Most students wonder how to format a literature review in a way that would eventually improve the quality of their academic writing. As a matter of fact, it’s not as difficult as it may sound, but it requires paying attention to several important details.
This standard format will help you finish the literature review for any research paper, regardless of its type. It’s all about following some simple rules that help you submit your task with the best quality.
Evaluate and compare sources from an analytical point of view. The literature review structure should be able to inform readers about trends, knowledge, and problems solved in the task or areas where you’d faced challenges. Write a critical analysis by highlighting relationships between sources in the body of your review. Read what you’ve written, and see if you have a clear central idea around which the research revolves. If this is not clear, rewrite the outline of your assignment, and make sure that it delivers relevant information.
Now you’re probably wondering: What is literature review in research? How can I write one?
Need to write a literature review?
If you’re merely stating names of researchers and what they’ve done, then you’re doing your literature review wrong. The literature review of a research paper is different from a bibliography. You won’t list sources and explain each one of them in details. Analyze and highlight ideas or topics and draw relationships between references. Summarize conclusions about the latest trends in the subject. Include subheadings and organize sources and findings under relevant subheadings. Every section or subheading should logically connect to the previous and next ones.
Your field of knowledge plays a role in determining the significance of sources. In some research papers, sources that go back a few years shouldn’t be used in any task, while in others your research can go years back. In scientific studies, for example, researchers should always make sure that they’re listing the most current information. All obsolete and old data should be excluded. In humanitarian studies, most students should be able to evaluate how a single theory has changed and evolved over time.
There are a few easy tips that help you finish an excellent literature review paper. Follow these tips to avoid mistakes that will cost you more time and effort:
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
- 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
- Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions.
In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
Table of contents
When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional Proofreading & Editing service!
Dissertation literature review If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasize the timeliness of the topic (“many recent studies have focused on the problem of x”) 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, give some background on the topic and its importance, discuss the scope of the literature you will review (for example, the time period of your sources), and state your objective. What new insight will you draw from the literature?
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. There are five key steps:
Have a look at the below-given document to learn writing a literature review.
Drafting a strong literature review is considered as the foundation of any research. It helps to evaluate existing research and tells your teacher how your research is relevant to the respective field. Moreover, it also discusses new insights that your research will contribute to the field of study.
The approaches to organizing a review are discussed below in detail.
However, this does not mean that a literature review is based on previous searches only. The writer discusses the research question and its various aspects and discusses the relevant study to support this claim.
Literature Review Conclusion
However, a conclusion of a stand-alone literature review will discuss the overall implications and suggestions for future research.
It is the simplest approach to structure your literature review. However, do not just summarize and list the sources. Instead, analyze the critical debates, research, and patterns that have shaped the direction of the field. Also, discuss your interpretation of the developments.
Some of the key reasons to add a literature review into your research paper, thesis, and dissertation include:
Moreover, the scope of the literature review largely depends on the topic and discipline. For example, science students only evaluate recent literary work to write their reviews. Nevertheless, the humanities students also have to study and discuss the historical research and perspective about the topic.
Wherever you can single out several theories on a single phenomenon, different models of a system, or diverging definitions of the same concept, the theoretical approach is the best choice. The purpose is to analyze the corpus of theory that has accumulated regarding an idea, opinion, or event. Usually, this form establishes the existing scientific knowledge gaps and finds out the outstanding research questions.
A literature review is an update on the status of current research related to the issue in question . Its purpose is to provide the reader with a guide to a particular research topic. And for the writer, a well-written literature review is the best way to show their competence in the field.
This method is organized around a particular issue, rather than time progression. If you have found recurring themes in the course of your reading, it is an excellent idea to focus the review on them. As a rule, the thematic approach requires an in-depth study of the available scientific literature. It also looks more substantial and time-consuming than the chronological one.
Literature reviews are written mostly in sciences and social sciences, and sometimes in humanities. A literature review aims to discuss published information on the studies in a particular area. The most simple version of a literature review can be a mere summary of the sources. However, it usually features an organizational pattern and implies not only summary but also synthesis.
Theoretical Approach
Very often, a literature review becomes the basis for a theoretical framework of a research paper. In this case, the theoretical approach is the most effective way to structure the report.
Here, the sections dwell upon different issues or various aspects of one topic. For example, an overview of psychology literature on nonverbal communication can be divided into the following parts: facial expressions, postures, eye contact, gestures, touch, etc.
As with any other academic paper, the key to a successful literature review is a good outline. Below you’ll find great tips for creating a perfect outline. Just keep reading this article prepared by Custom-writing experts!
Here is a sample to make the approach clear. If the first available source dates 1995, and the most recent one was written in 2017, divide your analysis into decades: 1995 – 2000, 2001 – 2010, and 2010 – present.
When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6]. However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.
There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12]. A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13], [14]. When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15].
an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience
do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.
After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.
How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21]. This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22].
The approaches of writing a literature review include the following
Typically, there are different approaches to producing a literature review in research. A researcher should identify the type of review they intend to write as they learn how to write a literature review for a research paper. In research, a researcher is supposed to conduct intensive research on a particular topic and publish the research outcome. Apart from field studies, the research involves summarizing and interpreting previous works to develop new interpretations and get progressive results in a particular research field. Eventually, the research leads to conclusions, perceptions, interpretations, and opinions that become part of the existing information on an area of research.
Henceforth, you could create thought charts and maps to help you identify the subsections in the research and outline the most significant information that forms your study’s basis.
A literature review in research analyzes scholarly materials such as books or articles to get enough information on a particular area of research (your research topic). The analysis of these scholarly materials would mean that you provide a description, summary, and/or evaluation of the materials with primary interests in the research problem. Technically, a literature review in research aims at providing a close examination of the sources used in exploring a research problem. The review also reflects the correlation of your research and other larger fields within your area of study. Thus said, it is advisable for researchers who intend to use these scholarly materials to learn how to write a literature review for a research paper.
Systematic Review
Before you start the writing journey, you should first consider choosing and defining your topic. Ensure that you select a topic that you are completely familiar with, to ease your work while writing the literature review. Typically, defining a topic would require that you get an interesting topic that is relevant to your reader. Furthermore, ensure that you get a topic that is current and well-established with sufficient pre-existing research. This approach will help your research work easier.
Now that you can identify the different types of approaches to literature reviews, you can now learn how to write a literature review for a research paper. The first step towards understanding how to write a literature review for a research paper is to learn the basic literature review structure, outline, and format.
A literature review for a research paper provides information on how the research correlates with other studies in the field of research. An analysis of pre-existing publications helps a researcher understand the development of existing concepts, theories, or ideas, and henceforth find a starting point of their own ideas in the same field. Therefore, to correctly accomplish a literature review’s purposes, it is essential to learn how to write a literature review for a research paper. Myhomeworkwriters.com provides all the information you need to know on how to write a literature review for a research paper and much more. Thus, you can fully understand all the important aspects of writing a literature review for a research paper.