat educated about the main areas of your paper while reading the Introduction, having education as a primary purpose of the Introduction will almost necessarily mislead your readers. Here are the primary reasons:
If you are writing an original paper, the first task in a paper is to convince readers that the problem you will be addressing is indeed novel. The primary goal of the Introduction is to establish, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the topic is indeed novel. Put in another way, the primary goal of the literature review in the Introduction is to establish that the information gap addressed by the paper is a true gap.
The primary problem in focusing on education as the primary goal is that the literature will be unfocused. As a fictitious example, imagine that an author wants to write an original clinical research paper on the effect diabetes on mortality after appendectomy in elderly patients. If the author introduces a section in the Introduction talking about the molecular pathophysiology of diabetes, there will be at least two main problems from the readers' perspective.
First, readers will be distracted, since pathophysiology is not relevant to establish that no previous study has ever been conducted regarding the relationship between diabetes and clinical outcomes. Second, if the author does talk about the molecular pathophysiology of diabetes, readers will automatically assume that the article will focus on some basic science aspect of the problem. Since they will later on find that this is not the case, they will be frustrated.
If an author then decides that focusing on the gap is the way to go, how can you then conduct a literature review on a gap? In other words, how can you review the literature on something that you yourself claims is novels and therefore has not been done before?
The answer here is to review literature on the fringes of your gap, and then keep pointing to your gap to emphasize that the gap is indeed a gap. For example, if the proposed gap is the absence of literature on the relationship between diabetes and surgical outcomes after appendectomy in the elderly, then one strategy would be to review similar studies that are not in the elderly, emphasizing since the elderly have a different response to diabetes the results could be different. Other approaches could be to evaluate a narrow section of the literature of the impact of diabetes on post-operative outcomes or a review of other studies evaluating post appendectomy studies involving the elderly. After each of these, the author then emphasizes that, despiting knowing what is known in the field, the original gap has not been filled and, therefore, it is the objective of the current study.
by Ricardo Pietrobon
My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.