ABE 501, 2/19/2020

Instruction for Literature Review Report

This exercise allows you to develop an appropriate format and essential elements for literature
review in your thesis or report writing. You are suggested to include the following items:

1. Title of your report/thesis (Less than 25 words): The title should be concise to allow
reader to understand the subject you are studying, typically it will contain some ‘Key
Words’ of the paper. Keep in mind that your literature review is an integral part of your
thesis/project.

2. Introduction (less than 200 words): The theme (topic) that you will study, significance of
the topic; This section explains ‘why you conduct this review?”.

3. Body of review: Total literature review should include at least 3 papers reviewed.
Length is suggested to be less than 2,000 words (not include figures and tables if any).

In the review body, describe for each paper

 Why the author(s) did this study?

 How did they conduct this study?

 What are the main results of the study, and/or what need to be further researched?

4. Summary: Based on your review, in regarding to your topic, summarize “What has been
done?” “What need to be further studied?” This will serve as your own Research
Objectives and contribution to literature when you done.

5. Citation: Use the ASABE Transaction convention with the following examples. The
listed citation must match with the literature review body:

Zhou, Yan, Lance Schideman, Guo Yu, Yuanhui Zhang. 2013. Environment-
Enhancing Energy: A synergistic combination of algal wastewater treatment and
biofuel production maximized by nutrient and carbon recycling. Energy
Environ. Sci., 2013 (6):3765-3779.

Barker, Douglas, J. Lifflander, A. Arya, Anshu, and Y. Zhang. 2012. A parallel

algorithm for 3D particle tracking and Lagrangian trajectory reconstruction.
Measurement Science and Technology, 23(2): 025301. doi:10.1088/0957-
0233/23/2/025301.

Note: You may use the ‘literature review” paper example that I distributed to the class earlier,
although yours is much shorter, the theme and structure is similar and should be readily adopted
as part of your future thesis.

C:/…/Class/AE400/Mini-Thesis instruction.doc