What Do You Write in the Literature Review
How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Video, & Template
What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of electric current cognition, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
There are five key steps to writing a literature review:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A proficient literature review doesn't just summarize sources—information technology analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a articulate picture of the country of cognition on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, you will likely accept to conduct a literature review to situate your inquiry within existing knowledge. The literature review gives yous a risk to:
- Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
- Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
- Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Testify how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
- Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you lot want to employ for graduate school or pursue a career in enquiry.
Pace ane – Search for relevant literature
Earlier you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly divers topic.
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or inquiry paper, y'all volition search for literature related to your enquiry trouble and questions.
Make a listing of keywords
Commencement past creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables y'all're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You lot can add to this list as you detect new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Utilise your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:
- Your university'south library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, technology and computer science)
You can too utilize boolean operators to help narrow downward your search.
Make sure to read the abstract to detect out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, yous tin cheque the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
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Step two – Evaluate and select sources
You likely won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so information technology will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or trouble is the writer addressing?
- What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the key theories, models, and methods?
- Does the research utilize established frameworks or take an innovative arroyo?
- What are the results and conclusions of the written report?
- How does the publication chronicle to other literature in the field? Does information technology ostend, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Make certain the sources y'all employ are credible, and brand certain you read whatever landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
Take notes and cite your sources
As y'all read, you should besides begin the writing process. Take notes that you lot can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is of import to go along runway of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. Information technology can be helpful to brand an annotated bibliography, where you compile full commendation data and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps yous remember what you read and saves time after in the process.
Step 3 – Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review's argument and structure, exist sure you sympathize the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): practice certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the management of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This step will help you piece of work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing noesis.
- Most research has focused on young women.
- There is an increasing involvement in the visual aspects of social media.
- Only in that location is still a lack of robust enquiry on highly visual platforms similar Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you lot could address in your own research.
Step 4 – Outline your literature review'due south structure
At that place are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over time. However, if you lot cull this strategy, be careful to avoid but listing and summarizing sources in order.
Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Requite your estimation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you take found some recurring central themes, y'all tin organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.
For example, if yous are reviewing literature most inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economical access.
Methodological
If you draw your sources from dissimilar disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods, you lot might desire to compare the results and conclusions that sally from different approaches. For instance:
- Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative enquiry
- Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is oftentimes the foundation for a theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
You lot might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Stride 5 – Write your literature review
Like any other academic text, your literature review should accept an introduction, a chief body, and a conclusion. What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, yous might want to split up the body into subsections. You tin utilize a subheading for each theme, fourth dimension catamenia, or methodological arroyo.
Equally you write, you tin can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the chief points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
- Clarify and interpret: don't merely paraphrase other researchers—add together your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to describe connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the conclusion, you should summarize the central findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
When you've finished writing and revising your literature review, don't forget to proofread thoroughly earlier submitting. Not a linguistic communication expert? Check out Scribbr's professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
At that place are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current state of noesis on your topic
- To ensure that you're not but repeating what others have already washed
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can accost
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the central findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your piece of work relates to existing enquiry and what new insights information technology will contribute.
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