What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific subject. It can also be described as a summary of the published works in a given field of study. It could be a section of a larger paper, an article or the focus of a larger paper. It gives your readers an overview of current knowledge, allowing the researcher to identify relevant theoretical frameworks, methodologies and gaps in the existing research that could later on apply to your paper’s topic or thesis.

The Purpose of a Literature Review

When writing a dissertation, thesis or research paper, you are likely to perform a literature review to put the research within the existing knowledge. Literature reviews play five key roles that you must keep in mind when writing it. A review of literature should do the following;

• Show your familiarity with the topic and its academic context
• Develop a theoretical framework and method for your study
• Distinguish your work from that of other researchers and theorists
• Demonstrate how your study addresses a gap or creates a basis for discussions
• Evaluate the current research and show your knowledge of the academic debates around your subject

Steps for Writing a Literature Review

Whether you are looking to pursue a career in research or applying for graduate school, writing literature reviews is an important skill that you will need for success. The following is a step-by-step guide on how to write a literature review.

Define the scope of your research

You should understand what is required in the review before you start writing. It is important to first determine the specific research question that your review will help to define. You should also decide on the maximum or minimum number of sources that should be included in the literature review.

Identify the literature

Begin the process of identifying the literature with a broad search. The literature or sources for your review will mainly come from academic materials such as books, article, journals, dissertations and other research papers. You may begin by creating a list of keywords related to your paper’s research question. List the main concepts and variables that you are interested in including any related terms and synonyms.

Use the listed keywords to start looking for sources. Some of the commonly used databases for scholarly articles and journals include Google Scholar, your university’s library catalogue, JSTOR and EBSCO. Read the abstract of every source to determine whether the content is relevant to your question. Besides, you can also check the bibliography of any useful articles and books that you find to generate other relevant sources.

You can use citation management tools to generate and keep track of the useful sources that you have found. Citation searching can also assist you in tracking how other researchers interact with and, build upon previous studies.

Do a critical analysis

A critical analysis of the sources collected around the topic is crucial to the literature review. Regardless of how much time you have, you will not be able to read everything that has been written on the topic of your study. Thus, it would be necessary to evaluate the sources that are most relevant to your thesis or research question.

The critical analysis should explore the relationships, key themes and any gaps in the research. You should carefully read and summarize every source with a focus on its coverage, authority, methodology and relationship with other studies. Here is a list of the questions that you should ask when doing a critical analysis.

• What problem or question does the study address?
• What are the key concepts and how are they described?
• What are the key theoretical frameworks, models and methodologies?
• Does the study take an innovative approach or use established frameworks?
• What are the study’s results and conclusions?
• How does the work relate to other pieces of literature in the field? Does your study confirm, expand or question the existing knowledge?
• What are the study’s strengths and weaknesses?

You must ensure that the sources used in your literature review are credible to give it authority and authenticity. It is also advisable to read the major theories and any landmark studies in your area of research.

Identify themes, debates and gaps

It is also important to categorize the resources that you intend to use in the literature review to demonstrate how they address your research question. The common categories explored in most studies include themes, debates, gaps, theories and chronology. You should clearly highlight the relationships and connections between the sources that you have identified.

Each of the identified categories should be backed with discussions and explanations of strengths and weaknesses, contribution to the overall survey, and comparisons with similar materials. Using multiple databases and resources can help you to get a variety of perspectives on the topic of research.

Placing the sources into categories as outlined above will enable you to work out a suitable structure for the literature review. It also makes it easier for you to demonstrate how the study will contribute to established knowledge.

Outline the structure of your literature review

There are various ways for organizing the literature review. You can use a combination of strategies or choose one, based on the length of the review. For instance, the overall structure of the review may be thematic but, every theme is described in a chronological order. The following are strategies for organizing the structure of a literature review.

• Chronological

The easiest way to organize the review is to trace how the topic has developed over time. However, you should be careful not to simply list and summarize the sources in chronological order. You should try to analyse the patterns, turning points and key discussions that have influenced the field. Interpret how and why some developments took place.

• Methodological

In case your sources are drawn from diverse disciplines or fields with various research methods, you may compare the results and conclusions emerging from different approaches. For example, check the results of qualitative vs quantitative research. You may also discuss how the topic has been addressed in empirical vs theoretical studies.

• Thematic

If you find some recurring key themes then, you can organize the literature review into sub-sections that address different elements of the topic. For example, if you are writing review of literature about the inequalities in migrant health outcomes, your key themes would include language barriers, healthcare policy, legal status, cultural attitudes and economic access.

• Theoretical

Literature reviews form the basis of theoretical frameworks. You can use them to discuss various theoretical frameworks, definitions and models of key concepts. You could argue for the relevance of a specific theory or combine different concepts to develop a framework for your study.

Literature Review Structure

The above insights will allow you to put together the required points for your literature review. However, you should also know how to organize the points when writing the review. Like other academic texts, your review of literature should comprise an introduction, body and conclusion. What to include in every section will mainly depend on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should establish the focus and purpose of the review.

The body can be divided into sub-sections depending on the length of the literature review. You can place the themes into different subheadings, each with a proper analysis and interpretation, critical evaluation and well-structured paragraphs.

The conclusion should summarize the key findings established in the literature and emphasize the significance of each result. Show how the study addresses gaps and contributes to new knowledge.

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