What Is a Literature Review in an Outline
What Is a Literature Review | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of electric current knowledge, assuasive you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you plant. At that place are five key steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Place themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A good literature review doesn't only summarize sources—information technology analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a articulate picture of the state of noesis on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When yous write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, you will have to comport a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives yous a chance to:
- Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
- Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
- Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Testify how your inquiry addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
Y'all might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone consignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of enquiry and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will look slightly unlike in each case, but the procedure of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Writing literature reviews is a specially important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in inquiry.
Footstep 1: Search for relevant literature
Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly divers topic.
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research newspaper, you lot will search for literature related to your inquiry problem and questions.
If yous are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, y'all will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to straight your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to exist accountable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.
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 any synonyms and related terms. You lot tin can add to this list if yous discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body image, self-perception, cocky-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 manufactures include:
- Your academy'due south library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, engineering and informatics)
You can use boolean operators to assistance narrow down your search:
- AND: to find sources that comprise more than one keyword (e.thousand. social media AND torso image AND generation Z)
- OR: to discover sources that contain ane of a range of synonyms (e.g. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT: to exclude results containing certain terms (e.g. apple tree Non fruit)
Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When yous detect a useful book or article, you tin check the bibliography to notice other relevant sources.
To identify the virtually of import publications on your topic, accept notation of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.
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Step 2: Evaluate and select sources
You probably won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic—y'all'll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or trouble is the author addressing?
- What are the key concepts and how are they divers?
- What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the research use established frameworks or have an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add together to, or claiming established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the inquiry?
Make certain the sources y'all use are apparent, and brand sure you lot read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
Yous tin find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a loftier citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.
The scope of your review will depend on your topic and subject field: in the sciences you normally only review contempo literature, only in the humanities you might accept a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in pregnant over fourth dimension).
Have notes and cite your sources
As you read, y'all should also begin the writing process. Accept notes that y'all can later comprise into the text of your literature review.
Information technology is of import to proceed track of your sources with citations to avert plagiarism. It tin can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you lot compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you call up what you read and saves time later on in the procedure.
Step 3: Place themes, debates, and gaps
To brainstorm organizing your literature review's statement and construction, you need to empathize the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you tin look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do sure approaches get more than or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are in that location any influential theories or studies that inverse the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?
This stride will help you work out the construction of your literature review and (if applicative) show how your own enquiry will contribute to existing noesis.
- Most research has focused on young women.
- At that place is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- Merely there is yet a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you lot could accost in your own enquiry.
Stride four: Outline your literature review's structure
There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Yous should accept a crude idea of your strategy earlier y'all start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall construction might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. Notwithstanding, if y'all choose this strategy, exist careful to avoid just listing and summarizing sources in lodge.
Try to clarify patterns, turning points and primal debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If yous take found some recurring cardinal themes, you tin organize your literature review into subsections that address unlike aspects of the topic.
For example, if yous are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.
Methodological
If y'all describe your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that sally from unlike approaches. For example:
- Look at what results accept emerged in qualitative versus quantitative enquiry
- Talk over how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Split up the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework. You tin use information technology to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of primal concepts.
You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.
Step five: Write your literature review
Like whatever other academic text, your literature review should take an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion. What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should clearly constitute 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 tin can use a subheading for each theme, time flow, or methodological arroyo.
Every bit you write, you can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: requite an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
- Analyze and interpret: don't just paraphrase other researchers—add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: apply transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Conclusion
In the determination, you should summarize the key findings you 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. Non a language expert? Check out Scribbr'southward professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Frequently asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to carry a literature review at the beginning of a enquiry project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current land of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that you're not but repeating what others have already done
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved issues that your inquiry can address
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing inquiry and what new insights it will contribute.
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