Many students will need to conduct and write-up a literature review at some point, whether as part of a dissertation or as a stand-alone assessment. In this article we’ll look at the purpose of a literature review and explore some of the key things you need to keep in mind when faced with his kind of task.
Starting out on a literature review
It’s quite normal to feel a little bit lost when you start out on a literature review. It can therefore be helpful to ensure that you have a clear sense of what a literature review is, and the purpose it serves, before setting out on the task.
How would you define a literature review? What’s its purpose? Think about your responses to those questions, then see how that compares to our ideas below.
Defining the literature review
In short, a literature review is a critical examination of the existing research in a particular field or topic area. The word critical is important here, and we’ll return to that idea later in this article.
You will use the literature review to justify your own research, or to identify the gap that you wish to explore. We never conduct research in a vacuum. No matter how niche or cutting edge that research is, we should always be looking to locate that research and contextualise our findings within the existing field.
Finding focus
You’ll sometimes hear a literature review described as reading around a subject, and whilst there’s more to it than that, it’s not a bad place to start.
Part of your goal is to get a good broad overview of the subject area you’re working in, so starting off by reading widely around the topic can help you get a sense of the key areas and arguments.
Before long though, you’re going to need to bring a bit more focus and precision to the task, otherwise you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with material. In a moment, we’ll think about how you might achieve that by framing the literature review as a survey of the field, but first we need to think about the different stages involved in bringing focus to your literature review.
Conducting a literature review
At the top of this article, we referred to conducting and writing-up a literature review. This suggests that there are two main elements to the task.
First of all, there’s the process of conducting the literature review, which in itself involves a number of steps:
- Defining and conducting your search – the Library and Learning Centre (LLC) offer advice on effective search techniques in their Subject Guides. It’s important to make your search as focused as possible, and to take a critical approach towards selecting and assessing resources
- Extracting the information you need from the sources – this involves reading critically and with focus, rather than that more passive reading around process that we mentioned earlier
- Recording that information in a way that’s going to be most useful to you later – this means thinking about what kind of information you’re going to need when it comes to writing-up your research. Key here is to consider the most effective way (for you) of documenting and synthesising your research
Surveying the field
One useful way to think of the literature review is to picture it as a map. Maps have edges – the territory doesn’t end at the map’s borders; it goes on beyond that. But the map is only concerned with that territory within those borders.
Likewise, when conducting and writing a literature review you need to first establish your borders – the field will continue beyond these edges, but your work needs to be focused within a pre-defined area.
This is where clearly defining your question can be a so important. The clearer an idea you have of exactly what you’re exploring, the easier you’ll find it to establish the parameters (and perimeters) of your research.
There’s a further similarity. A map doesn’t show every single detail within the defined boundaries. As the saying goes, the map is not the territory.
Instead, it displays the broad contours of an area and picks out specific points of interest or importance. This too is similar to what you are doing in a literature review. It’s usually not possible to cover absolutely everything that’s ever been published or printed, however tightly you set your borders (the exception to this would be if you’ve been tasked with conducting a systematic review).
Instead, when you conduct and write a literature review you are seeking to sketch out the broad contours of your area – the key themes, questions and developments – and to highlight the particularly important points.
Writing-up the literature review
The second part of doing a literature review involves turning the research you’ve gathered into a coherent and effective piece of academic writing – in other words, what’s the end product of all your work?
If the task is simply to produce a literature review then you are good to go. If the literature review is part of a wider dissertation or other piece of work, it’s important you understand how that literature review will fit structurally into the wider piece. In particular, it’s important to understand the difference between the scientific and non-scientific structures, and what those structures mean for your literature review.
The importance of being critical
Sometimes literature reviews can be too descriptive. It’s important that you avoid this trap – in fact, it may help to think of it as conducting a critical review rather than a literature review.
It can also be helpful to think in terms of what a literature review shouldn’t be. A literature review is NOT:
- an annotated bibliography
- a piece of writing where each paragraph describes a different source or study
- a description of what has already been done in the area
Instead, a good literature review will take a critical, thematic approach to the existing work that has been done in the area in which you are working. One key here is to consider at the research stage the most effective way (for you) of documenting and synthesising your research, so that you make it as easy as possible to find the links, contradiction, and common themes between the different sources you encounter.
Summing Up
The ability to conduct and write an effective literature review is likely to be important in many disciplines. But it’s not something to fear or be daunted by. With a clear idea of the purpose of your literature review, and a focused and structured approach to how you conduct and write-up your research, you can find the task both effective and enjoyable.
