How to- the literature review 1/2- find a good literature review

Hello everyone and welcome to our next sequence on delimiting your scientific paper. My name is Alexander and today we will talk about what the literature review is all about. The subject will be made in two videos. First things first, we have to know the objectives of the literary review especially in an academic paper. Let’s begin with the definition of what we’re doing, a sentence, when we are doing a literary review. When we begin a research work, a research question drives us. Which the purpose of expanding human understanding. Philosopher defined the understanding as the frontier between knowledge and non-knowledge. A scientific problem arises only on this frontier between what is known and what is unknown. Therefore if your scientific problem is before the frontier then you’re looking for something already found. If you’re looking too far, too deep in the non-knowledge part, you might get lost. Let’s say you’ve got your research question. First you know nothing, young researcher fellow. You need to learn what has already been done in your field and then get closer to the frontier of knowledge. It’s not that easy to delimit this frontier and to position yourself on it. Science is always in motion. Theories get proven, as others get debunked. You have to take this into account when building your literature review. This fact explain the necessary critical dimension of the literature review and why the frontier between knowledge and non-knowledge is always moving. To sum up, the work on the literature review could be pictured by the analogy made famous by Isaac Newton. If I ascend further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. During our research, we need to climb the mountain of accumulated knowledge. And when we are at the level of the giant’s head, well, we could be by the apparent lack of the originality of our work. But this is when we know how we can contribute to academic knowledge. It is by standing up, that we see further than the giants, and then increase the men of knowledge. Now, you also have to be pragmatical. Establishing the literature review is a way for you to specify why and how your work is original, by moving the knowledge frontier. Originality may cover several aspects, including leading new empirical work, also interpreting known ideas in a new way, giving new data to old problems, but also translating results from one technique or context to another. Reading trans-disciplinary research or even producing original sentences or even finding a new field of research. Well, that’s it for the what and why of the literature review. Thanks for watching and see you soon. Don’t miss the next part where we present the different tools for collecting references and building your own literature review.