Guide adapted from "Literature Review", a guide developed by Marisol Ramos used under CC BY 4.0 /modified from original.
What is a literature review?
"A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries." - Quote from Taylor, D. (n.d) "The literature review: A few tips on conducting it"
What are the goals of creating a Literature Review?
- Baumeister, R.F. & Leary, M.R. (1997). "Writing narrative literature reviews," Review of General Psychology, 1(3), 311-320.
When do you need to write a Literature Review?
In all these cases you need to dedicate a chapter in these works to showcase what have been written about your research topic and to point out how your own research will shed a new light into these body of scholarship.
Literature reviews are also written as standalone articles as a way to survey a particular research topic in-depth. This type of literature reviews look at a topic from a historical perspective to see how the understanding of the topic have change through time.
What kinds of literature reviews are written?
The DIREKT Project Online Information Literacy (IL) Module Platform