What Does a Literature Review Table Look Like

The Literature Review | A Consummate Pace-past-Step Guide

Published on 22 February 2019 by Shona McCombes. Revised on 3 May 2021.

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, assuasive y'all to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.

Conducting a literature review involves collecting, evaluating and analysing publications (such equally books and journal articles) that relate to your research question. At that place are five master steps in the process of writing a literature review:

1. Search for relevant literature
2. Evaluate sources
3. Place themes, debates and gaps
4. Outline the structure
5. Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn't just summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to requite a clear pic of the state of knowledge on the subject.

Why write a literature review?

When you write a dissertation or thesis, yous volition have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing cognition. The literature review gives y'all a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a contend

You might as well have to write a literature review every bit a stand-alone assignment. In this instance, the purpose is to evaluate the electric current country of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates effectually a topic.

The content will look slightly different in each case, merely the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.

Step 1: Search for relevant literature

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a conspicuously divers topic.

If you are writing the literature review department of a dissertation or research paper, you lot will search for literature related to your research objectives and questions.

If yous are writing a literature review every bit a stand-alone assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a key question to directly your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer information technology based only on a review of existing publications.

Research question example

What is the affect of social media on body epitome amid Generation Z?

Make a list of keywords

Start past creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. Include each of the key concepts or variables you're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

Keywords example

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, cocky-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Utilize your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some 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, technology and computer science)

You lot can use boolean operators to help narrow downwards your search:

• AND to find sources that contain more than one keyword (due east.grand. social media AND body image AND generation Z
• OR to observe sources that contain one of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
• NOT to exclude results containing certain terms (east.one thousand. apple NOT fruit)

Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can bank check the bibliography to detect other relevant sources.

To identify the nearly important publications on your topic, have notation of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles go on actualization in your reading, make certain to seek them out.

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Step 2: Evaluate and select sources

Yous probably won't be able to read admittedly everything that has been written on the topic – you lot'll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the fundamental concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the enquiry utilize established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the written report?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Brand sure the sources y'all apply are credible, and brand sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of enquiry.

You lot tin can find out how many times an commodity has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.

The scope of your review volition depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually simply review contempo literature, just in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has inverse in meaning over fourth dimension).

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should likewise begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later contain into the text of your literature review.

Information technology'due south important to go along rail of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism. It can be helpful to brand an annotated bibliography, where y'all compile full reference information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps y'all think what you read and saves fourth dimension later on in the process.

You lot tin utilise our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consequent citations.

Step 3: Identify themes, debates and gaps

To begin organising your literature review's statement and construction, you need to empathise the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you tin can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more than or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where practise sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there whatsoever influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This stride will help yous work out the construction of your literature review and (if applicable) evidence how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

Example of trends and gaps

In reviewing the literature on social media and body image, you note that:

• Most inquiry has focused on immature women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• Just there is still a lack of robust research on highly-visual platforms similar Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

Step four: Outline your literature review's structure

In that location are various approaches to organising the body of a literature review. You should have a rough idea of your strategy before you start writing.

Depending on the length of your literature review, yous can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, merely each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest arroyo is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if yous choose this strategy, be careful to avert simply listing and summarising sources in club.

Try to analyse patterns, turning points and primal debates that accept shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why sure developments occurred.

Thematic

If yous have establish some recurring primal themes, you tin organise your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if y'all are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant wellness outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic admission.

Methodological

If yous draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods, you might desire to compare the results and conclusions that sally from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Split the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of cardinal 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 have an introduction, a primary body, and a conclusion. What you lot 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.

Dissertation literature review

If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic ("many recent studies have focused on the trouble of x") or highlight a gap in the literature ("while there has been much research on x, few researchers take taken y into consideration").

Stand-alone literature review

If you are writing a stand-alone paper, requite some groundwork on the topic and its importance, talk over the telescopic of the literature yous volition review (for example, the time catamenia of your sources), and state your objective. What new insight volition you draw from the literature?

Trunk

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You tin utilize a subheading for each theme, fourth dimension period, or methodological approach.

As y'all write, make sure to follow these tips:

• Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
• Analyse and interpret: don't just paraphrase other researchers – add together your ain interpretations, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature equally a whole.
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources.
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.

Instance of a paragraph in a literature review

Conclusion

In the conclusion, y'all should summarise the primal findings y'all take taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.

Dissertation literature review

If the literature review is role of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your inquiry addresses gaps and contributes new noesis, or talk over how y'all have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This tin lead directly into your methodology section.

Stand up-alone literature review

If you are writing a stand-lone paper, you can talk over the overall implications of the literature or make suggestions for future research based on the gaps yous have identified.

Frequently asked questions near literature reviews

What is the purpose of a literature review?

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the starting time of a research project:

• To familiarise yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you're not just repeating what others accept already done
• To identify gaps in noesis and unresolved issues that your inquiry can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it volition contribute.

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