The literature review statement

Fill in this document either in French or in English. The structure of you document may be
different from this one as long as you include all the pieces of information required below.
The length for this document must be around 25 pages. It will be a good foundation to draw
up the final master thesis.

1 Reminder of the research problem

1.1 What is the research problem you want to work on?

1.2 What are the research questions?

2 The Literature review

2.1 Conceptual Background
Write an overview of articles (academic research studies) that deal with your field and discuss
them:
o Draw an overview of previous research studies results.
o Discuss why such research studies are relevant to your study.
o Pinpoint the weaknesses of these studies.
o End up with a summary of the main aspects of the literature and explain what will be
your own contribution (to what extent your study is necessary given what has already
been done in the literature).

2.2. The hypotheses or propositions

o If you conduct an exploratory research, state the propositions issued from the literature
o If you conduct a formal study (descriptive or causal), specify the hypotheses you want
to test and propose a conceptual model.

For more details about exploratory research and formal study, see Cooper and Schindler
(2003): Chapter 6: design strategies p.144.

Bibliography
Only academic articles and books! You can find scientific papers on EBSCO.

-For Finance, Audit Control and IBES:

LEE, Nick with LINGS, Ian, (2008) Doing Business Research – a Guide to Theory and
Practice, Sage Publications Ltd, London.
-For Negotiation:
SEKARAN Uma with BOUGIE Roger (2013) Research Methods for Business A skill-
building approach, 6th Edition, Wiley-Blackwell.
-For Marketing:
Coussement K., Demoulin N. and Charry K. (2011), Marketing Research with SAS Enterprise
Guide, Gower.  
-For HR, GOP, MIS :
EASTERBY-SMITH Mark, THORPE Richard and JACKSON Paul (2012) Management
Research, 4th edition, Sage