What Is Literature Survey?

Literature survey is the documentation of a comprehensive review of the published and unpublished work from secondary sources data in the areas of specific interest to the researcher. The library is a rich storage base for secondary data and researchers used to spend several weeks and sometimes months going through books, journals, newspapers, magazines, conference proceedings, doctoral dissertations, master's theses, government publications and financial reports to find information on their research topic. With computerized databases now readily available and accessible the literature search is much speedier and easier and can be done without entering the portals of a library building.

The researcher could start the literature survey even as the information from the unstructured and structured interviews is being gathered. Reviewing the literature on the topic area at this time helps the researcher to focus further interviews more meaningfully on certain aspects found to be important is the published studies even if these had not surfaced during the earlier questioning. So the literature survey is important for gathering the secondary data for the research which might be proved very helpful in the research.  The literature survey can be conducted for several reasons. The literature review can be in any area of the business.

Difference between literature survey and annotated bibliography

Survey of our literature