The purposes of a literature review
Literature reviews play a crucial role in placing your work within the framework of existing knowledge, assisting in justifying your research and its relevance. Literature reviews serve a number of purposes.
To identify Gaps:
Literature reviews identify gaps in the existing research, highlighting areas that need further investigation.
To support Your Argument:
Literature reviews support your research by showing how it fits into the broader academic conversation.
To show awareness of the present state of knowledge in a particular field, including:
- seminal authors
- the main empirical research
- theoretical positions
- controversies
- breakthroughs as well as links to other related areas of knowledge
To provide a foundation for the author’s research. To do that, the literature review needs to:
- help the researcher define a hypothesis or a research question, and how answering the question will contribute to the body of knowledge;
- provide a rationale for investigating the problem and the selected methodology; and
- provide a particular theoretical lens, support the argument, or identify gaps.
Activity
Before you continue with this module, complete the quiz below to evaluate your understanding of literature reviews.
