Writing a Review of Literature

Doctoral and Masters students may find it helpful to begin writing a review of literature as soon as they enter graduate school. Building a comprehensive annotated bibliography may save many hours of work when dissertation time arrives.

A review of literature in a scholarly paper is a classification and evaluation of what accredited scholars and researchers have written on a topic, organized according to a guiding concept such as a research objective, thesis, or the problem/issue to be addressed.

Resources discussed in the review should be scholarly in nature. Scholarly journals generally have a sober, serious look, and contain many graphs and charts (few glossy pages or exciting pictures). Scholarly journals always cite their sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies. Authors are scholars in the field or someone who has done research in the field. Scholarly language is that of the discipline covered and assumes some scholarly background on the part of the reader. The main purpose of the review of literature is to report on original research or experimentation in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world.
 

Requirements for Review of Literature

Demonstrate your intellectual ability to recognize relevant information.
Demonstrate your ability to synthesize and evaluate the literature according to the guiding concept you have determined for yourself.


Show off your research skills:

Information seeking: your ability to scan the literature efficiently using manual or computerized methods to identify a set of potentially useful articles and books.

Critical appraisal: your ability to apply principles of analysis to identify those studies which are unbiased and valid.
 

Join the community of scholars:

Identify gaps in the literature.
Avoid reinventing the wheel.
Carry on from where others have already reached.
Identify other people working in the same fields.
 

Demonstrate your familiarity with the scholarship in your field:

Increase your breadth of knowledge of your subject area.
Identify seminal works in your area.
Provide the intellectual context for your own work.
Identify opposing views.
Put your work into perspective.
Demonstrate that you can access previous work in an area.
Identify information and ideas that may be relevant to your project.
Identify methods that could be relevant to your project.
 

The Initial Appraisal of a Resource

Author
Date of Publication
Edition or Revision
Publisher
Title of Journal
Date of Access for WWW
 

Content Analysis of a Resource

Intended Audience
Objective Reasoning
Coverage
Writing Style
Evaluative Reviews
 

Writing the Introduction

Keep the audience in mind. What basic background information should you provide?
Introduce your research focus.
Define your starting point and justify the reason for making this choice.

Sorting the Resources

May be arranged by date of publication, subject matter, or author, depending upon purpose.
Transitions from discussion of one source to another are essential to helping build your argument that your own work is important.

Scholarly language is always a requirement.

Making and Writing Conclusions

Read what you have written.
What have you discovered as you have read and written about these resources?
This is a time for your voice to be heard. Do you have anything to say? What recommendations or questions do you have?

Always keep in mind that as you read scholarly literature
you are looking for a GAP your own research might fill.

See the “Need a Verb” handout for further assistance.

Also See

• Graduate  Workshop Schedule
• Graduate Writing Consultation
• Writing Consultation Policies
• Writing a Review of Literature
• Need a Verb?
• Writing the Abstract
• Proof Reading Tips
• Academic Proposal Writing