How to Write a Literature Review About References
How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Video, & Template
What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
There are v key steps to writing a literature review:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A good literature review doesn't only summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of cognition on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, yous will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research inside existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a take chances to:
- Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
- Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your enquiry
- Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Testify how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
- Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to utilise for graduate school or pursue a career in research.
Pace 1 – Search for relevant literature
Before you begin searching for literature, you need a conspicuously defined topic.
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research newspaper, you will search for literature related to your enquiry problem and questions.
Make a list of keywords
Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you lot're interested in, and list whatsoever synonyms and related terms. You tin can add to this listing every bit you detect new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Trunk prototype, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Use your keywords to brainstorm searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:
- Your university'south library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)
Y'all can also utilise boolean operators to help narrow down your search.
Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you notice a useful book or commodity, you lot tin cheque the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
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Step 2 – Evaluate and select sources
Yous likely won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so information technology will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your inquiry question.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or problem is the author addressing?
- What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the key theories, models, and methods?
- Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the report?
- How does the publication chronicle to other literature in the field? Does information technology confirm, add together to, or claiming established knowledge?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the enquiry?
Make certain the sources you lot use are credible, and make sure yous read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
Accept notes and cite your sources
Equally you read, you should as well begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
Information technology is of import to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves fourth dimension later in the process.
Pace three – Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review'south argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you lot can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): exercise certain approaches become more than or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur beyond the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where practice sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are at that place whatsoever influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are in that location weaknesses that demand to be addressed?
This pace volition help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicative) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Most research has focused on young women.
- There is an increasing involvement in the visual aspects of social media.
- Just at that place is notwithstanding a lack of robust enquiry on highly visual platforms similar Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could accost in your own research.
Step 4 – Outline your literature review'due south structure
There are various approaches to organizing the torso of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, yous can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall construction might be thematic, just each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over time. Even so, if you cull this strategy, be conscientious to avert simply listing and summarizing sources in order.
Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the management of the field. Requite your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you have found some recurring central themes, y'all can organize your literature review into subsections that accost different aspects of the topic.
For example, if you lot are reviewing literature virtually inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal condition, and economic access.
Methodological
If you lot depict your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods, yous might want to compare the results and conclusions that sally from different approaches. For example:
- Wait at what results accept emerged in qualitative versus quantitative inquiry
- Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Dissever 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 hash out various theories, models, and definitions of primal concepts.
You might debate for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine diverse theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step 5 – Write your literature review
Like whatever other academic text, your literature review should accept an introduction, a main 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.
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.
As you lot write, you can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the primary points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
- Clarify and interpret: don't just paraphrase other researchers—add your own interpretations where possible, 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: utilize transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Decision
In the conclusion, you should summarize the central findings you lot have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
When you've finished writing and revising your literature review, don't forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr's professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to acquit a literature review at the beginning of a enquiry project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that you lot're not just repeating what others have already done
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your inquiry can address
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the fundamental findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing enquiry and what new insights information technology volition contribute.
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