Why literature Survey is important in Research?

Doing a literature survey before you begin your investigation enables you to take advantage of the unique human capacity to pass on detailed written information from one generation to another. Reading all the knowledge that's accumulated so far on the problem you want to study can be time-consuming and even tedious. But careful evaluation of that material helps make your investigation worthwhile by alerting you to knowledge already gained and the problems already encountered in your areas of interest.

A literature survey amounts to reading available material on a given topic, analyzing and organizing findings, and producing a summary. There are many sources for literature reviews, including journals of general interest in each discipline, such as the American Political Science Review. There are also journals for specific topics such as the Leadership and Organization Development Journal. Governments publish great quantities of data on many topics. The United Nations and the United States Government Printing Office are two major sources. In addition, businesses and private organizations gather and publish information you might find useful. For certain problems you may want to search through popular or non-scholarly periodicals as well. While it's customary to include only data from sources that actually research the problem in a precise fashion, articles in more popular sources may provide interesting insight or orientations. Talking to knowledgeable people may also give you information that helps you formulate your problem. 

Thoroughness is the key. Most libraries have staff trained in information retrieval that can help find sources and suggest strategies to review the literature. The Internet, of course, now allows easy access to limitless information on given topics. Thoroughness in your review means not only finding all current publications on a topic but locating earlier writing as well. There's no easy rule for how long ago literature was published on your topic. The time varies from problem to problem. A useful way to locate past as well as current writing is to begin with the most current sources likely to contain relevant material. Then, follow these authors' footnotes and bibliographies. At some point in this search you'll find the material is beginning to be only peripherally related to your current interest or that author’s claim originality in their work. 

Of course, doing a good literature survey is easier when you know a great deal about the subject already. In such a case you'd probably be familiar with publications and even other people who do research in your area of interest. But for the novice, efficient use of library/Internet services and organizing how they check sources are especially important skills. 

Having located literature, keeping a checklist of useful information will help you read each source. You might ask yourself, particularly for research articles:

1. What was the exact problem studied?
2. How were the topics of interest defined?
3. What did the authors expect to find?
4. How were things measured?
5. What research did this author cite? Have you read it?
6. Who were the subjects of study?
7. What do the results show?
8. Do the data presented agree with the written conclusions?
9. What were the limitations of the study? 

A thorough literature survey should demonstrate that you've carefully read and evaluated each article or book. Because research reports can be tedious and difficult to understand for new researchers, many tend to read others' conclusions or summaries and take the author's word that the data actually support the conclusions. Careful reading of both tables and text for a while will convince you they don't always agree. Sometimes data are grossly misinterpreted in the text, but on other occasions authors are more subtle. Consider, for example, the following statements: 

Fully 30 percent of the sample said they did not vote. Only 30 percent of the sample said they did not vote. 

The percentage is the same, but the impression conveyed is decidedly different. Reading the actual data before accepting the author's conclusions will help prevent some of these errors of interpretation from creeping into your own research.

It's important that after you finish your reading, you're able to write your literature survey in a way that's clear, organizing what you know about the content and methods used to study your problem. You may find it helpful to record information about each source on a separate card or piece of paper so that information can later be reshuffled, compared, and otherwise reorganized. Note in most journal articles that what probably began as a long literature survey is usually condensed on the first few pages of the research report, explaining previous research on the problem and how the current study will contribute. You, too, want to add to this growing body of knowledge we call social science by a creative summary of what's been accomplished by others as well as by your own research.