Research Guides: Literature Reviews: Getting Started

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review provides an overview of the available scholarly publications for a specific topic.

It tries to summarize the current state of knowledge for that topic, as well as highlight where there are gaps in the research and therefore opportunities for future research.

Lit reviews can be:

a standalone article, or
- Example: "Challenges and Practices of Knowledge Sharing in E-Learning: A Systematic Literature Review"
the first section of an article or the first part of a larger research project (like a PhD dissertation) to give context/background for the author's original research.
- Example: "'There are Certain Rules that One Must Abide by': Predictors of Mortality in Slasher Films" pages 623-625.

A lit review is not...

An argumentative research paper.

You are not taking sides or drawing a conclusion about the topic. You do want to present all available perspectives. You may discuss where there is disagreement among scholars, but again, you're not taking sides: you're just saying "this is part of the conversation."

A summary.

You want your sources to still be in conversation with each other. Don't just summarize what Article 1 says, then Article 2, then Article 3, and so on. Identify the main ideas that several of your sources have in common and make those the focus, bringing in your citations as needed.

An annotated bibliography.

A lit review is a type of essay, with all the usual intro and conclusion and body paragraphs. You'll offer a list of sources at the end in whatever style you're following, of course. An annotated bibliography is just the list of sources with a paragraph of justification after each one.

What to Do:

Search in multiple databases
Search with a variety of keywords -- develop lists of synonyms and related terms
For longer projects, repeat searches at different times to catch new publications

Be Selective

You won't find literally every article for your topic, nor do you need to. (Otherwise you'd be searching forever.)

You should plan on finding more articles than you will ultimately use, discarding those that aren't as relevant to your topic.

Avoiding Bias

You have to strive for a thorough review of all the literature to make sure you don't overlook or exclude (or do a weaker job of discussing) areas of study.

Depending on the purpose of your lit review, you might organize your writing (and your discussion of the literature you found)...

Chronologically
Thematically
By methodology
By theory/framework

Literature Reviews (UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center)