Literature review writing: how information is selected and transformed

Abstract

Purpose – 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.Design/methodology/approach – 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 s...