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The purpose of this study is to explore Master’s students’ literature reviews to better understand the literacies required for engaging in complexity in this genre and to inform graduate student pedagogy.

In this qualitative study, data were collected in the form of student literature review papers (23 drafts and 23 final versions) from students attending a research seminar course in an all-course Master’s program. All papers were analyzed for citations patterns, genre awareness and levels of complexity.

Results highlight the nature of complexity in this genre – that this complexity is underpinned by discursive issues such as “truth”, “claims” or “facts” that often mislead novice academic writers, and recognizing that knowledge contested in academic contexts is important to understanding and teaching students about complexity in writing.

One of the most challenging writing tasks graduate students face, is the literature review. Literature reviews require sophisticated conceptual maneuverings. Despite being analytical in nature, many students find it difficult to engage with the layers of complexity required in this genre. How do we make the complexity in literature reviews more visible and accessible? The argument in this paper is that understanding the nature of complexity in literature reviews can enhance writing processes and intentional explicit pedagogy.

This paper aims to report a study of researchers' preferences in selecting information from cited papers to include in a literature review, and the kinds of transformations and editing applied to the selected information.

This is a part of a larger project to develop an automatic summarization method that emulates human literature review writing behaviour. Research questions were: how are literature reviews written – where do authors select information from, what types of information do they select and how do they transform it? What is the relationship between styles of literature review (integrative and descriptive) and each of these variables (source sections, types of information and types of transformation)? The authors analysed the literature review sections of 20 articles from the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2001‐2008, to answer these questions. Referencing sentences were mapped to 279 source papers to determine the source sentences. The type of information selected, the sections of source papers where the information was taken from, and the types of editing changes made to include in the literature review were analyzed.

Integrative literature reviews contain more research result information and critique, and reference more information from the results and conclusion sections of the source papers. Descriptive literature reviews contain more research method information, and reference more information from the abstract and introduction sections. The most common kind of transformation is the high‐level summary, though descriptive literature reviews have more cut‐pasting, especially for information taken from the abstract. The types of editing – substitutions, insertions and deletions – applied to the source sentences are identified.

The results are useful in the teaching of literature review writing, and indicate ways for automatic summarization systems to emulate human literature review writing.

Though there have been several studies of abstracts and abstracting, there are few studies of literature reviews and literature review writing. Little is known about how writers select information from source papers, integrate it and present it in a literature review. This paper fills some of the gaps.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on information literacy and library instruction providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2016.

The paper provides information about each source, describes the characteristics of current scholarship and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

Practical and useful guidance is given to those undertaking management research; and advice is given on how to manage the practicalities of the research project. Particular emphasis is placed on applied and action research culminating in implementation of findings within an organisational setting. A description of the aims of management research is followed by advice on the selection of a research subject and the importance of the planning stage. Details of the processes involved in gathering the relevant information; its careful analysis; and the presentation of the findings in a readable, structured and coherent form are presented. Finally, suggestions on how to implement the research findings within an organisation are offered, as well as advice on the publication of results.

Management research is a discipline characterized by heterogeneity in viewpoints, the application of research to real-life problems in the organization and the multidisciplinary nature of research problems. The need for a good literature review is paramount in doctoral dissertations with a view to justifying research agendas and help interested scholars use synthesized organization of extant work. The paper aims to provide an overview of the types of review, pointers for effective review, evaluating sources of information, referencing the sources cited, and avoidance of plagiarism in writing literature reviews. The paper is intended to make doctoral scholars understand the importance of literature reviews, the organization and synthesis of ideas involved, and the rigor in detailing references and avoiding plagiarism to increase the quality of the finished output.

As librarians have developed a growing concern for fostering the information literacy of library users they have become increasingly involved in teaching many facets of information use. Completing a literature review forms one important context within which people learn to use information effectively, and within this process the need to be able to think critically about the relevance of information is very important. One of the problems that neophyte researchers face in the early stages of their research, is the need to interpret the possible “scope” or “coverage” of their literature review. This article describes eight ways of thinking about scope identified among beginning research students: topicality, comprehensiveness, breadth, exclusion, relevance, currency, availability, and authority. Some of these eight concerns reflect recognised information values. They also suggest strategic directions for librarians and other educators working with beginning researchers. These directions include the need to help students adopt psychological rather than topical views of relevance, and subjective rather than objective views of information. Such strategies are likely to reduce students’ emphasis on comprehensive coverage, and would encourage them to focus on establishing connections and meaning in relation to their own research.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an effective model for increasing professionals' competence, enthusiasm and success in writing and publishing.

Recent articles on writing groups in the field of library and information science are reviewed and a case study of a group at RMIT University Library is presented. The authors were the facilitator and group members who were librarians, most with relative inexperience in research, writing, presenting, and getting published. A self-rating confidence survey was created to establish developmental priorities which were then addressed through input from experts, practical application and reflection, and constructive advice and support from group members. Group effectiveness and outcomes were evaluated at mid- and end-point review meetings, through a post-intervention confidence survey and by tracking publication output.

The group became a cohesive, task-focused and productive team. A post-intervention confidence survey evidenced improvements on all survey items at a team level. Each member affirmed that they had gained substantial knowledge of writing, presentation and research techniques and understanding of the publication process. Publication output increased over the benchmark year of 2010, and in 2011 and 2012 exceeded initial targets.

The model presented offers a practical and effective approach to increasing competence and output in writing, presenting, research, and getting published and can be easily adopted by others.

Most literature reviews on library professional writing groups relate to professionals required to publish. The Get Published Group comprised Australian librarians writing voluntarily.

Literature reviews are essential tools for uncovering prevalent knowledge gaps, unifying fragmented bodies of scholarship, and taking stock of the cumulative evidence in a field of inquiry. Yet, successfully producing rigorous, coherent, thought-provoking, and practically relevant review articles represents an extremely complex and challenging endeavor. The purpose of this paper is to uncover the key requirements for expanding literature reviews’ reach within and across study domains and provide useful guidelines to prospective authors interested in generating this type of scientific output.

Drawing upon the authors’ own experience of producing literature reviews and a scrutiny of review papers in major management journals, the authors develop an end-to-end process of writing and publishing review articles of high potential impact.

The advanced process is broken down into two phases and seven sequential steps, each of them being described in terms of key actions, required skill sets, best practices, metrics of assessment and expected outcomes.

By tapping into the inherent complexity of review articles and demystifying the intricacies associated with pursuing this type of scientific research, the authors seek to inspire a wealth of new influential surveys of specialized literature.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the macro‐level discourse structure of literature reviews found in information science journal papers, and to identify different styles of literature review writing. Although there have been several studies of human abstracting, there are hardly any studies of how authors construct literature reviews.

This study is carried out in the context of a project to develop a summarization system to generate literature reviews automatically. A coding scheme was developed to annotate the high‐level organization of literature reviews, focusing on the types of information. Two sets of annotations were used to check inter‐coder reliability.

It was found that literature reviews are written in two distinctive styles, with different discourse structures. Descriptive literature reviews summarize individual papers/studies and provide more information on each study, such as research methods, results and interpretation. Integrative literature reviews provide fewer details of individual papers/studies, but focus on ideas and results extracted from these papers. They provide critical summaries of topics, and have a more complex structure of topics and sub‐topics. The reviewer's voice is also more dominant.

The coding scheme is useful for annotating the macro‐level discourse structure of literature reviews, and can be used for studying literature reviews in other fields. The basic characteristics of two styles of literature review writing are identified. The results have provided a foundation for further studies of literature reviews – to identify discourse relations and rhetorical functions employed in literature reviews, and their linguistic expressions.