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A literature review is an integrated analysis - not just a summary - of scholarly writings that are related directly to your research question. That is, it represents the literature that provides background information on your topic and shows a correspondence between those writings and your research question. In contrast to an academic research paper, the focus of a literature review is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.
According to the APA 7th Manual, literature review articles “provide narrative summaries and evaluations of the findings or theories within a literature base” and “capture trends in the literature” (2020, p. 8).
A literature review is important because it:
The analytical features of a literature review might:
Conducting Your Literature Review by
This book is a step-by-step guide to writing a literature review, and includes tips for modifying the process as needed depending on your audience, purpose, and goals. The lessons in this book can be applied to writing the background section for a thesis or an original research publication. Literature reviews are now much more challenging to compile today than they used to be. You need a structured approach to handle the sheer volume of published research available. This book will help you formulate a strategy for making decisions about what to include and not include in your review, and produce a reliable and unbiased summary of the existing research. You will learn skills for defining research questions, using search tools and managing citations.
Writing Literature Reviews by
This useful guide educates students in the preparation of literature reviews for term projects, theses, and dissertations. The authors provide numerous examples from published reviews that illustrate the guidelines discussed throughout the book.
Chapter 3: The Literaature Review, Theory, Problem Statement, and Hypothoses by
This chapter discusses the literature review in a social work dissertation including strategies for researching and evaluating the literature, tips for completing a literature search, as well as analyzing, synthesizing, integrating the literature, and finally writing the literature review itself. In addition, the relevance of theory to social work research is examined, as is the development of the statement of the problem, issues in developing hypotheses, and defining and operationalizing measurable variables.
Chapter 3: Writing the Review of Literature for Your Study by
This user-friendly guide helps students get started on--and complete--a successful doctoral dissertation proposal by accessibly explaining the process and breaking it down into manageable steps. Steven R. Terrell demonstrates how to write each chapter of the proposal, including the problem statement, purpose statement, and research questions and hypotheses; literature review; and detailed plan for data collection and analysis. Of special utility, end-of-chapter exercises serve as building blocks for developing a full draft of an original proposal. Numerous case study examples are drawn from across the social, behavioral, and health science disciplines. Appendices present an exemplary proposal written three ways to encompass quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods designs. User-Friendly Features *"Let's Start Writing" exercises leading up to a complete proposal draft. *"Do You Understand?" checklists of key terms plus an end-of-book glossary. *End-of-chapter quizzes with answers. *Case study examples from education, psychology, health sciences, business, and information systems. *Sample proposal with three variants of the methods chapter: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods.
