WHAT ARE LITERATURE REVIEWS?

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)

GOALS OF LITERATURE REVIEWS

What are the goals of creating a Literature Review?

 To develop a theory or evaluate an existing theory

 To summarize the historical or existing state of a research topic
 Identify a problem in a field of research

When do you need to write a Literature Review?

 When writing a prospectus or a thesis/dissertation

 When writing a research paper
 When writing a grant proposal

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.

TYPES OF LITERATURE REVIEWS

What kinds of literature reviews are written?

  Narrative Review: The purpose of this type of review is to describe the current state of the
research on a specific topic/research and to offer a critical analysis of the literature reviewed.
Studies are grouped by research/theoretical categories, and themes and trends, strengths and
weakness, and gaps are identified. The review ends with a conclusion section which summarizes
the findings regarding the state of the research of the specific study, the gaps identify and if
applicable, explains how the author's research will address gaps identify in the review and
expand the knowledge on the topic reviewed.
 Book review essays/ Historiographical review essays: This is a type of review that focus on a
small set of research books on a particular topic " to locate these books within current
scholarship, critical methodologies, and approaches" in the field. -LARR
 Systematic review: "The authors of a systematic review use a specific procedure to search the
research literature, select the studies to include in their review, and critically evaluate the
studies they find." (p. 139). Nelson, L.K. (2013). Research in Communication Sciences and
Disorders. San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing.
 Meta-analysis: "Meta-analysis is a method of reviewing research findings in a quantitative
fashion by transforming the data from individual studies into what is called an effect size and
then pooling and analyzing this information. The basic goal in meta-analysis is to explain why
different outcomes have occurred in different studies." (p. 197). Roberts, M.C. & Ilardi, S.S.
(2003). Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
 Meta-synthesis: "Qualitative meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative study that uses as data the
findings from other qualitative studies linked by the same or related topic." (p.312). Zimmer, L.
(2006). "Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts," Journal of Advanced
Nursing, 53(3), 311-318.

STRATEGIES TO FIND SOURCES

THE RESEARCH PROCESS

Finding sources (scholarly articles, research books, dissertations) for your literature review is part of the
research process, a process that is iterative--you go back and forth along the process as new information
is gather and analyze until all necessary data is acquire and you are ready to write. The main steps in this
research process are:
Planning: Before searching for articles or books, brainstorm to develop keywords that better describe
your research question.

Searching: While searching take note of what other keywords are used to describe your topic and use
them to do more searches

– Most articles include a keyword section

– Key concepts may change name through time so make sure to check for variations

Organising: Start organizing your results by categories/key concepts or any organizing principle that
make sense for you. This will help you later when you are ready to analyze your findings

Analysing: While reading, start making notes of key concepts and commonalities and disagreement
among the research articles you find.

– Create a spreadsheet document to record what articles you are finding useful and why.

– Create fields to write summaries of articles or quotes for future citing and paraphrasing.

Writing: Synthesize your findings. Use your own voice to explain to your readers what you learn about
the literature your search; its weaknesses and strengths; what is missing or ignore

Repeat: at any given time of the process you can go back to a previous step as necessary

TIPS

There is no magic number regarding how many sources you are going to need for your literature review,
it all depends on the topic and what type of the literature review you are doing:
► Are you working on an emerging topic? You are not likely to find many sources, which is good
because you are trying to prove that this is a topic that needs more research. But, it is not enough to say
that you found few or no articles on your topic in your field. You need to look broadly to other
disciplines (also known as triangulation) to see if your research topic has been studied from other
perspectives as a way to validate the uniqueness of your research question.

► Are you working on something that has been studied extensively? Then you are going to find many
sources and you will want to limit how far you want to look back. Use limiters to eliminate research that
may be dated and opt to search for resources published within the last 5-10 years.

EVALUATING LITERATURE REVIEWS AND SOURCES

A good literature review evaluates a wide variety of sources (academic articles, scholarly books,
government/NGO reports). It also evaluates literature reviews that study similar topics. This page offers
you a list of resources and tips on how to evaluate the sources that you may use to write your review.

READING CRITICALLY

To be able to write a good Literature Review, you need to be able to read critically. Below are some tips
that will help you evaluate the sources for your paper.

Reading critically (summary from How to Read Academic Texts Critically)

 Who is the author? What is his/her standing in the field.

 What is the author’s purpose? To offer advice, make practical suggestions, solve a specific
problem, to critique or clarify?
 Note the experts in the field: are there specific names/labs that are frequently cited?
 Pay attention to methodology: is it sound? what testing procedures, subjects, materials were
used?
 Note conflicting theories, methodologies and results. Are there any assumptions being made by
most/some researchers?
 Theories: have they evolved overtime?
 Evaluate and synthesize the findings and conclusions. How does this study contribute to your
project?

TIPS TO EVALUATE SOURCES

Criteria to evaluate sources:

Authority: Who is the author? what is his/her credentials--what university he/she is affliliated? Is his/her
area of expertise?

Usefulness: How this source related to your topic? How current or relevant it is to your topic?

Reliability: Does the information comes from a reliable, trusted source such as an academic journal?

LITERATURE REVIEW WRITING TIPS

Synthesize your findings. Your findings are your evaluation of the literature reviewed: what you
consider the strenghts and weakness of the studies reviewed; the comparison you did between studies;
research trends and gaps in the research that you found while researching your topic, etc...

Across the articles that you read, pay attention to what are the:

 Common/contested findings
 Important trends
 Influential theories

Identifying these elements as you are reading and writing notes about your sources will help you later
when you start writing.

Do not over quote. If you only quote from every single author you found, then you are not showing any
original thinking or analysis. Use quotes judiciously. Use quotes to highlight a particular passage or
thought that exemplifies the research, theory or topic you are researching.

Instead, use paraphrasing. Restate the main ideas of a paragraph or section to highlight, in your own
words, the important points made by the author.

Summarize findings, important sections, a whole article or book: This is different from paraphrasing
since you are not re-stating the author words but summarizing the main point of what you are reading in
a concise matter for your readers.

Note: In all cases, do not forget to give credit to these sources since they are not your original ideas
but someone else. Check the specific citation style you are using for the appropriate in-text citation
format)

WRITING A LITERATURE REVIEW

LITERATURE REVIEWS: USEFUL SITES

The majority of these sites focus on literature reviews in the social sciences unless otherwise noted. For
systematic literature reviews, we recommend you to contact directly your subject librarian for help.

WRITING TUTORIALS & OTHER RESOURCES

A selection of sites that offer tutorials and handouts to learn how to write literature reviews and how to
use specific writing skills such as paraphrasing and synthesis.

CITATION RESOURCES

PLAGARISM - WHAT IS IT AND HOW TO AVOID IT?

Plagiarism is "the deliberate or reckless representation of another’s words, thoughts, or ideas as one’s
own without attribution in connection with submission of academic work, whether graded or otherwise"
(University of North Carolina 2009).

The best way to avoid plagiarizing on your paper is to cite your sources using one of the many citations
style used in academia.

PURPOSE OF CITATIONS, WHEN AND WHAT TO CITE?

 OWL Purdue: Research and Citation Resources Excellent site that explain in detail how, when
and why to use this citation style for both print and online sources, with an emphasis to the
major citation styles, APA, MLA and Chicago.

Why Cite?

 There are four main reasons:

 To acknowledge the author(s) of the work that you used to write your paper.
 To provide context to your research and demonstrate that your paper is well-researched.
 To allow readers to find the original source and learn more about some aspect that you
mentioned only briefly in the document.
 To enable further research by letting others discover what has already been explored and
written about on a given topic.

What and When to Cite?

You should always cite other people's words, ideas and other intellectual property that you use in your
papers or that influence your ideas. This includes but isn't limited to books, journal articles, web pages,
reports, data, statistics, speeches, lectures, personal interviews, etc. You should cite whenever you:

 use a direct quote

 paraphrase
 summarize
 use facts or statistics that are relatively less known or relate directly to your argument.
OTHER ACADEMIC WRITINGS

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Sometimes people confuse Literature Reviews with Annotated Bibliographies but they are quite
different in format but they are similar in purpose, to survey the literature.

So what is an annotated bibliography? "... is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each
citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph, the
annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and
quality of the sources cited.”

To write a good annotated bibliography you need to be:

Concise: Get to the point of what the book/article is about, in few words, summarize.

Evaluative: Determine who is the author, what is his/her expertise in the topic, how reliable is the
information

Critical: Reflect on what is the strength and weakness of the work, what is missing, etc.

Comparative: Describe how the book/article compares to other similar works

RESEARCH PROSPECTUS

The Research Prospectus is a planning document, usually use before writing your thesis or some
seminar paper to complete a degree (e.g. Master's thesis or Plan B paper). It does include a working
bibliography and small literature review. Below are some useful links on how to write a prospectus, best
practices and examples.

 Research Prospectus
 Research Prospectus for political sciences paper

CRITICAL ESSAYS

Guidelines to Write Literary Essays

Good advice and strategies to write:

 Close-reading essays
 Lens essays (when you use specific theories to analyze literary texts)
 Research essays