How to Write an Introduction for a Literature Review
What Is a Literature Review | Step-past-Stride Guide & Examples
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. Information technology provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you lot to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing inquiry.
Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such equally books and periodical articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. There are 5 cardinal steps:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A good literature review doesn't simply summarize sources—information technology analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a articulate picture of the state of cognition on the discipline.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When y'all write a thesis, dissertation, or inquiry paper, you will have to deport a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:
- 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
- Prove how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a argue
You might also have to write a literature review every bit a stand-lone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the electric current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the aforementioned steps.
Writing literature reviews is a particularly of import skill if yous want to apply for graduate schoolhouse or pursue a career in inquiry.
Stride one: Search for relevant literature
Earlier you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic.
If you lot are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or inquiry paper, you lot volition search for literature related to your inquiry problem and questions.
If y'all are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will take to choose a focus and develop a central question to directly your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be accountable without collecting original data. Y'all should exist able to respond it based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a list of keywords
Start by creating a listing of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you lot're interested in, and list whatever synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:
- Your university's library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economics)
- Inspec (physics, technology and computer science)
You can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:
- AND: to find sources that contain more than i keyword (e.g. social media AND torso image AND generation Z)
- OR: to detect sources that contain i of a range of synonyms (eastward.thousand. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- Non: to exclude results containing sure terms (e.g. apple tree NOT fruit)
Read the abstract to discover out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you notice a useful book or article, y'all tin can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To place the most important publications on your topic, accept note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles go along actualization in your reading, make sure to seek them out.
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Footstep two: Evaluate and select sources
You probably won't be able to read admittedly everything that has been written on the topic—you'll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.
For each publication, enquire yourself:
- What question or problem is the author addressing?
- What are the central concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the research apply established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the report?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does information technology ostend, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
- How does the publication contribute to your agreement of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the inquiry?
Brand certain the sources you use are credible, and brand certain you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.
You can observe out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar—a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly exist included in your literature review.
The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually merely review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).
Have notes and cite your sources
As you read, you should also brainstorm the writing process. Have notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to go along track of your sources with citations to avert plagiarism. It can exist helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile total citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you lot call up what you read and saves fourth dimension later in the procedure.
Footstep iii: Identify themes, debates, and gaps
To begin organizing your literature review's argument and construction, y'all need to understand the connections and relationships betwixt the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you lot can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do sure approaches become more or less popular over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where exercise sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are in that location whatsoever influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are at that place weaknesses that demand to be addressed?
This pace will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) testify how your own enquiry will contribute to existing knowledge.
- Most research has focused on young women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- Only there is even so a lack of robust inquiry on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.
Stride 4: Outline your literature review'southward structure
There are diverse approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. You lot should have a rough idea of your strategy before yous start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, you lot can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall construction might be thematic, merely each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest approach is to trace the evolution of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid but list and summarizing sources in gild.
Try to clarify patterns, turning points and key debates that take shaped the management of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you take found some recurring cardinal themes, you lot can organize your literature review into subsections that accost dissimilar aspects of the topic.
For example, if you are reviewing literature nigh inequalities in migrant health outcomes, primal themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.
Methodological
If you depict your sources from different disciplines or fields that utilise a variety of enquiry methods, y'all might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:
- Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
- Hash out how the topic has been approached past empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Split the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is oft the foundation for a theoretical framework. Y'all tin use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.
You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical arroyo, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your inquiry.
Stride 5: Write your literature review
Similar whatever other academic text, your literature review should take an introduction, a main torso, and a conclusion. What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Body
Depending on the length of your literature review, yous might want to divide the torso into subsections. You can utilize a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.
As you write, you tin can follow these tips:
- Summarize and synthesize: requite an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
- Analyze and translate: don't just paraphrase other researchers—add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts
Determination
In the conclusion, you should summarize the cardinal findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.
When you've finished writing and revising your literature review, don't forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language practiced? Check out Scribbr's professional Proofreading & Editing service!
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Oftentimes asked questions
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:
- To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that y'all're not merely repeating what others have already washed
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved issues that your research can accost
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing enquiry and what new insights it will contribute.
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