A literature review is an evaluative report of information found in the literature related to the selected study area. Literature review represents a crucial component of every report or research paper (Jesson et al., 2011). “The higher the academic level of the research, the more important a thorough integration of the findings with existing literature becomes” (Kumar, 2011). Furthermore, project assessment criteria usually require to demonstrate awareness of the current state of knowledge in the subject, its limitations and how new research fits in this wider context (Gill and Johnson, 2010). However, using literature review have both pros and cons in any study, especially business research projects. Therefore, the first part of this report
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Specifically, the example study took the categories and elements described and used in studies by Guthrie et al. (2004) and Guthrie and Petty (2000a) to facilitate general comparative analysis of this study with other studies. Accordingly, IC is divided into 3 categories: internal structure, external structure and employee competence. Three coders used the Guthrie and Petty (2000a) definitions to identify and record the ICDs reported by large UK companies in their annual reports, then they reviewed, compared and discussed their results to amend those terms slightly to adapt to the UK context. For quantitative content analysis, the practice of counting instances of disclosure used by several prior ICD studies was also adopted in this research in order to strengthen the credibility. They reviewed the study of Thomson, 2007; Deegan and Rankin, 1996; Gray et al., 1995; Guthrie et al., 2004; Krippendorff, 2004 to utilize the same assumptions underlying quantitative content analysis. The volume or frequency of disclosure of a specific issue/ item indicates how important the writers of the report consider that issue/item to be. As a result, they conducted the above analysis across the 15 sample companies in UK across four broad sectors, 2676 ICDs were identified, coded and …show more content…
As Colquitt (2013) repeated, researchers need to link their work with what has already been said and recognize their “intellectual indebtedness”. In the article “Corporate reporting of intellectual capital: Evidence from UK companies”, the authors always tried to connect their findings to the previous studies by comparing the results. For instance, their examination on ICDs in UK companies of different sizes tended to find a size effect, where companies with bigger market capitalisations released more IC information than smaller companies. This size effect was consistent with previous findings of corporate reporting disclosure studies. Besides, the contrasting results were also indicated when the results were not consistent with Bozzolan et al. in respect of 2 in 3 categories, where they found internal capital made up 24% of ICDs (compared to 17% in this study) while human capital disclosures contributed 16% of total ICDs in their study (compared to 22% in this study). In a word, literature review enables the researchers to reveal their observation and assessment in study field as well as link the existing perceptions to their own research questions. From then, the writers can prove the reliability of their research and its contribution (Bryman & Bell,
Specifically, the example study took the categories and elements described and used in studies by Guthrie et al. (2004) and Guthrie and Petty (2000a) to facilitate general comparative analysis of this study with other studies. Accordingly, IC is divided into 3 categories: internal structure, external structure and employee competence. Three coders used the Guthrie and Petty (2000a) definitions to identify and record the ICDs reported by large UK companies in their annual reports, then they reviewed, compared and discussed their results to amend those terms slightly to adapt to the UK context. For quantitative content analysis, the practice of counting instances of disclosure used by several prior ICD studies was also adopted in this research in order to strengthen the credibility. They reviewed the study of Thomson, 2007; Deegan and Rankin, 1996; Gray et al., 1995; Guthrie et al., 2004; Krippendorff, 2004 to utilize the same assumptions underlying quantitative content analysis. The volume or frequency of disclosure of a specific issue/ item indicates how important the writers of the report consider that issue/item to be. As a result, they conducted the above analysis across the 15 sample companies in UK across four broad sectors, 2676 ICDs were identified, coded and …show more content…
As Colquitt (2013) repeated, researchers need to link their work with what has already been said and recognize their “intellectual indebtedness”. In the article “Corporate reporting of intellectual capital: Evidence from UK companies”, the authors always tried to connect their findings to the previous studies by comparing the results. For instance, their examination on ICDs in UK companies of different sizes tended to find a size effect, where companies with bigger market capitalisations released more IC information than smaller companies. This size effect was consistent with previous findings of corporate reporting disclosure studies. Besides, the contrasting results were also indicated when the results were not consistent with Bozzolan et al. in respect of 2 in 3 categories, where they found internal capital made up 24% of ICDs (compared to 17% in this study) while human capital disclosures contributed 16% of total ICDs in their study (compared to 22% in this study). In a word, literature review enables the researchers to reveal their observation and assessment in study field as well as link the existing perceptions to their own research questions. From then, the writers can prove the reliability of their research and its contribution (Bryman & Bell,