Writing Your Master's Thesis - Creating a Bibliography and Writing a Literature Review

Before you even start writing your actual master's thesis, you will need to compile a bibliography of all the research sources and materials that are relevant to your thesis topic. In addition, as part of your master's thesis, you will be required to write a literature review, which may be part of your thesis proposal or even part of your thesis itself depending on the preferences and standards followed by your academic department and your faculty advisors.

Prior to embarking on either one of these very important projects, it is vital to understand the difference between a bibliography and a literature review. A bibliography is simply a list of sources that you have consulted in the course of researching your master's thesis. In this context, "consulted" is defined very broadly. It doesn't matter whether you got a lot of information from a book or just a little. It doesn't even matter whether the information that you gleaned from a particular research source never even makes it into your thesis.

Any book or article that you looked at, even briefly, in the course of conducting research for your master thesis belongs in the bibliography. It doesn't matter whether you read the whole book or just skimmed a chapter, whether an article was helpful or added nothing to your understanding of your topic. When it comes to putting together a bibliography, you must err on the side of over-inclusiveness. Note that a bibliography is not the same as a "reference page" or a "works cited page" that you might include in a run-of-the-mill term paper. A bibliography for a master's thesis should include all relevant resources that you encountered while researching your topic, whether you actually cite them or not.

A literature review on the other hand is much more selective than a bibliography and much more difficult to put together. A bibliography, essentially, is just a list of books and articles put in standard citation form. You don't need to understand or appreciate or even to have read a source in order to include it in a bibliography. A literature review, on the other hand, is a written analysis and synthesis of the research sources that are most pertinent and helpful to your master's thesis topic. In your literature review, you will not simply list sources as you do in a bibliography.

Rather, you will discuss and analyze the importance of each source to the topic that you have chosen to write about. More than that, a well-written and well-constructed literature review does not simply list important sources and discuss their contributions to the field. In writing a literature review, you should be able to draw connections between the various sources that you discuss and analyze. In other words, it is vital that you explain for your reader how the points made and theories proposed in one research source build on or add to those found in another book or article. You should be able to identify and discuss trends and commonalities that appear in the works that you discuss in a literature review, as well as note any disagreements among scholars that are exemplified in these works.

A literature review should provide a brief history of the development of scholarship and academic theories in your chosen field, with emphasis on most recent discoveries, controversies, or proposals. After reading your literature review, your faculty advisors should come away completely informed about the state of research in your field as it stands today. With this understanding, the readers of your master thesis will be prepared to ascertain what your own research and writing has added to your chosen topic and judge the value of your work in advancing scholarship in your academic field.

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