literature review - PhD Thesis Writers

What is the best thesis writing advice for scholars?

January 8, 2018 Ananda Comments 1 comment

There is a glut of writing advice that is available for scholars, particularly that is related to thesis writing. The internet is flooded with books, blogs and articles that are getting circulated with writing advice and tips to allow them to handle the writing task easily. However, most of the available advice is repetitive and does not come of much help to the writer.

Some of the most common tips you would find available for your phd thesis writing:
1. You must write every day, right from the beginning of your PhD
2. Do not overthink while writing as this may come in the flow of your writing
3. Believe in doing work rather than doing perfect work, as improvisations can be done at a later stage
4. Take rewriting as an integral part of writing and not as a separate pressure or load.

You must surely not be oblivious to these tips being a PhD scholar but despite that all scholars, sometime or the other time, do encounter stressed phases in the process of thesis writing. The tips above are common and applicable to all but may not be effective for all, every time.

Writing is not a straight path. It is a process involving a lot of complexity and narrowing the thoughts down to a single statement advice is actual oversimplification of the complexity of the ordeal of writing.

Just trying to follow these tips blindly, I think would not work for the main reason that before following advice, you need to incorporate the skill for being able to apply these tips in a customised manner that could benefit you.You need to leave the simplification of the advice and the subtlety behind to be able to make it useful for you.

You would surely be reading advice from many corners and would come across theoretical models that claim to bring skill development, end of they though, it is your expertise that will determine the amount of efforts taken by you. As an amateur, a lot of concentration is wanted in all aspects related to writing but to a seasoned writer, the flow of writing comes more as a spontaneous action rather than a conscious effort.

Practice as a means to perfection isn’t just applicable to sports coaching but the flow is equally well in creative activities too because to come in the flow of doing things effortlessly, you must have high level of expertise. However, you being good at something doesn’t necessarily makes you a good advisor too. It is ultimately the writer who has to polish and surface out those skills to be able to adopt and adhere to the tips given by the advisors.

A supervisor’s account of reviewing literature review by candidates from different cultural backgrounds

August 23, 2016 Ankit rathi Comments 0 Comment

There is a whole lot of dilemma linked with being a supervisor to students from different cultures. It is understandable that these students must be feeling perplexed, lonely and confused in their Ph.D. journey. As a supervisor, with a humane touch one would want to do everything that is reasonable enough to help, but then there is always some ambiguity about the best way to help, and with so many responsibilities attached, a supervisor is always short of time and energy, both.

With varied experience in my kitty, and all that I have seen around, I feel that prospective supervisors should be given a choice to accept or not a student who belongs to a diverse cultural background. This holds all the more weight when one talks about semantic barriers, such as the scholar and supervisor not being comfortable on the grounds of language. In universities and institutes who have big monetary motives often don’t say no to applying scholars as they don’t consider these challenges significant in front of the money that is coming to them.

As a supervisor you much check in prior to accepting that whether you are in a position to offer support that needs to be given to the scholar. Sometimes, I have also had to face rudeness from the scholar who belonged to another culture. To be explained better, because of cultural differences, certain behaviour of the scholar seems unacceptable in our culture. For example, getting late for appointments, or looking into the eyes and talking. All these may be signs of normal behaviour in some culture but at the same time signalling rudeness or impoliteness in some. If you are facing anything such, you must do what I did. Explain to the scholar in a tactful manner the changes in the culture that need to be adopted certainly.

Yet another dilemma faced during handling cross cultural scholars is the correction of work and telling them their mistakes. The usage of appropriate words and vocabulary matching the standards of the culture are certain challenges that are difficult to comprehend by the scholar. One needs to devote a lot of time and energy on perpetual basis, trying to do this. This may sometimes make scholars believe it is actually a part of the supervisor’s job but that is not possible, and then further conflicts or differences may arise, which sometimes may get out of control.

Literature Review vs. Systematic Review

July 26, 2016 Shobhit Malik Comments 0 Comment

The literature existing for a specific topic can be summarized in either a systematic review or literature review. So, both these topics are easily confused, until one delves into the dynamics of both these systems. Even though they are used to fulfil a similar requirement, a literature review is significantly different from a systematic review.

A literature review involves the qualitative summarization of a topic, typically using informal or subjective methods to collate and interpret data. On the other hand, a systematic review involves high-level study of the primary research using a focused approach toward identification, selection, synthesis, and appraisal of all relevant questions involved in the research. From the definition itself, it is evident that the latter review format is more comprehensive as compared to the former.

Both these review systems are inherently different and require specific requirements for their appropriate use. Inappropriate use of either of them can defeat the purpose of the review system.

A systematic review system is appropriate in cases when a focused question requires a pertinent answer. This system is primarily used to remove any bias from the review. Such a review system can be used to answer a clearly defined clinical question. The components of a systematic review include a pre-specified eligibility criterion, systematic search strategy, assessment of the findings’ validity, interpretation and presentation of the results, and a reference list. The number of authors needs to be three or more. An average time required to complete a systematic review is 18 months, on average. The timeline usually goes into months and sometimes, into years. From the above, it is understandable that a thorough knowledge of the topic is required, and a comprehensive statistical analysis of the resources is needed to be done. Such a review system supports the techniques of evidence-based practice.

On the other hand, a literature review is fairly basic in comparison to a systematic review. It is basically a qualitative summary of evidences on a particular topic using informal/subjective methods of collation of data. It can be used to provide a summary or overview of a particular topic; the topic can be generic in nature or a specific query. The principal components of this review system are introduction, methods, discussion, conclusion, and bibliography. The number of authors can be one, or even more. Since it is not comprehensive in nature as compared to a systematic review, the timeline required to finish this review ranges in weeks to months. A comprehensive understanding of the topic under review is not required.

Writing a Critical Literature Review

April 27, 2016 Ankit rathi Comments 0 Comment

After numerous healthy discussions with my friends and fellow researchers, I still wasn’t clear about the idea of critical literature review. So, I decided to take help from the online resources and from my mentor. The knowledge I got, was surely helpful and I really want to share it with the PhD candidates who are still looking for the answers related to the critical literature review.

I would like to start this post by answering ‘what a critical literature review is?’

Okay, let me tell you that a critical literature review is an overview of published and unpublished resources which answer two basic questions:

What are the current theoretical issues, policies and debates related to your topic?
What is the current state of knowledge about these problems and issues?

You guys must be wondering what’s the requirement of a literature review?

I tell you, Literature Review is required:

As a way to frame and focus a research project
When research questions are formed without sustained reference to the literature.
Knowledge of the literature helps in tighten research question and enhance conceptual sensibility of the topic.
As a way to justify a research project to the readers.

Now, how should you start with a critical literature review?
You would start writing your literature review once your topic for research has been decided and objectives have been ascertained. Now according to the same, you must go about writing your literature review. You could follow this stepwise guide for achieving your goal of writing a high-caliber literature review:

Accumulating the literature you would like to review:

This step is basically for taking notes of two points:

Why you chose certain studies to review and reject the others and secondly, the years in which these studies were conducted. It is advisable to refer to the researchers that are closely related to your research topic and are conducted recently.

Analyzing the literature critically:

Be a Critique! Now, you should be able to briefly state the purpose and findings of each research study you are including in the review. Also, you should be able to point out the weakness and limitations of researches conducted. It will be helpful in analyzing the literature at an all-inclusive level. At a micro level, jot down the key contribution of researchers which is unique and value adding in nature. You should be able to address the relevance and exceptional researches conducted by the fellow researchers as it is the mark of a good scholar.

Summarizing the review:

There should be a draft of various research contributions you are going to extract from each research papers. Divide the research papers based on the similar findings and similar thought processes together. In this step, you should be able to identify and formulate the studies that disagree with each other’s, it would be helpful in building and highlighting the contrasting view point about research topic in review.

Give structure to your review:

It is easier to give a literature review a proper structure if you have a format in front of you. This will help in governing the flow of topic and from one paragraph or section to the other.

Start drafting the review:

After following g the above mentioned steps, you should be all set to begin with draft of your literature review. The literature review will link your research objectives with the findings of already conducted researchers and also address these studies that draw opposite conclusions as compared to yours.

I think, you are good to go now with the critical literature review. In case, you still have any query, feel free to get in touch with us by dropping us email at: info@phdthesiswriters.com

Does Every PhD Research Require a Conceptual Framework?

March 8, 2016 Kapila Comments 1 comment

A majority of reports indicates that over 89% of research candidates find it difficult to decide if their research requires a conceptual framework or not.

Are you fighting the same battle?
If yes, then this article will surely help you out!

The conceptual framework is an essential ingredient for your research. It provides a glance on researcher’s synthesis of literature on how to explain a phenomenon.

The requirement of a ‘Conceptual Framework’ depends on the type of research. But before explaining which research requires a conceptual framework, let me first tell you what purpose a conceptual framework fulfils:

It generates proper links from the literature to the questions and research goals.
It serves as a medium to keep research on track.
It provides a clear insight on the variable of a study.
It explains the concepts and proposes the relationships among the concepts.
It provides an organized structure for the research design and methods.
It guides the development & testing.
It represents the relationship of the developed hypothesis with central factors or key concepts.

Now, moving towards the purpose of this article, let’s see, which research requires a conceptual frame:

A conceptual framework is understood as an explanation of how a research candidate sees the different concepts and outcome of the study and its relation with each other. It can be an adoption used in a previous study with modification to suit the inquiry.

framework

A research can be categorised into two types mentioned below:

Exploratory Research: It is also known as formative research, its objective is to gather preliminary information that will help define problems and suggest hypothesis. It is conducted for a problem that has not been clearly defined. Exploratory research helps determine the research design, methods of data collection and conceptual framework.

Explanatory / Casual Research: Casual research is quantitative in nature. It is pre-planned and structured in design that’s why it is also known as conclusive research. It is different from exploratory research in terms of explaining cause and effect relationship between variables. Explanatory research shows the cause and effect relationship in terms of experiments and doesn’t require a conceptual framework.

There are two research methods for exploring the cause and effect relationship between variables:

Experimentation
Simulation

What if your research requires a conceptual framework?

Well, don’t worry; we have got your back.

But, what all do we require for developing a conceptual framework?

Below are the ingredients required for developing a conceptual framework:

Literature Review
Knowledge of specific research domain
Research Background
Personal Experience
Data

We understand that the conceptual framework is a prominent document for your research. Let’s discuss how to develop a conceptual framework.

Developing a Conceptual Framework:

concepual-framework

Identify Concepts:

Identify concepts from the literature review and provide a categorization among them. The concepts can be categorised as abstract or concrete.

An abstract concept is broad and may not be readily observable while the concrete or specific concepts are amenable to measurement.’

Define Variable:

Defining variable is the main function of a conceptual framework in a descriptive research. A variable is something that changes. The change in variable depends upon the various factors; some of the variables are like constant only (name of someone) while other change frequently (Value of Stock Exchange)

Operationalize Variables:

The operationalization of variables involves strictly defining variables into measurable elements. It defines fuzzy concept and allows them for empirical and quantitative measurement. To improve the robustness of research design and to increase the quality of the result, operationalization of variables sets down the exact definition of each variable.

Develop Propositions:

Develop the relational statement or propositions among the concepts. This helps in providing an idea for hypothesis development and testing.

Explore the relationship between variables:

Exploring the relationship among variable is an important part of developing a conceptual framework. Some research abstracts contain the variable of research and thus may serve the purpose.

Even though conceptual framework is the heart of a research, not every research requires a conceptual framework.

Do you require assistance in developing a conceptual framework? Then drop a mail at info@phdthesiswriters.com!

Tips to Choose Authentic PhD Thesis Writers

March 19, 2015 Tanuja Comments 0 Comment

PhD being a notable and highest degree of education deserves and also demands lots of remarkable and detail work. A research thesis consists of a long list of contents starting from study plan and winding up at appendices. It also includes many criticalities like data collection and its analysis, findings and its discussions, etc. Hence, presenting an absolutely equipped thesis becomes a tough nut to crack for pursuers.

Also, writing and presenting something unique and eye catching is a burning aspiration of all the researchers. In this aspect researcher’s wave for online data collection, journal studies, books and their practical revelation, but these sources are not sufficient enough for completion of thesis. Lagging behind is the researcher’s previous experience and expertise in the work. This holding nail can be thrown out by the help of some expert and PhD thesis writers. These PhD writers and experts can add some jewels to make your thesis magnificent enough for a handsome grade in your degree. So, let’s go through some small yet crucial tips to choose an authentic PhD thesis writer-

Your PhD thesis writer should preferably be from the same subject background so that he can have a good hand holding on the subject matter and steer you in an improved way.
Thesis writer should generate a unique and fresh work that definitely evades plagiarism. As, copying the work can cut down both your knowledge and grades also this is ethically not genuine.
Choose a writer who can be easily contacted and discuss the proceedings of work with you whenever required.
Never forget reviewing the past records, researcher’s feedback and sample paper works of the writers before finalizing them.

Thus, an eye on aforesaid points can assist you with an expert writer.

Design of Research Questions

May 23, 2014 Kapila Comments 0 Comment

Devoid of coming up with concrete research question(s), any research based study can never be started. Based on observational phenomenology, a broad research objective is formed, and then through epistemology and construct building, the research objective is boiled down to concrete research question(s). Unless those research questions are not specific and measurable, the research work can never be effective in all aspects. Specificity of the research question is required in order to keep the study focused. There are several organizations, which assist researchers in designing research questions for their studies. For more information about designing research questions, kindly go through the pages of www.phdthesiswriters.com.

Finding the most suitable thesis proposal writing services

February 17, 2014 Ananda Comments 0 Comment

While choosing the right thesis topic is the first step in your thesis writing project, it is equally important to convince your professors to give you a go ahead on the topic. It is therefore essential to find a suitable thesis writing service that helps you frame your proposal in a way that it gets approved at the first submission. Once your proposal is approved, you can move ahead in the process of your thesis writing and save a lot of time. At PhD Thesis Writers, we hire talent that is professionally well-equipped and knowledgeable to guide you through your proposal writing. So, once you come to us for support with proposals for your thesis, you can sit back and relax as our writers assist you in writing a proposal that is perfect for your research design.