St. Chamuel College, Inc.
College Department S.Y. 2025-2026
1st SEMESTER
Subject: RESEARCH METHODS
Course Level: BSCA 4 & BSAIS 4
Module 2
Content Standards: The learner demonstrates the understanding in the criteria in
selecting, citing, and synthesizing related literature and ethical standards in writing
related literature.
Performance Standards: The learner is able to select, cite, and synthesize properly
related literature, use sources according to ethical standards and present written review
of related literature.
Most Essential Learning Competencies: The learner selects relevant literature, cites
related literature using standard style (APA, MLA or Chicago Manual of Style),
synthesizes information from relevant literature, writes coherent review of literature,
follows ethical standards in writing related literature, and presents written review of
literature.
Introduction: A literature review is a comprehensive summary of previous research
on a topic. The literature review surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources
relevant to a particular area of research. The review should enumerate, describe,
summarize, objectively evaluate and clarify this previous research. It should give a
theoretical base for the research and help you
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(the author) determine the nature of your research. The literature review acknowledges
the work of previous researchers, and in so doing, assures the reader that your work
has been well conceived. It is assumed that by mentioning a previous work in the field
of study, that the author has read, evaluated, and assimilated that work into the work at
hand.
A theoretical framework can be thought of as a map or travel plan. It is
important to consider relevant theory underpinning the knowledge base of the
phenomenon to be researched.
1. What do I know about the phenomenon that I want to study?
2. What types of knowledge are available to me?
3. What theory will best guide my teaching practice?
4. Is this theory proven through theory-linked research?
5. What other theories are relevant to this practice?
6. How can I apply these theories and findings in practice?
LEARNING CONTENT:
MODULE 2: LEARNING FROM OTHERS AND REVIEWING THE LITERATURE
DEFINITION OF LITERATURE
Literature is an oral or written record of man’s significant experiences that are
artistically conveyed in a prosaic manner. Embodied in any literary work like essay,
novel, journal, story, or biography are man’s best thoughts and feelings about the world
(Ridley, 2012).
A review of related literature is an analysis of man’s written or spoken
knowledge of the world. In doing RRL, you deal with both formal or direct and informal
or indirect expressions of man’s knowledge. Fusing your world understanding with the
authors’ world perceptions enables you to get a good analysis of existing written works
that are related to your research study (Wallan, 2014).
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A literature review creates a "landscape" for the reader, giving her or him a full
understanding of the developments in the field. This landscape informs the reader that
the author has indeed assimilated all (or the vast majority of) previous, significant works
in the field into her or his research.
A literature review is an overview of the previously published works on a
specific topic. The term can refer to a full scholarly paper or a section of a scholarly
work such as a book, or an article.
In writing the literature review, the purpose is to convey to the reader what
knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and
weaknesses are. The literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (eg. your
research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative
thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries.
These are written works collectively, especially, those enduring importance,
exhibiting creative imagination and artistic skill which are written in a particular period,
language and subject. Any written materials published in book, journal, magazine,
novel, poetry, yearbook and encyclopedia are considered literature.
Rules for Writing a Literature Review
● Define the topic and audience.
● Search and re-search the literature.
● Take notes while reading.
● Choose the type of review you wish to write.
● Keep the review focused, but make it of broad interest.
● Be critical and consistent.
● Find a logical structure.
● Make use of feedback.
● Include your own relevant research.
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● Be up to date in your review of literature and studies.
What, Where and How to Find Information
● It is necessary that you list down all the important variables which you need in
your study and any theories which you think can generate your hypothesis and
those that can explain the relationships among your variables.
● After the variables are determined, the relationship between them posited and
either a preliminary hypothesis or investigative question stated, you continue
your search for information related to your problem being studied.
● Check the population you want to include in your study.
● Know how to write citations where you can include the author, the title, the
publisher and the date of publication, the volume number, the page number,
information about the study and the findings.
● Review and synthesize those findings that support or reject your hypothesis or
research questions.
● Use online computers for searching and retrieval of information.
● Synthesize the reviewed literature.
Types of Literature Reviews
1. Argumentative Review – This form examines literature selectively in order to
support or refute an argument, deeply imbedded assumption, or philosophical
problem already established in the literature. The purpose is to develop a body of
literature that establishes a contrarian viewpoint.
2. Integrative Review – It is a general review of the existing literature as a
'systematic' process. It usually involves both quantitative and qualitative studies -
hence 'integrative' (inclusive) - but is not always the case. Some people also call
it a systematic review.
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3. Historical Review – These are focused on examining research throughout a
period of time, often starting with the first time an issue, concept, theory,
phenomena emerged in the literature, then tracing its evolution within the
scholarship of a discipline.
4. Methodological Review – The methodological option is a way of structuring
your literature review by the research methodologies used. In other words,
organizing your discussion based on the angle from which each piece of
research was approached – for example, qualitative, quantitative or mixed
methodologies.
5. Systematic Review – It is a type of literature review that is focused on a
particular research question. Literature Review aims to review the existing
literature, identify the research gap, place the research study in relation to other
studies, to evaluate promising research methods, and to suggest further
research. Systematic reviews are a type of review that uses repeatable analytical
methods to collect secondary data and analyze it.
6. Theoretical Review – The theoretical literature review helps to establish what
theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what degree the
existing theories have been investigated, and to develop new hypotheses to be
tested.
Purposes of Review of Related Literature (RRL)
● To obtain background knowledge of your research
● To relate your study to the current condition or situation of the world
● To show the capacity of your research work to introduce new knowledge
● To expand, prove, or disprove the findings of previous research studies
● To increase your understanding of the underlying theories, principles, or
concepts of your research
● To explain technical terms involved in your research study
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● To highlight the significance of your work with the kind of evidence it
gathered to support the conclusion of your research
● To avoid repeating previous research studies
● To recommend the necessary of further research on a certain topic
Styles or Approaches of Review of Related Literature
1. Traditional Review of Literature
To do a review of literature in traditional way is to summarize present
forms of knowledge on a specific subject. Your aim here is to give an expanded
or new understanding of an existing work. Being necessarily descriptive,
interpretative, evaluative, and methodically unclear and uncertain, a traditional
review is prone to your subjectivity. This kind of review does not require you to
describe your method of reviewing literature but expects you to state your
intentions in conducting the review and to name the sources of information.
Traditional review is of different types that are as follows:
● Conceptual Review – analysis of concepts or ideas to give meaning to
some national or world issues.
● Critical Review – focuses on theories or hypotheses and examines
meanings and results of their application to situations.
● State-of-the-Art Review – makes the researcher deal with the latest
research studies on the subject.
● Expert Review – encourages a well-known expert to do the RRL because
of the influence of a certain ideology, paradigm, or belief on him/her.
● Scoping review – prepares a situation for a future research work in the
form of project making about community development, government
policies and health services, among others.
2. Systematic Review of Literature
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As indicated by its name, systematic, which means methodical, is a style
of RRL that involves sequential acts of review of related literature. It is a rigorous
way of obtaining data from written works. It is a bias-free style that every
researcher wanting to be a research expert should experience as it requires you
to go through the following steps:
● Have a clear understanding of the research questions.
● Plan your manner of obtaining the data.
● Do the literature search.
● Determine which data, studies or sources of knowledge are valuable or
not.
● Determine the methodological soundness of the research studies.
● Summarize what you have gathered from various sources of data.
The following table shows the way several books on RRL compare and contrast the
two styles of RRL.
Standards Traditional Review Systematic Review
Purpose To have a thorough and To meet a certain objective
clear based
understanding of the field on specific research questions
Scope Comprehensive, wide picture Restricted focus
Review Design Indefinite plan, permits Viewable process and paper
creative trail
and exploratory plan
Choice of Studies Purposeful selection by the Prepared standards for
studies
reviewer
selection
Nature of Studies Inquiry-based techniques Wide and thorough search for
all
involving several studies
studies
Quality Appraisal Reviewers’ views Assessment checklists
Summary Narrative Graphical and short summary
answers
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DEFINITION OF STUDIES
Related studies refers to theses, dissertation and research studied substantially
characterized by the presence of the following part: research problems, hypotheses,
objectives, related literature, methodology, findings, conclusions and recommendations
and bibliography. These are published and unpublished research studies such as
thesis, dissertation, and research proceedings are sources of materials that are
included in this section.
FUNCTIONS OF REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND STUDIES
● To provide justification of the study
● To identify gaps, problems and needs of related studies
● To provide rationale of the study as well as the reasons of conducting the study
● To have basis that will be used to support the findings of the study
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MATERIALS CITED
● The materials must be as recent as possible, may be 10 years back.
● Materials must be as objective and unbiased as possible.
● Materials must be relevant to the study.
● Coherence principle must be observed in writing literature review.
CITATION STYLES
A citation style is a set of rules on how to cite sources in academic writing.
Whenever you refer to someone else’s work, a citation is required to avoid plagiarism.
Citation style guidelines are often published in an official handbook containing
explanations, examples, and instructions. The most common citation styles are the
following:
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1. APA (American Psychological Association) – is an author/date-based style.
This means emphasis is placed on the author and the date of a piece of work to
uniquely identify it. APA style (also known as APA format) is a writing style and
format for academic documents such as scholarly journal articles and books. It is
commonly used for citing sources within the field of behavioral and social
sciences.
Example:
Singh, A. A., Hwahng, S. J., Chang, S. C., & White, B. (2017). Affirmative
counseling with trans/gender-variant people of color. In A. Singh & L. M. Dickey
(Eds.), Affirmative counseling and psychological practice with transgender and
gender nonconforming clients (pp. 41–68). American
Psychological Association. [Link]
003
2. MLA (Modern Language Association) – It is arguably the most well used of all
the citation styles. MLA (Modern Language Association) style is most commonly
used in USA to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and
humanities. This resource, updated to reflect the MLA Handbook (8th ed.), offers
examples for the general format of MLA research papers, in-text citations,
endnotes/footnotes, and the Works Cited page.
Example:
Derwing, Tracey M., et al. "Teaching Native Speakers to Listen to Foreign-
accented Speech." Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 23,
no. 4, 2002, pp. 245-259.
3. Harvard – is very similar to APA. Where APA is primarily used in the USA,
Harvard referencing is the most well used referencing style in the UK and
Australia, and is encouraged for use with the humanities. The Harvard citation
style is a system that students, writers and researchers can use to incorporate
other people’s quotes, findings and ideas into their work in order to support and
validate their conclusions without breaching any intellectual property laws.
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Example:
1 author (Smith, 2014)
2 authors (Smith and Jones, 2014)
3 authors (Smith, Jones and Davies,
2014) 4+ authors (Smith et al.,
2014)
4. Vancouver – is mainly used in medical and scientific papers. The Vancouver
citation style is a citation style used in the fields of biomedicine, health, and
physical sciences. It is used to correctly attribute the authors of work cited within
your paper. The Vancouver style uses numbers within the article body that refer
to formatted citations in the reference list at the end of the paper.
Example:
Kanneganti P, Harris JD, Brophy RH, Carey JL, Lattermann C, Flanigan DC. The
effect of smoking on ligament and cartilage surgery in the knee: a systematic
review. Am J Sports Med [Internet]. 2012 Dec [cited 2019 Feb 19];40(12):2872-8.
Available from: [Link] doi:
10.1177/0363546512458223
5. Chicago and Turabian – are two separate styles but are very similar, just like
Harvard and APA. These are widely used for history and economics. Chicago
and Turabian style both offer a choice between two citation styles: notes and
bibliography, and author-date: In notes and bibliography style, citations appear in
footnotes or endnotes, with a bibliography at the end listing all your sources in
full. This style is popular in the humanities.
Example:
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ETHICAL PRACTICE
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Ethical writing is clear, accurate, fair and honest.
● Obtained informed consent from participants.
● There should be no pressure on individuals to participate.
● Respect individual autonomy.
● Avoid causing harm.
● Maintain anonymity and confidentiality.
● Take particular care in research with vulnerable groups.
Plagiarism – It is the most widely recognized and one of the most serious violations of
the contract between the reader and the writer. It is the using of someone else’s words
or ideas, and passing them off as your own.
TWENTY-FIVE ETHICAL GUIDELINES
1. An ethical writer always acknowledges the contributions of others and the source
of his/her ideas.
2. Any verbatim text taken from another author must be enclosed in quotation marks.
3. We must always acknowledge every source that we use in our writing; whether
we paraphrase it, summarize it, or enclose it in quotations.
4. When we summarize, we condense, in our own words, a substantial amount of
material into a short paragraph or perhaps even into a sentence.
5. Whether we are paraphrasing or summarizing, we must always identify the
source of the information.
6. When paraphrasing and/or summarizing others’ work we must reproduce the
exact meaning of the other authors’ ideas or facts using our words and sentence
structure.
7. In order to make substantial modifications to the original text that result in a
proper paraphrase, the author must have a thorough understanding of the ideas
and terminology being used.
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8. A responsible writer has an ethical responsibility to readers, and to the author/s
from whom s/he is borrowing, to respect other’s ideas and words, to credit those
from whom we borrow, and whenever possible, to use one’s own words when
paraphrasing.
9. When in doubt as to whether a concept or fact is common knowledge, provide a
citation.
10. Authors who submit a manuscript for publication containing data, reviews,
conclusions, etc. that have already been disseminated in some significant
manner must clearly indicate to the editors and readers the nature of previous
dissemination.
11. If the results of a single complex study are best presented as a “cohesive” single
whole, they should not be partitioned into individual papers.
12. Because some instances of plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and even some writing
practices that might otherwise be acceptable can constitute copyright
infringement, authors are strongly encouraged to become familiar with basic
elements of copyright law.
13. Authors are urged to adhere to the spirit of ethical writing and avoid reusing their
own previously published text, unless it is done in a manner consistent with
standard scholarly conventions.
14. Authors are strongly urged to double-check their citations.
15. The references used in a paper should only be those that are directly related to
its contents.
16. Authors should follow a simple rule: Strive to obtain the actual published paper.
17. Generally, when describing others’ work, do not rely on a secondary summary of
that work.
18. If an author must rely on a secondary source to describe the contents of a
primary source, s/he should consult writing manuals used in his/her discipline to
follow the proper convention to do so.
19. When borrowing heavily from a source, authors should always craft their writing
in a way that makes clear to readers, which ideas are their own and which are
derived from the source being consulted.
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20. When appropriate, authors have an ethical responsibility to report evidence
that runs contrary to their point of view.
21. Authors have an ethical obligation to report all aspects of the study that may
impact the independent replicability of their research.
22. Researchers have an ethical responsibility to report the results of their studies
according to their a priori plans.
23. Only those individuals who have made substantive contributions to a project
merit authorship in a paper.
24. Faculty-student collaborations should follow the same criteria to establish
authorship.
25. Academic or professional ghost authorship in the sciences is ethically unacceptable.
PROTECTING THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
Intellectual property or IP refers to any work or creation of a person, to which he
is entitled to or possess rights, as it is a product of his intellect. Intellectual properties
include but are not limited to inventions, literary pieces, graphic designs, logos, taglines,
and symbols normally used for commercial purposes.
Today, IPs are considered one of the most significant assets any business can
ever have. Intellectual properties are a product of a human’s intelligence and creativity,
and should this serve any purpose in a particular industry or organization, then it should
rightfully be protected by law. Since most, if not all, IPs are intangible, there really is a
need for all of these creations to be guarded and preserved by the law. This is to ensure
that the masterminds behind this intelligence or invention are given due credit and
recognition for their work.
Republic Act No. 8293
RA 8293 is also known as the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, which
governs and protects all intellectual properties within the Philippines. Basically, the
whole act or law states that the Philippines will be administering, preserving, and
protecting specific
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intellectual property rights. With that, a separate Intellectual Property Office was
established to administer and implement the State policies declared in this act.
Section 4. Definitions. – 4.1. The term “intellectual property rights” consists of:
a) Copyright and Related Rights;
b) Trademarks and Service Marks;
c) Geographic Indications;
d) Industrial Designs;
e) Patents;
f) Layout-Designs (Topographies) of Integrated Circuits; and
g) Protection of Undisclosed Information (n, TRIPS)
It is enshrined in the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, officially known
as Republic Act No. 8293. Under Philippine law, original intellectual creations in the
literary and artistic domain are copyrightable.
All these intellectual properties have differing benefits–commercial, industrial, or
economic–to the state, that is why the government of the Philippines strives to grant
security and protection over such assets. Aside from governing these IP bodies, it also
helps encourage more businesses and individuals to continue producing intellectual
properties, which can be a great advantage of the state when it comes to globalization.
Wrap Up
The RRL (review of related literature) is an overview of pre-existing literature
which holds a relation to the topic of an individual’s research, thesis, or dissertation
topic. Moreover, through an RRL, researchers can identify potentially better topics
through an excess of already available studies.
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The literature and studies cited in this chapter tackle the different concept,
understanding, and ideas, generalization or conclusions and different development
related to study of the enrollment from the past up to the present and which serves as
the researchers guide in developing the project.
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