How to Write a Literature Review
Books, Guides and other Useful Resources
Succeeding with Your Literature ReviewPublication Date: 2012
Literature Reviews Made EasyPublication Date: 2010
- Writing a Literature Review: Six Steps to Get You from Start to FinishIf you are new to the process of synthesizing information from what can seem like a massive amount of "literature," these suggestions from a UC Merced Sociology professor can help you tackle the project.
Skills Needed
When conducting a literature review a researcher must have three quite distinct skills. He or she must be
- adept at searching online databases and print indexes.
- able to evaluate critically what has been read.
- able to incorporate the selected readings into a coherent, integrated, meaningful account.
Credits
Portions of this LibGuide have been borrowed from LibGuides at the following colleges and universities:
What is a literature review?
A literature review surveys published information (books, scholarly articles, and other documents) relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory. The "literature" of a literature review refers to any collection of materials on a topic.
Sometimes a literature review is a brief summary of those sources, but more commonly it is a summary and a synthesis. A synthesis can be a reorganization of the information to provide a new interpretation, make comparisons between old and new information, or track the intellectual progression of an idea or concept. A literature review can also provide an evaluation of the sources in order to advise readers on their relevance or importance.
Here are a few types of Literature Reviews often used in undergraduate research:
- Narrative Review: Describes what related research has already been conducted and how that research informs the thesis of the paper
- Critical Review: Provides a more detailed examination of the literature that compares and evaluates a number of perspectives.
- Conceptual Review: Groups literature according to concepts, or categories, or themes in order to provide a snapshot of where things are with a particular field of research.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
Generally speaking, a literature provides an overview of the significant literature published on a topic. For researchers of all levels and disciplines, a literature review can:
- Set up the starting point for research by summarizing, comparing, and evaluating existing sources in the area of interest.
- Help understand the direction of the further research and areas worth focusing on.
- Provide access to the most important information on a certain topic by picking out sources that are valid, meaningful, and relevant, summarizing them and turning them into a single concise report.
- Help researchers not to duplicate work that has been done before.
- Provide a detailed analysis of methods used in other researches.
- Identify gaps and contradictions in existing sources and highlight the most important findings.
- Identify current research in the field.
Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers.
Examples of Literature Reviews
- Example: Writing a Short Literature Review from CUNYThis is an excellent example of an APA literature review from how a student gathered information from the literature to composing and formatting the entire paper.
- Sample Literature Reviews from University of LaVerneThis guide provides sample published literature reviews from a wide variety of disciplines.