A LITERATURE REVIEW

A literature review is, therefore, generally conducted as a matter of course before beginning any new piece of academic research, because, as has been seen, a thorough review of the literature provides a comprehensive overview of what research has already been performed on the topic of interest, and on related topics, and because a thorough literature review can also provide valuable further information, including how other researchers have tackled similar research topics, in terms of what methodology they used and what analyses and conclusions were drawn from the literature they found and the results they gained (Hart, 2020). A literature review is not, therefore, simply a reviewof the existing literature on a subject, but is, rather, an evaluationof all the previous work that has gone before the current research topic, and an evaluation of the relationships between all of the previously completed works (Hart, 2020).

A thorough literature review therefore allows an evaluation of the relationship between the research question(s) that is/are being proposed and the existing body of research. This process, as has been seen, gives the researcher plenty of ideas with regards to how to develop their research question further, based on what has previously been attempted, and found, and what omissions there are in the previous literature (Hart, 2020). In this sense, therefore, reviewing the literature in this manner gives