A Comparison of Time Series Forecasting Methods
Literature review –
You should review the scholarly literature on your research topic by summarizing and analyzing published working a structured way. A literature review serves to analyze the state of research on a topic and should help you to identify research directions or gaps in knowledge.
The purpose is to further support your research questions and if possible to support a conceptual model or even to provide hypotheses. Writing a literature review section is not similar to throwing over a bookshelf and describing the documents in the order you find them. It is an organised summary of the most important literature in your area as well as a critical review of this literature. In the literature review section, you describe relevant existing literature regarding your research question(s) (i.e., the key research challenge that you want to address, main concepts and their relationships you want to study). The purpose is to further support your research question(s) and if possible to form research hypotheses.
One way to organise this section is to structure the literature from broad/generic to small/focused. It is very important to focus on the academic (not the professional!) literature that is directly relevant for your topic. Many students, however, start with a definition of the area of research (e.g., supply chain management, logistics, transport modality) and take too long to focus on the topic under consideration. Therefore, do not include general sections on topics or concepts that are not explicitly featured in your research question(s).
A literature review should give a focussed overview on the state-of-the-art of the problem you are investigating. Be brief and concise in what you describe and use summaries, tables, etc., as much as possible. Make sure to examine literature critically and draw your conclusions carefully! Document your approach. Be critical towards what you read, not everything is of equal quality or always true. If you find contrasting arguments, describe which one you prefer and why. Do not hesitate to discuss such differences in opinions in your thesis. Also pay attention to what is missing in literature.
If your research is explanatory (e.g. using surveys, archival data, experiments) you need to integrate hypotheses in the discussion as well as a conceptual model. If your research is exploratory, a conceptual model is needed that relates the core variables in your research. If your aim is to develop a model (simulation, analytical) your literature needs to identify what the requirements are of this model and how it adds to the existing models ad knowledge available already.
You are supposed to search the literature in a structured and systematic manner and to provide background on the research approach you used. In particular, you are supposed to conduct your literature review as described in D. Denyer and D. Tranfield (2009) “Chapter 39: producing a systematic review”, in Buchanan, D. and Bryman, A. (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods, Sage Publications Ltd, London, pp. 671-689. Therefore, you are supposed to provide the following background information on your literature review in an appendix of your thesis:
- Describe the search for literature (which keywords did you use, in which part of the paper did you search, in which journals did you search)2
- Describe which papers you got from this search, how you screened them (i.e. included/excluded them, how you searched/went through all the papers) and what the amount
of papers to be further investigated was. Summarize this in a figure.
- Describe which data you gathered from the papers and how you processed this data (per research question).