What is a literature review?
A literature review is a critical analysis of the literature related to your research topic. It evaluates and critiques the literature to establish a theoretical framework for your research topic and/or identify a gap in the existing research that your research will address.
A literature review is not a summary of the literature. You need to engage deeply and critically with the literature. Your literature review should show your understanding of the literature related to your research topic and lead to presenting a rationale for your research.
A literature review focuses on:
- the context of the topic
- key concepts, ideas, theories and methodologies
- key researchers, texts and seminal works
- major issues and debates
- identifying conflicting evidence
- the main questions that have been asked around the topic
- the organisation of knowledge on the topic
- definitions, particularly those that are contested
- showing how your research will advance scholarly knowledge (generally referred to as identifying the ‘gap’).
This module will guide you through the functions of a literature review; the typical process of conducting a literature review (including searching for literature and taking notes); structuring your literature review within your thesis and organising its internal ideas; and styling the language of your literature review.
The purposes of a literature review
A literature review serves two main purposes:
1) 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.
2) 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;
- provide a particular theoretical lens, support the argument, or identify gaps.
Activity
Before you engage further with this module, try the quiz below to see how much you already know about literature reviews.
