FADA - Postgraduate Research Support: Literature Review

A literature review is important because it:

• Explains the background of research on a topic.
• Demonstrates why a topic is significant to a subject area.
• Helps focus your own research questions or problems
• Discovers relationships between research studies/ideas.
• Suggests unexplored ideas or populations
• Identifies major themes, concepts, and researchers on a topic.
• Tests assumptions; may help counter preconceived ideas and remove unconscious bias.
• Identifies critical gaps, points of disagreement, or potentially flawed methodology or theoretical approaches.
• Indicates potential directions for future research.

Different projects involve different kinds of literature reviews with different kinds and amounts of work. And, of course, the "end products" vary.

• Honors paper
• Capstone project
• Research Study
• Senior thesis
• Masters thesis
• Doctoral dissertation
• Research article
• Grant proposal
• Evidence based practice

NCSU Libraries  http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/tutorials/litreview/

Writing a literature review will take time to gather and analyze the research relevant to your topic, so it best to start early and give yourself enough time to gather and analyze your sources.  The process of writing a literature review usually covers the following steps:

1. Define your Research question
2. Plan your approach to your research and your review
3. Search the Literature
4. Analyze the material you’ve found
5. Managing the results of your research
6. Writing your Review

Keep in mind that a literature review defines and sets the stage for your later research.  While you may take the same steps in researching your literature review, your literature review is not:

Not an annotated bibliography in which you summarize each article that you have reviewed.  A lit review goes beyond basic summarizing to focus on the critical analysis of the reviewed works and their relationship to your research question.

Not a research paper where you select resources to support one side of an issue versus another.  A lit review should explain and consider all sides of an argument in order to avoid bias, and areas of agreement and disagreement should be highlighted.