literature review

Despite the importance of author engagement in the literature review of academic articles, many writers fail to publish their academic articles due to being incompetent in using conventional engagement resources. In view of this problem, the present study aimed to study linguistic representation of engagement as a dimension of evaluation in academic articles published in international and Iranian local journals. To do so, the literature review section of eighty psychology and applied linguistics articles as representatives of humanities and mechanical engineering and medicine articles as representatives of hard science articles published between 2008 and 2017 in the international and Iranian local journals formed the corpus of the study and were analyzed on the basis of the engagement resources proposed by Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory The findings indicated that monoglossic resources were used more frequently in articles published in local journals than those published in international ones. Regarding heteroglossic resources, intra-vocalizing resources (countering, denial, pronouncement, and entertainment) were found more frequently in articles published in international journals. However, extra-vocalizing resources (endorsement and attribution resources) used in local journals outnumbered those used in international ones. The findings can provide insights for teaching academic writing in EFL contexts.

Financial assessment has been of great interest to both academic and practitioners in the past decades. Among several performance assessment approaches, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has become one of the crucial tools that have been commonly adopted to financially evaluate firms in various fields. The main aim of this review article is to review of DEA models in regarding to evaluation of the financial performance. This paper presents the first comprehensive and structured literature review of the use of DEA models for financially assessment. To this end, this paper reviewed and summarized the different models of DEA models that have been applied around the world to development of financial assessment problems. Consequently, a review of 455 published scholarly papers appearing in 160 journals between 1994 and 2021 have been obtained to achieve a comprehensive review of DEA application in financial efficiency. Accordingly, the selected articles have been categorized based on year of publication, authors, nationalities, scope of study, time duration, application area, study purpose, results, outcomes, etc. The discussion and the findings of this paper can be used as a guideline to analysts to determine the best fit financial assessment method when DEA evaluation is applied to any dataset. Future perspectives and challenges are discussed.

Considering the organizations’ increasing use of social media, many studies are being conducted in this area. Researchers are faced with a variety of research strategies depending on the nature of the research problem and data. If the right research strategy is not employed, the researcher will lose focus, and the time and effort spent will not necessarily serve the research objectives. When choosing a research strategy, the organization’s characteristics should be taken into consideration; otherwise, it may lead to confounding interpretations of the findings. In this regard, the present study aims to introduce an appropriate research strategy for each maturity stage of the organization under study. To this end, using systematic mapping methodology, about 256 articles published within 2011- 2021 were investigated, and the relationship between the types of research strategy used and the different stages of an organization’s maturity in using social media was reported. Specifically, by synthesizing the social sciences research methodology framework and the social media stage of the growth model, a mapping was developed between the research strategies and maturity stages. Based on this mapping, it is expected that the appropriate strategy for research at the first maturity stage is exploratory, and for the second and third stages are observational and descriptive, respectively. When the organization moves to the fourth and fifth levels, archival and causal strategies are recommended for research. Using the results of this research, researchers will be able to identify the right research strategy for the maturity stage of the organization under study and develop the appropriate research design accordingly.

In the world of language teaching, textbooks have a central role; therefore, they influence the entire process of learning/teaching languages. Having them analyzed and evaluated is vital for ensuring their efficiency and alignment with the goals of language classes. Reviewing the vision series textbook evaluation studies is the purpose of this paper. Due to the extensive use of this series in Iranian high schools, students' worldviews are inevitably affected by it. Students may also be lead wrongly by biased perspectives in high school textbooks. Since these textbooks are new and taught to every Iranian student, they need continuous evaluation and analysis to achieve their specified goals. While some studies have evaluated and analyzed these textbooks, a review of published articles in this field is still lacking. Throughout the literature, 24 research articles from the last 5 years are discussed. Generally, the study found that most teachers believe Vision text books have adhered to the guidelines of the CLT method and are an improvement over the old English language teaching books. Several revisions have also been suggested because they believe these books have cultural shortcomings and do not allow students to become familiar with the target culture. As a final point, some implications are presented regarding the evaluation of English textbooks in Iranian contexts.