What is a literature review?
The purpose of a literature review is to locate peer-reviewed sources that inform you of key ideas in your field of study. By ‘literature’ we mean books, academic journal articles and other sources. The information you gather from reading these sources can then be used to identify potential gaps in knowledge or to investigate new issues that may not have been noticed before. A literature review is often used to develop research questions for future research.
As a general rule, your literature review should:
- Explain why your research topic is important.
- Provide a critical analysis of the ideas in the literature rather than just describe the findings.
- Organise ideas into themes rather than by source.
- Identify similarities and differences in opinions, evidence and the findings of sources.
- Identify areas of controversy, or limitations of research methods
- Include citations of sources and a reference list or bibliography (according to your required referencing style).
The number of sources referred to in a literature review may vary. An undergraduate literature review may be a short assessment so you may only need to review a small number of sources. Alternatively, you may be given a set of sources to review, or you may be asked to find your own sources. At an honours or postgraduate level, a literature review will include a larger number of sources. Generally, the higher the word count, the greater the number of sources you are expected to include. As with any assignment or research project, it is important to discuss and determine your topic, word count and referencing style with your lecturer or supervisor before you begin.
Literature review or annotated bibliography?
Don’t confuse a literature review with an annotated bibliography! Although they are two different ways of reviewing the literature, these are two distinct genres of academic writing.
A literature review has a beginning, middle and end (like an introduction, body paragraphs and a conclusion). It requires you to analyse and evaluate key literature on a given topic - to identify, compare and contrast common themes explored in the literature.
In contrast, an annotated bibliography is a list of short descriptive summaries of readings on a particular topic or area of research. It does not compare and contrast sources. The sources are ordered in a list format according to the source reference.
