What is a literature review?
A Literature Review is an examination of academic sources on a particular subject. It gives you a broad overview of the state of the field, enabling you to spot relevant concepts, methods, and gaps in the literature that you may then use to inform your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic.
A literature Review is written in five steps, which are as follows:
- Look up relevant writings
- Analyze the sources
- Determine the themes, arguments, and gaps.
- Explain the architecture
- Write a review of the literature.
In order to provide a comprehensive picture of the state of knowledge on the topic, a good literature review does more than simply describe the sources; it also analyzes, synthesizes, and critically assesses them.
Importance of Literature Review
To place your research inside the body of knowledge, you’ll probably need to do a literature review when writing a thesis, dissertation, or research paper. Using the literature review, you can:
- Show that you are knowledgeable about the subject and the scholarly background.
- Create a theoretical framework and a research methodology.
- Consider how your work compares to those of other scholars and theorists.
- Show how your research fills a gap or advances a discussion.
- Analyze the research’s current state and show that you are knowledgeable about the scholarly discussions surrounding your chosen issue.
If you want to apply to graduate school or pursue a career in research, being able to write literature reviews is a skill that you should really work on developing. We’ve created a detailed guide on how to write your literature review:
Step 1: Look up Relevant Literature
You need to have a specific topic in mind before looking for literature. You will look for literature that is relevant to your research problem and questions if you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper.
Create a keyword list.
Make a list of keywords associated with your research question to start. Include all of the major ideas or factors that interest you, as well as any related terms and synonyms. As you uncover new keywords during your literature search, you can add to this list.
Examples of your keywords may include (depending on your research topic); Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok Generation Z, teenagers, young adults, and youth: body image, self-perception, self-esteem, and mental health.
See example of literature reviews writing here
Search for relevant sources
Scribbr.com gave a list of source from which you can use your keywords to begin searching from. Some of the useful databases to search for journals and articles include:
- Your university’s library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)
You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.
Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
Step 2: Select and evaluate sources
Since it’s unlikely that you’ll have time to read everything that has been written on your subject, you’ll need to decide which sources are most important to your research question.
- For each publication, consider the following:
- What question or issue is the author working to address?
- What are the main ideas and what do they entail?
- What are the main concepts, theories, and approaches?
- Does the study employ tested frameworks or adopt a unique concept?
- What are the study’s findings and recommendations?
- How does the book compare to other works in the field? Does it support, help boost, or disprove previously held beliefs?
- What are the research’s benefits and drawbacks?
Take notes and cite your sources
It is advisable to start writing as you read. Make notes that you can use to support your literature review later on.
To prevent plagiarism, it’s crucial to keep track of your sources with citations. Making a reference list, where you gather complete citation details and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source, can be beneficial.
By doing so, you can remember what you read more easily and expedite the process later.
Step 3: Locate themes, controversies, and gaps in the information.
Make sure you comprehend the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read before you start organizing the argument and structure of your literature review. You can look for: based on your reading and notes.
Trends and patterns (in theory, method, or outcomes): Do some methods gain or lose favor over time?
Themes: What issues or ideas appear repeatedly in the literature?
Where are there disputes, conflicts, and contradictions between the sources?
Important publications: Have any theories or studies had a significant impact on the field’s course?
What are the gaps in the literature? Are there any areas that require improvement?
This step will assist you in determining the format of your literature review and, if necessary, demonstrate how your own research will advance our understanding of the subject.
Step 4 – Outline your literature review’s structure
The body of a literature review can be organized in a number of ways. You can combine several of these techniques, depending on how long your literature review is (for instance, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest strategy is to chart the topic’s evolution over time. If you decide to use this approach, be careful not to just list and summarize the sources in order.
Analyze trends, defining moments, and significant discussions that have influenced the field’s course. Give your explanation of the how and why of specific developments.
Thematic
Your literature evaluation can be divided into subsections that focus on various facets of the subject if you have identified certain recurrent primary themes.
Key issues, for instance, would be healthcare policy, language difficulties, cultural views, legal status, and economic access if you are analyzing literature about disparities in migrant health outcomes.
Methodological
You may want to compare the findings and recommendations that result from various strategies if your sources are from several disciplines or fields that employ a range of research methodologies. For instance:
- Compare the findings of qualitative and quantitative research.
- Compare and contrast empirical and theoretical research on the subject.
- Sort the literature into sources from sociology, history, and culture.
Theoretical
A theoretical framework frequently starts with a review of the literature. It can be used to talk about different theories, models, and definitions of important concepts.
To develop a framework for your research, you might make an argument for the applicability of a particular theoretical approach or combine different theoretical ideas.
Step 5 – Write your literature review
Your literature review ought to be organized into an introduction, a body, and a conclusion just like any other academic paper. Depending on the goal of your literature review, you should decide what to include in each.
Introduction
The focus and purpose of the literature review should be stated in the introduction with clarity.
Body
You might want to break up the body of your essay into subsections, depending on how long your literature review is. Each theme, time frame, or methodological strategy can have its own subheading.
As you write, you can follow these tips:
Give an overview of the key points of each source and combine them into a logical whole by summarizing and synthesizing.
Interpret and analyze: Don’t just repeat what other researchers have said; where you can, add your own interpretations and discuss the significance of the results in light of the body of literature.
Analyze critically, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of your sources.
Create paragraphs that flow naturally: To make connections, comparisons, and contrasts, use transitional words and topic sentences.
Conclusion
You should highlight the significance of the major discoveries you have drawn from the literature in the conclusion. Make sure to illustrate how your research helps fill in knowledge gaps and adds to it, or explain how you drew on existing theories and methodologies to create a framework for your research.
