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Writing a Literature Review

A literature review does more than summarize what other scholars have written. It helps readers understand what is already known about a topic, how researchers have approached it, where important questions or disagreements remain, and how your own work contributes to the ongoing conversation.

Because literature reviews appear across disciplines and take many forms, there is no single formula for writing one. A literature review may be a stand-alone article or assignment, or it may be part of a larger research paper, thesis, dissertation, or report. Its organization and emphasis will also vary depending on your field, research question, and purpose.

Still, effective literature reviews tend to perform several important tasks. Writers must establish the context and significance of the topic, identify a problem or gap worth addressing, explain how they located or selected relevant scholarship when appropriate, synthesize sources into meaningful patterns and conversations, and help readers understand what can be concluded from the existing research.

The resources below focus on common sections and moves you may encounter when developing a literature review:

  • Introductions — Establish the topic, context, scope, and purpose of the review.
  • Problem Statements — Identify the problem, gap, tension, or unanswered question that makes further investigation necessary.
  • Methodology — Explain how sources were located, selected, evaluated, or analyzed when the type of literature review calls for a systematic approach.
  • Synthesis — Bring sources into conversation by identifying patterns, relationships, disagreements, developments, and gaps across the literature.
  • Discussion — Interpret what the literature collectively shows and explain the significance, limitations, or implications of those findings.
  • Abstracts — Give readers a concise overview of the review's purpose, approach, major findings, and significance.

You do not necessarily need to write these sections in order—or even include all of them as separately labeled sections. Think of them instead as rhetorical jobs that help transform a collection of sources into a purposeful account of what a field knows, how it knows it, and what remains to be understood.

In secondary data research, your reader wants to know not just what kinds of sources you're looking for, but also where you expect to find them. This supports your professional ethos - it signals that you know where researchers go to find credible sources.

If you've never had to do this kind of research before, you may not be aware of the databases that are available to you. Chances are, you've used search engines instead. Here's the difference:
  • A database is like a bucket that contains full texts of academic research. Different databases have different philosophies, and offer different ways of tracking who has cited that source, and whom that source has cited. Here are some examples:

    • SCOPUS: This database tends to focus on science, technology, and social science fields. It is pretty inclusive, and you can find just about any kind of academic resource here.

    • IEEE Xplore: IEEE is a publisher of several academic journals. The IEEE Explore database searches only the items published by IEEE.

    • JSTOR: This database houses mostly liberal arts secondary sources, though sometimes you might find the occasional social science article. This is generally used by researchers in literature, philosophy, and art fields.
  • A search engine is a software that searches all databases that are linked to it, and retrieves full text articles. Search engines are great to get an overview of the research surrounding your topic, but they lack specificity and can provide a lot of junk search results. Not every database is linked to these search engines, too - so even though you may be getting a lot of results, you're probably missing out on the best results. Here are the ones you're probably most familiar with:

    • Google Scholar: Google Scholar is a catch-all for any full-text "academic" item on the internet. Unfortunately, there's not much governance here - so it's not unusual for you to pull up non-peer reviewed work, student work, or even retracted articles. Also, many academic articles are subscription-based, which means you may hit a paywall when trying to access the source. You already have subscriptions to most of these articles through our library, though, so it's best to go through the library instead.

    • Summon: This is the search box on the front page of our library website. Summon *theoretically* searches all of the databases that we have access to through our library and retrieves full-text items. However, if you're only searching for full-text items, you might be missing really useful sources that could be acquired through inter-library loan.