How to Integrate a Literature Review Into a Paper Example

The Literature Review | A Complete Step-by-Step Guide

Published on 22 February 2019 by Shona McCombes. Revised on 3 May 2021.

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current cognition, allowing yous to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.

Conducting a literature review involves collecting, evaluating and analysing publications (such as books and journal articles) that relate to your inquiry question. There are five main steps in the process of writing a literature review:

1. Search for relevant literature
2. Evaluate sources
3. Identify themes, debates and gaps
4. Outline the construction
5. Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn't merely summarise sources – information technology analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a articulate movie of the state of cognition on the subject.

Why write a literature review?

When you write a dissertation or thesis, y'all will accept to conduct a literature review to situate your enquiry within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a gamble 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
• Evidence how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this example, the purpose is to evaluate the current land of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.

The content volition look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.

Footstep i: Search for relevant literature

Earlier yous begin searching for literature, you lot need a conspicuously divers topic.

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research newspaper, you will search for literature related to your research objectives and questions.

If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will accept to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Dissimilar a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. Yous should exist able to reply it based but on a review of existing publications.

Inquiry question instance

What is the touch of social media on body image among Generation Z?

Brand a listing of keywords

Outset by creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. Include each of the key concepts or variables you're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

Keywords example

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Trunk image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental wellness
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university's 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)

You tin utilise boolean operators to help narrow down your search:

• AND to find sources that incorporate more than one keyword (e.one thousand. social media AND body prototype AND generation Z
• OR to find sources that contain ane of a range of synonyms (e.1000. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
• NOT to exclude results containing certain terms (e.g. apple Not fruit)

Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When y'all find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to detect other relevant sources.

To identify the nearly important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or manufactures proceed appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.

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Stride two: Evaluate and select sources

You lot probably won't exist able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic – you'll take to evaluate which sources are nearly relevant to your questions.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the writer addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the central theories, models and methods? Does the inquiry use established frameworks or take an innovative arroyo?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication chronicle to other literature in the field? Does information technology ostend, add to, or challenge 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 research?

Brand sure the sources you utilize are apparent, and make sure yous read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You tin find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high 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 discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, but in the humanities yous might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).

Take notes and cite your sources

Every bit you read, you should also brainstorm the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It's important to go along track of your sources with references to avert plagiarism. It tin exist helpful to brand an annotated bibliography, where you lot compile total reference data and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps yous remember what y'all read and saves fourth dimension later on in the procedure.

You lot can employ our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consequent citations.

Footstep three: Identify themes, debates and gaps

To begin organising your literature review's statement and structure, you demand to understand the connections and relationships betwixt the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, y'all can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): exercise certain approaches go more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur beyond the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the management of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help y'all work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) prove how your own research will contribute to existing cognition.

Example of trends and gaps

In reviewing the literature on social media and body prototype, you lot note that:

• Nigh research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust enquiry on highly-visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that you could address in your own inquiry.

Stride 4: Outline your literature review'southward structure

There are various approaches to organising the body of a literature review. Yous should have a crude idea of your strategy earlier yous showtime writing.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over time. All the same, if you lot cull this strategy, be careful to avoid just listing and summarising sources in lodge.

Attempt to analyse patterns, turning points and key debates that take shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

Thematic

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organise your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For instance, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, cardinal themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative inquiry
• Talk over how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is oftentimes the foundation for a theoretical framework. You tin can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of central concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical arroyo, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Step 5: Write your literature review

Similar any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction, a main trunk, and a decision. What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

Introduction

The introduction should clearly institute the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Dissertation literature review

If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central trouble or research question and give a cursory summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic ("many recent studies have focused on the problem of 10") or highlight a gap in the literature ("while there has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration").

Stand-alone literature review

If you are writing a stand-alone paper, requite some background on the topic and its importance, talk over the scope of the literature you lot will review (for example, the fourth dimension period of your sources), and land your objective. What new insight will you draw from the literature?

Body

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to carve up the body into subsections. You tin apply a subheading for each theme, time flow, or methodological arroyo.

Equally yous write, make sure to follow these tips:

• Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the master points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
• Analyse and interpret: don't just paraphrase other researchers – add together your own interpretations, 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: use transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.

Case of a paragraph in a literature review

Decision

In the conclusion, you should summarise the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.

Dissertation literature review

If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new cognition, or talk over how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This can lead straight into your methodology section.

Stand up-lone literature review

If you are writing a stand up-alone paper, y'all can hash out the overall implications of the literature or make suggestions for future research based on the gaps you have identified.

Frequently asked questions about literature reviews

What is the purpose of a literature review?

There are several reasons to deport a literature review at the beginning of a enquiry project:

• To familiarise yourself with the current state of cognition on your topic
• To ensure that yous're not but repeating what others have already done
• To place gaps in noesis and unresolved problems that your research 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 enquiry and what new insights it will contribute.

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