what is a review essay

How to Write Critical Reviews

When you are asked to write a critical review of a book or article, you will need to identify, summarize, and evaluate the ideas and information the author has presented. In other words, you will be examining another person’s thoughts on a topic from your point of view.

Your stand must go beyond your “gut reaction” to the work and be based on your knowledge (readings, lecture, experience) of the topic as well as on factors such as criteria stated in your assignment or discussed by you and your instructor.

Make your stand clear at the beginning of your review, in your evaluations of specific parts, and in your concluding commentary.

Remember that your goal should be to make a few key points about the book or article, not to discuss everything the author writes.

Understanding the Assignment

To write a good critical review, you will have to engage in the mental processes of analyzing (taking apart) the work–deciding what its major components are and determining how these parts (i.e., paragraphs, sections, or chapters) contribute to the work as a whole.

Analyzing the work will help you focus on how and why the author makes certain points and prevent you from merely summarizing what the author says. Assuming the role of an analytical reader will also help you to determine whether or not the author fulfills the stated purpose of the book or article and enhances your understanding or knowledge of a particular topic.

Be sure to read your assignment thoroughly before you read the article or book. Your instructor may have included specific guidelines for you to follow. Keeping these guidelines in mind as you read the article or book can really help you write your paper!

Also, note where the work connects with what you’ve studied in the course. You can make the most efficient use of your reading and notetaking time if you are an active reader; that is, keep relevant questions in mind and jot down page numbers as well as your responses to ideas that appear to be significant as you read.

Please note: The length of your introduction and overview, the number of points you choose to review, and the length of your conclusion should be proportionate to the page limit stated in your assignment and should reflect the complexity of the material being reviewed as well as the expectations of your reader.

Write the introduction

Below are a few guidelines to help you write the introduction to your critical review.

Introduce your review appropriately

Begin your review with an introduction appropriate to your assignment.

If your assignment asks you to review only one book and not to use outside sources, your introduction will focus on identifying the author, the title, the main topic or issue presented in the book, and the author’s purpose in writing the book.

If your assignment asks you to review the book as it relates to issues or themes discussed in the course, or to review two or more books on the same topic, your introduction must also encompass those expectations.

Explain relationships

For example, before you can review two books on a topic, you must explain to your reader in your introduction how they are related to one another.

Within this shared context (or under this “umbrella”) you can then review comparable aspects of both books, pointing out where the authors agree and differ.

In other words, the more complicated your assignment is, the more your introduction must accomplish.

Finally, the introduction to a book review is always the place for you to establish your position as the reviewer (your thesis about the author’s thesis).

As you write, consider the following questions:

• Is the book a memoir, a treatise, a collection of facts, an extended argument, etc.? Is the article a documentary, a write-up of primary research, a position paper, etc.?
• Who is the author? What does the preface or foreword tell you about the author’s purpose, background, and credentials? What is the author’s approach to the topic (as a journalist? a historian? a researcher?)?
• What is the main topic or problem addressed? How does the work relate to a discipline, to a profession, to a particular audience, or to other works on the topic?
• What is your critical evaluation of the work (your thesis)? Why have you taken that position? What criteria are you basing your position on?

Provide an overview

In your introduction, you will also want to provide an overview. An overview supplies your reader with certain general information not appropriate for including in the introduction but necessary to understanding the body of the review.

Generally, an overview describes your book’s division into chapters, sections, or points of discussion. An overview may also include background information about the topic, about your stand, or about the criteria you will use for evaluation.

The overview and the introduction work together to provide a comprehensive beginning for (a “springboard” into) your review.

• What are the author’s basic premises? What issues are raised, or what themes emerge? What situation (i.e., racism on college campuses) provides a basis for the author’s assertions?
• How informed is my reader? What background information is relevant to the entire book and should be placed here rather than in a body paragraph?

Write the body

The body is the center of your paper, where you draw out your main arguments. Below are some guidelines to help you write it.

Organize using a logical plan

Organize the body of your review according to a logical plan. Here are two options:

• First, summarize, in a series of paragraphs, those major points from the book that you plan to discuss; incorporating each major point into a topic sentence for a paragraph is an effective organizational strategy. Second, discuss and evaluate these points in a following group of paragraphs. (There are two dangers lurking in this pattern–you may allot too many paragraphs to summary and too few to evaluation, or you may re-summarize too many points from the book in your evaluation section.)
• Alternatively, you can summarize and evaluate the major points you have chosen from the book in a point-by-point schema. That means you will discuss and evaluate point one within the same paragraph (or in several if the point is significant and warrants extended discussion) before you summarize and evaluate point two, point three, etc., moving in a logical sequence from point to point to point. Here again, it is effective to use the topic sentence of each paragraph to identify the point from the book that you plan to summarize or evaluate.

Questions to keep in mind as you write

With either organizational pattern, consider the following questions:

• What are the author’s most important points? How do these relate to one another? (Make relationships clear by using transitions: “In contrast,” an equally strong argument,” “moreover,” “a final conclusion,” etc.).
• What types of evidence or information does the author present to support his or her points? Is this evidence convincing, controversial, factual, one-sided, etc.? (Consider the use of primary historical material, case studies, narratives, recent scientific findings, statistics.)
• Where does the author do a good job of conveying factual material as well as personal perspective? Where does the author fail to do so? If solutions to a problem are offered, are they believable, misguided, or promising?
• Which parts of the work (particular arguments, descriptions, chapters, etc.) are most effective and which parts are least effective? Why?
• Where (if at all) does the author convey personal prejudice, support illogical relationships, or present evidence out of its appropriate context?

Keep your opinions distinct and cite your sources

Remember, as you discuss the author’s major points, be sure to distinguish consistently between the author’s opinions and your own.

Keep the summary portions of your discussion concise, remembering that your task as a reviewer is to re-see the author’s work, not to re-tell it.

And, importantly, if you refer to ideas from other books and articles or from lecture and course materials, always document your sources, or else you might wander into the realm of plagiarism.

Include only that material which has relevance for your review and use direct quotations sparingly. The Writing Center has other handouts to help you paraphrase text and introduce quotations.

Write the conclusion

You will want to use the conclusion to state your overall critical evaluation.

You have already discussed the major points the author makes, examined how the author supports arguments, and evaluated the quality or effectiveness of specific aspects of the book or article.

Now you must make an evaluation of the work as a whole, determining such things as whether or not the author achieves the stated or implied purpose and if the work makes a significant contribution to an existing body of knowledge.

Consider the following questions:

• Is the work appropriately subjective or objective according to the author’s purpose?
• How well does the work maintain its stated or implied focus? Does the author present extraneous material? Does the author exclude or ignore relevant information?
• How well has the author achieved the overall purpose of the book or article? What contribution does the work make to an existing body of knowledge or to a specific group of readers? Can you justify the use of this work in a particular course?
• What is the most important final comment you wish to make about the book or article? Do you have any suggestions for the direction of future research in the area? What has reading this work done for you or demonstrated to you?

Academic and Professional Writing

This is an accordion element with a series of buttons that open and close related content panels.

Analysis Papers

Reading Poetry

A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis

Using Literary Quotations

Play Reviews

Writing a Rhetorical Précis to Analyze Nonfiction Texts

Incorporating Interview Data

Grant Proposals

Planning and Writing a Grant Proposal: The Basics

Additional Resources for Grants and Proposal Writing

Job Materials and Application Essays

Writing Personal Statements for Ph.D. Programs

• Before you begin: useful tips for writing your essay
• Guided brainstorming exercises
• Get more help with your essay
• Frequently Asked Questions

Resume Writing Tips

CV Writing Tips

Cover Letters

Business Letters

Proposals and Dissertations

Resources for Proposal Writers

Resources for Dissertators

Research Papers

Planning and Writing Research Papers

Quoting and Paraphrasing

Writing Annotated Bibliographies

Creating Poster Presentations

Writing an Abstract for Your Research Paper

Thank-You Notes

Advice for Students Writing Thank-You Notes to Donors

Reading for a Review

Critical Reviews

Writing a Review of Literature

Scientific Reports

Scientific Report Format

Sample Lab Assignment

Writing for the Web

Writing an Effective Blog Post

Writing for Social Media: A Guide for Academics

• Peterborough

How to Write Academic Reviews

• What is a review?
• Common problems with academic reviews
• Getting started: approaches to reading and notetaking
• Understanding and analyzing the work
• Organizing and writing the review

What Is a Review?

A scholarly review describes, analyzes, and evaluates an article, book, film, or performance (through this guide we will use the term “work” to refer to the text or piece to be reviewed).  A review also shows how a work fits into its disciplines and explains the value or contribution of the work to the field.

Reviews play an important role in scholarship. They give scholars the opportunity to respond to one another’s research, ideas and interpretations. They also provide an up-to-date view of a discipline. We recommend you seek out reviews in current scholarly journals to become familiar with recent scholarship on a topic and to understand the forms review writing takes in your discipline. Published scholarly reviews are helpful models for beginner review-writers. However, we remind you that you are to write your own assessment of the work, not rely on the assessment from a review you found in a journal or on a blog.

As a review-writer, your objective is to:

• understand a work on its own terms (analyze it)
• bring your own knowledge to bear on a work (respond to it)
• critique the work while considering validity, truth, and slant (evaluate it)
• place the work in context (compare it to other works).

Common Problems with Academic Reviews

A review is not a research paper.

Rather than a research paper on the subject of the work,an academic review is an evaluation about the work’s message, strengths, and value. For example, a review of Finis Dunaway’s Seeing Green would not include your own research about media coverage of the environmental movement; instead, your review would assess Dunaway’s argument and its significance to the field.

A review is not a summary

It is important to synthesize the contents and significance of the work you review, but the main purpose of a review is to evaluate, critically analyze, or comment on the text. Keep your summary of the work brief, and make specific references to its message and evidence in your assessment of the work.

A review is not an off-the-cuff, unfair personal response

An effective review must be fair and accurate. It is important to see what is actually in front of you when your first reaction to the tone, argument, or subject of what you are reviewing is extremely negative or positive.

You will present your personal views on the work, but they must be explained and supported with evidence. Rather than writing, “I thought the book was interesting,” you can explain why the book was interesting and how it might offer new insights or important ideas. Further, you can expand on a statement such as “The movie was boring,” by explaining how it failed to interest you and pointing toward specific disappointing moments.

Getting Started: Approaches to Reading and Notetaking

Pre-reading.

Pre-reading helps a reader to see a book as a whole. Often, the acknowledgments, preface, and table of contents of a book offer insights about the book’s purpose and direction. Take time before you begin chapter one to read the introduction and conclusion, examine chapter titles, and to explore the index or references pages.

Read more about strategies for critical and efficient reading

Reverse outline

A reverse outline helps a reader analyze the content and argument of a work of non-fiction. Read each section of a text carefully and write down two things: 1) the main point or idea, and 2) its function in the text. In other words, write down what each section says and what it does. This will help you to see how the author develops their argument and uses evidence for support.

Double-entry notebook

In its simplest form, the double-entry notebook separates a page into two columns. In one column, you make observations about the work. In the other, you note your responses to the work. This notetaking method has two advantages. It forces you to make both sorts of notes — notes about the work and notes about your reaction to the work — and it helps you to distinguish between the two.

Whatever method of notetaking you choose, do take notes, even if these are scribbles in the margin. If you don’t, you might rely too heavily on the words, argument, or order of what you are reviewing when you come to write your review.                                              

Understand and Analyze the Work

It is extremely important to work toward seeing a clear and accurate picture of a work. One approach is to try to suspend your judgment for a while, focusing instead on describing or outlining a text. A student once described this as listening to the author’s voice rather than to their own.

Ask questions to support your understanding of the work.

Questions for Works of Non-Fiction

• What is the subject/topic of the work? What key ideas do you think you should describe in your review?
• What is the thesis, main theme, or main point?
• What major claims or conclusions does the author make? What issues does the work illuminate?
• What is the structure of the work? How does the author build their argument?
• What sources does the author consult? What evidence is used to support claims? Do these sources in any way “predetermine” certain conclusions?
• Is there any claim for which the evidence presented is insufficient or slight? Do any conclusions rest on evidence that may be atypical?
• How is the argument developed? How do the claims relate? What does the conclusion reveal?

Questions for Works of Fiction

• What is the main theme or message? What issues does the book illuminate?
• How does the work proceed? How does the author build their plot?
• What kind of language, descriptions, or sections of plot alert you to the themes and significance of the book?
• What does the conclusion reveal when compared with the beginning?

Read Critically

Being critical does not mean criticizing. It means asking questions and formulating answers. Critical reading is not reading with a “bad attitude.” Critical readers do not reject a text or take a negative approach to it; they inquire about a text, an author, themselves, and the context surrounding all three, and they attempt to understand how and why the author has made the particular choices they have.

Think about the Author

You can often tell a lot about an author by examining a text closely, but sometimes it helps to do a little extra research. Here are some questions about the author that would be useful to keep in mind when you are reading a text critically:

• Who is the author? What else has the author written?
• What does the author do? What experiences of the author’s might influence the writing of this book?
• What is the author’s main purpose or goal for the text? Why did they write it and what do they want to achieve?
• Does the author indicate what contribution the text makes to scholarship or literature? What does the author say about their point of view or method of approaching the subject? In other words, what position does the author take?

Think about Yourself

Because you are doing the interpreting and evaluating of a text, it is important to examine your own perspective, assumptions, and knowledge (positionality) in relation to the text. One way to do this is by writing a position statement that outlines your view of the subject of the work you are reviewing. What do you know, believe, or assume about this subject? What in your life might influence your approach to this text?

Here are some prompts that might help you generate a personal response to a book:

• I agree that ... because ...                    
• I disagree that ... because ...
• I don’t understand ...
• This reminds me of …
• I’m surprised by …                 

Another way to examine your thoughts in relation to a text is to note your initial response to the work. Consider your experience of the text – did you like it? Why or why not?

• What did I feel when I read this book? Why?
• How did I experience the style or tone of the author? How would I characterize each?
• What questions would I ask this author if I could?
• For me, what are the three best things about this book? The three worst things? Why?

Consider Context

A reviewer needs to examine the context of the book to arrive at a fair understanding and evaluation of its contents and importance. Context may include the scholarship to which this book responds or the author’s personal motive for writing. Or perhaps the context is simply contemporary society or today’s headlines. It is certainly important to consider how the work relates to the course that requires the review.

Here are some useful questions:

• What are the connections between this work and others on similar subjects? How does it relate to core concepts in my course or my discipline?
• What is the scholarly or social significance of this work? What contribution does it make to our understanding?
• What, of relevance, is missing from the work: certain kinds of evidence or methods of analysis/development? A particular theoretical approach? The experiences of certain groups?
• What other perspectives or conclusions are possible?

Once you have taken the time to thoroughly understand and analyze the work, you will have a clear perspective on its strengths and weaknesses and its value within the field. Take time to categorize your ideas and develop an outline; this will ensure your review is well organized and clear.

Organizing and Writing the Review

A review is organized around an assessment of the work or a focused message about its value to the field. Revisit your notes and consider your responses to your questions from critical reading to develop a clear statement that evaluates the work and provides an explanation for that evaluation.

For example:

X is an important work because it provides a new perspective on . . .

X’s argument is compelling because . . . ; however, it fails to address . . .

Although X claims to . . ., they make assumptions about . . . , which diminishes the impact . . .

This statement or evaluation is presented in the introduction. The body of the review works to support or explain your assessment; organize your key ideas or supporting arguments into paragraphs and use evidence from the book, article, or film to demonstrate how the work is (or is not) effective, compelling, provocative, novel, or informative.

As with all scholarly writing, a well-organized structure supports the clarity of your review. There is not a rigid formula for organization, but you may find the following guidelines to be helpful. Note that reviews do not typically include subheadings; the headings listed here serve to help you think about the main sections of your academic review.

Introduction

Introduce the work, the author (or director/producer), and the points you intend to make about this work. In addition, you should

• give relevant bibliographic information
• give the reader a clear idea of the nature, scope, and significance of the work
• indicate your evaluation of the work in a clear 1-2 sentence thesis statement

Provide background information to help your readers understand the importance of the work or the reasons for your appraisal. Background information could include:

• why the issue examined is of current interest
• other scholarship about this subject
• the author’s perspective, methodology, purpose
• the circumstances under which the book was created

Sample Introduction

Within educational research, much attention has been given to the importance of diversity and equity, and the literature is rife with studies detailing the best ways to create environments that are supportive of diverse students. In “Guidance Matters,” however, Carpenter and Diem (2015) examined these concepts in a less-studied source: policy documents related to leadership training.  Using discourse analysis, they explored the ways in which government policies concerning the training of educational administrators discussed issues of diversity and equity. While their innovative methods allowed them to reveal the ways in which current policy promotes superficial platitudes to diversity rather than a deep commitment to promoting social justice, their data analysis left many of their identified themes vague and their discussion did not provide a clear explanation of the applications of their findings.

What works in this sample introduction:

• The nature of the larger issue, how best to create diversity and equity within educational environments, is clearly laid out.
• The paragraph clearly introduces the authors and study being reviewed and succinctly explains how they have addressed the larger issue of equity and diversity in a unique way.
• The paragraph ends with a clear thesis that outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the work.

Summary of the Work

Keep the summary of the work short! A paragraph or two should be sufficient. Summarize its contents very briefly and focus on:

• the purpose of the work
• the main points of the work
• the ideas, themes, or arguments that you will evaluate or discuss in the review

Analysis and Evaluation

Analyze and explain the significance of the main points of the work. Evaluate the work, answering questions such as the following:

• Does the work do what its author claimed it would?
• Is the work valid and accurate?
• How does the work fit into scholarship in the field?
• What are your reasons for agreeing, disagreeing, liking, disliking, believing, disbelieving?

Note that this section will take up the bulk of your review and should be organized into paragraphs. Because this form of writing typically does not use subheadings, strong paragraphing, particularly the use of clear topic sentences, is essential. Read more on paragraphing.

Reviews are informed by your critical reading or viewing of a work; therefore you need to include specific evidence from the work to support your claims about its message and its impact. Your writing and  your assessment of the work will be most effective if you paraphrase or summarize the evidence you use, rather than relying on direct quotations. Be sure to follow the rules for citation in your discipline. Read more on paraphrasing and summarizing.

Sample Body Paragraph

One of the strengths of Carpenter and Diem’s  (2015) study was innovative use of  and nuanced explanation of discourse analysis. Critiquing much of the research on policy for its positivist promises of “value neutral and empirically objective” (p. 518) findings, Carpenter and Diem (2015) argued that discourse theory can provide an important lens through which to view policy and its relationship to educational outcomes.  By interrogating the “inscribed discourses of policy making” (p. 518), they showed how policy language constructs particular social meanings of concepts such as diversity and equity. Significantly, this analysis was not simply about the language used within documents; instead, Carpenter and Diem (2015) argued that the language used was directly related to reality. Their “study examine[d] how dominant discourses related to equity, and their concretization within guiding policy documents, may shape the ways in which states, local school districts, and educational leaders are asked to consider these issues in their everyday practice” (Carpenter & Diem, 2015, p. 519). Thus, through the use of discourse theory, Carpenter and Diem (2015) framed policy language, which some might consider abstract or distant from daily life, as directly connected to the experience of educational leaders.

What works in this sample body paragraph:

• The paragraph begins with a clear topic sentence that connects directly to a strength mentioned in the thesis of the review.
• The paragraph provides specific details and examples to support how and why their methods are innovative.
• The direct quotations used are short and properly integrated into the sentences.

The paragraph concludes by explaining the significance of the innovative methods to the larger work.

Conclusion and Recommendation

Give your overall assessment of the work. Explain the larger significance of your assessment. Consider who would benefit from engaging with this work.

• PRO Courses Guides New Tech Help Pro Expert Videos About wikiHow Pro Upgrade Sign In
• EDIT Edit this Article
• EXPLORE Tech Help Pro About Us Random Article Quizzes Request a New Article Community Dashboard This Or That Game Popular Categories Arts and Entertainment Artwork Books Movies Computers and Electronics Computers Phone Skills Technology Hacks Health Men's Health Mental Health Women's Health Relationships Dating Love Relationship Issues Hobbies and Crafts Crafts Drawing Games Education & Communication Communication Skills Personal Development Studying Personal Care and Style Fashion Hair Care Personal Hygiene Youth Personal Care School Stuff Dating All Categories Arts and Entertainment Finance and Business Home and Garden Relationship Quizzes Cars & Other Vehicles Food and Entertaining Personal Care and Style Sports and Fitness Computers and Electronics Health Pets and Animals Travel Education & Communication Hobbies and Crafts Philosophy and Religion Work World Family Life Holidays and Traditions Relationships Youth
• Browse Articles
• Learn Something New
• Quizzes Hot
• This Or That Game
• Train Your Brain
• Explore More
• Support wikiHow
• About wikiHow
• Log in / Sign up
• Education and Communications
• Critical Reviews

How to Write an Article Review (With Examples)

Last Updated: April 24, 2024 Fact Checked

Preparing to Write Your Review

Writing the article review, sample article reviews, expert q&a.

This article was co-authored by Jake Adams . Jake Adams is an academic tutor and the owner of Simplifi EDU, a Santa Monica, California based online tutoring business offering learning resources and online tutors for academic subjects K-College, SAT & ACT prep, and college admissions applications. With over 14 years of professional tutoring experience, Jake is dedicated to providing his clients the very best online tutoring experience and access to a network of excellent undergraduate and graduate-level tutors from top colleges all over the nation. Jake holds a BS in International Business and Marketing from Pepperdine University. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 3,108,944 times.

An article review is both a summary and an evaluation of another writer's article. Teachers often assign article reviews to introduce students to the work of experts in the field. Experts also are often asked to review the work of other professionals. Understanding the main points and arguments of the article is essential for an accurate summation. Logical evaluation of the article's main theme, supporting arguments, and implications for further research is an important element of a review . Here are a few guidelines for writing an article review.

Education specialist Alexander Peterman recommends: "In the case of a review, your objective should be to reflect on the effectiveness of what has already been written, rather than writing to inform your audience about a subject."

Article Review 101

• Read the article very closely, and then take time to reflect on your evaluation. Consider whether the article effectively achieves what it set out to.
• Write out a full article review by completing your intro, summary, evaluation, and conclusion. Don't forget to add a title, too!
• Proofread your review for mistakes (like grammar and usage), while also cutting down on needless information.

• Article reviews present more than just an opinion. You will engage with the text to create a response to the scholarly writer's ideas. You will respond to and use ideas, theories, and research from your studies. Your critique of the article will be based on proof and your own thoughtful reasoning.
• An article review only responds to the author's research. It typically does not provide any new research. However, if you are correcting misleading or otherwise incorrect points, some new data may be presented.
• An article review both summarizes and evaluates the article.

• Summarize the article. Focus on the important points, claims, and information.
• Discuss the positive aspects of the article. Think about what the author does well, good points she makes, and insightful observations.
• Identify contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies in the text. Determine if there is enough data or research included to support the author's claims. Find any unanswered questions left in the article.

• Make note of words or issues you don't understand and questions you have.
• Look up terms or concepts you are unfamiliar with, so you can fully understand the article. Read about concepts in-depth to make sure you understand their full context.

• Pay careful attention to the meaning of the article. Make sure you fully understand the article. The only way to write a good article review is to understand the article.

• With either method, make an outline of the main points made in the article and the supporting research or arguments. It is strictly a restatement of the main points of the article and does not include your opinions.
• After putting the article in your own words, decide which parts of the article you want to discuss in your review. You can focus on the theoretical approach, the content, the presentation or interpretation of evidence, or the style. You will always discuss the main issues of the article, but you can sometimes also focus on certain aspects. This comes in handy if you want to focus the review towards the content of a course.
• Review the summary outline to eliminate unnecessary items. Erase or cross out the less important arguments or supplemental information. Your revised summary can serve as the basis for the summary you provide at the beginning of your review.

• What does the article set out to do?
• What is the theoretical framework or assumptions?
• Are the central concepts clearly defined?
• How adequate is the evidence?
• How does the article fit into the literature and field?
• Does it advance the knowledge of the subject?
• How clear is the author's writing? Don't: include superficial opinions or your personal reaction. Do: pay attention to your biases, so you can overcome them.

• For example, in MLA , a citation may look like: Duvall, John N. "The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise ." Arizona Quarterly 50.3 (1994): 127-53. Print. [9] X Trustworthy Source Purdue Online Writing Lab Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines Go to source

• For example: The article, "Condom use will increase the spread of AIDS," was written by Anthony Zimmerman, a Catholic priest.

• Your introduction should only be 10-25% of your review.
• End the introduction with your thesis. Your thesis should address the above issues. For example: Although the author has some good points, his article is biased and contains some misinterpretation of data from others’ analysis of the effectiveness of the condom.

• Use direct quotes from the author sparingly.
• Review the summary you have written. Read over your summary many times to ensure that your words are an accurate description of the author's article.

• Support your critique with evidence from the article or other texts.
• The summary portion is very important for your critique. You must make the author's argument clear in the summary section for your evaluation to make sense.
• Remember, this is not where you say if you liked the article or not. You are assessing the significance and relevance of the article.
• Use a topic sentence and supportive arguments for each opinion. For example, you might address a particular strength in the first sentence of the opinion section, followed by several sentences elaborating on the significance of the point.

• This should only be about 10% of your overall essay.
• For example: This critical review has evaluated the article "Condom use will increase the spread of AIDS" by Anthony Zimmerman. The arguments in the article show the presence of bias, prejudice, argumentative writing without supporting details, and misinformation. These points weaken the author’s arguments and reduce his credibility.

• Make sure you have identified and discussed the 3-4 key issues in the article.

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://libguides.cmich.edu/writinghelp/articlereview
• ↑ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4548566/
• ↑ Jake Adams. Academic Tutor & Test Prep Specialist. Expert Interview. 24 July 2020.
• ↑ https://guides.library.queensu.ca/introduction-research/writing/critical
• ↑ https://www.iup.edu/writingcenter/writing-resources/organization-and-structure/creating-an-outline.html
• ↑ https://writing.umn.edu/sws/assets/pdf/quicktips/titles.pdf
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_works_cited_periodicals.html
• ↑ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4548565/
• ↑ https://writingcenter.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/593/2014/06/How_to_Summarize_a_Research_Article1.pdf
• ↑ https://www.uis.edu/learning-hub/writing-resources/handouts/learning-hub/how-to-review-a-journal-article
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/editing-and-proofreading/

About This Article

If you have to write an article review, read through the original article closely, taking notes and highlighting important sections as you read. Next, rewrite the article in your own words, either in a long paragraph or as an outline. Open your article review by citing the article, then write an introduction which states the article’s thesis. Next, summarize the article, followed by your opinion about whether the article was clear, thorough, and useful. Finish with a paragraph that summarizes the main points of the article and your opinions. To learn more about what to include in your personal critique of the article, keep reading the article! Did this summary help you? Yes No

• Send fan mail to authors

Reader Success Stories

Prince Asiedu-Gyan

Apr 22, 2022

Did this article help you?

Sammy James

Sep 12, 2017

Juabin Matey

Aug 30, 2017

Vanita Meghrajani

Jul 21, 2016

Nov 27, 2018

Featured Articles

Trending Articles

Watch Articles

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Do Not Sell or Share My Info
• Not Selling Info

Get all the best how-tos!

Sign up for wikiHow's weekly email newsletter

How to Write an Article Review: Tips and Examples

Did you know that article reviews are not just academic exercises but also a valuable skill in today's information age? In a world inundated with content, being able to dissect and evaluate articles critically can help you separate the wheat from the chaff. Whether you're a student aiming to excel in your coursework or a professional looking to stay well-informed, mastering the art of writing article reviews is an invaluable skill.

Short Description

In this article, our research paper writing service experts will start by unraveling the concept of article reviews and discussing the various types. You'll also gain insights into the art of formatting your review effectively. To ensure you're well-prepared, we'll take you through the pre-writing process, offering tips on setting the stage for your review. But it doesn't stop there. You'll find a practical example of an article review to help you grasp the concepts in action. To complete your journey, we'll guide you through the post-writing process, equipping you with essential proofreading techniques to ensure your work shines with clarity and precision!

What Is an Article Review: Grasping the Concept 

A review article is a type of professional paper writing that demands a high level of in-depth analysis and a well-structured presentation of arguments. It is a critical, constructive evaluation of literature in a particular field through summary, classification, analysis, and comparison.

If you write a scientific review, you have to use database searches to portray the research. Your primary goal is to summarize everything and present a clear understanding of the topic you've been working on.

Writing Involves:

• Summarization, classification, analysis, critiques, and comparison.
• The analysis, evaluation, and comparison require the use of theories, ideas, and research relevant to the subject area of the article.
• It is also worth nothing if a review does not introduce new information, but instead presents a response to another writer's work.
• Check out other samples to gain a better understanding of how to review the article.

Types of Review

When it comes to article reviews, there's more than one way to approach the task. Understanding the various types of reviews is like having a versatile toolkit at your disposal. In this section, we'll walk you through the different dimensions of review types, each offering a unique perspective and purpose. Whether you're dissecting a scholarly article, critiquing a piece of literature, or evaluating a product, you'll discover the diverse landscape of article reviews and how to navigate it effectively.

Journal Article Review

Just like other types of reviews, a journal article review assesses the merits and shortcomings of a published work. To illustrate, consider a review of an academic paper on climate change, where the writer meticulously analyzes and interprets the article's significance within the context of environmental science.

Research Article Review

Distinguished by its focus on research methodologies, a research article review scrutinizes the techniques used in a study and evaluates them in light of the subsequent analysis and critique. For instance, when reviewing a research article on the effects of a new drug, the reviewer would delve into the methods employed to gather data and assess their reliability.

Science Article Review

In the realm of scientific literature, a science article review encompasses a wide array of subjects. Scientific publications often provide extensive background information, which can be instrumental in conducting a comprehensive analysis. For example, when reviewing an article about the latest breakthroughs in genetics, the reviewer may draw upon the background knowledge provided to facilitate a more in-depth evaluation of the publication.

Need a Hand From Professionals?

Address to Our Writers and Get Assistance in Any Questions!

Formatting an Article Review

The format of the article should always adhere to the citation style required by your professor. If you're not sure, seek clarification on the preferred format and ask him to clarify several other pointers to complete the formatting of an article review adequately.

How Many Publications Should You Review?

• In what format should you cite your articles (MLA, APA, ASA, Chicago, etc.)?
• What length should your review be?
• Should you include a summary, critique, or personal opinion in your assignment?
• Do you need to call attention to a theme or central idea within the articles?
• Does your instructor require background information?

When you know the answers to these questions, you may start writing your assignment. Below are examples of MLA and APA formats, as those are the two most common citation styles.

Using the APA Format

Articles appear most commonly in academic journals, newspapers, and websites. If you write an article review in the APA format, you will need to write bibliographical entries for the sources you use:

• Web : Author [last name], A.A [first and middle initial]. (Year, Month, Date of Publication). Title. Retrieved from {link}
• Journal : Author [last name], A.A [first and middle initial]. (Publication Year). Publication Title. Periodical Title, Volume(Issue), pp.-pp.
• Newspaper : Author [last name], A.A [first and middle initial]. (Year, Month, Date of Publication). Publication Title. Magazine Title, pp. xx-xx.

Using MLA Format

• Web : Last, First Middle Initial. “Publication Title.” Website Title. Website Publisher, Date Month Year Published. Web. Date Month Year Accessed.
• Newspaper : Last, First M. “Publication Title.” Newspaper Title [City] Date, Month, Year Published: Page(s). Print.
• Journal : Last, First M. “Publication Title.” Journal Title Series Volume. Issue (Year Published): Page(s). Database Name. Web. Date Month Year Accessed.

Enhance your writing effortlessly with EssayPro.com , where you can order an article review or any other writing task. Our team of expert writers specializes in various fields, ensuring your work is not just summarized, but deeply analyzed and professionally presented. Ideal for students and professionals alike, EssayPro offers top-notch writing assistance tailored to your needs. Elevate your writing today with our skilled team at your article review writing service !

The Pre-Writing Process

Facing this task for the first time can really get confusing and can leave you unsure of where to begin. To create a top-notch article review, start with a few preparatory steps. Here are the two main stages from our dissertation services to get you started:

Step 1: Define the right organization for your review. Knowing the future setup of your paper will help you define how you should read the article. Here are the steps to follow:

• Summarize the article — seek out the main points, ideas, claims, and general information presented in the article.
• Define the positive points — identify the strong aspects, ideas, and insightful observations the author has made.
• Find the gaps —- determine whether or not the author has any contradictions, gaps, or inconsistencies in the article and evaluate whether or not he or she used a sufficient amount of arguments and information to support his or her ideas.
• Identify unanswered questions — finally, identify if there are any questions left unanswered after reading the piece.

Step 2: Move on and review the article. Here is a small and simple guide to help you do it right:

• Start off by looking at and assessing the title of the piece, its abstract, introductory part, headings and subheadings, opening sentences in its paragraphs, and its conclusion.
• First, read only the beginning and the ending of the piece (introduction and conclusion). These are the parts where authors include all of their key arguments and points. Therefore, if you start with reading these parts, it will give you a good sense of the author's main points.
• Finally, read the article fully.

These three steps make up most of the prewriting process. After you are done with them, you can move on to writing your own review—and we are going to guide you through the writing process as well.

Outline and Template

As you progress with reading your article, organize your thoughts into coherent sections in an outline. As you read, jot down important facts, contributions, or contradictions. Identify the shortcomings and strengths of your publication. Begin to map your outline accordingly.

If your professor does not want a summary section or a personal critique section, then you must alleviate those parts from your writing. Much like other assignments, an article review must contain an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Thus, you might consider dividing your outline according to these sections as well as subheadings within the body. If you find yourself troubled with the pre-writing and the brainstorming process for this assignment, seek out a sample outline.

Your custom essay must contain these constituent parts:

• Pre-Title Page - Before diving into your review, start with essential details: article type, publication title, and author names with affiliations (position, department, institution, location, and email). Include corresponding author info if needed.
• Running Head - In APA format, use a concise title (under 40 characters) to ensure consistent formatting.
• Summary Page - Optional but useful. Summarize the article in 800 words, covering background, purpose, results, and methodology, avoiding verbatim text or references.
• Title Page - Include the full title, a 250-word abstract, and 4-6 keywords for discoverability.
• Introduction - Set the stage with an engaging overview of the article.
• Body - Organize your analysis with headings and subheadings.
• Works Cited/References - Properly cite all sources used in your review.
• Optional Suggested Reading Page - If permitted, suggest further readings for in-depth exploration.
• Tables and Figure Legends (if instructed by the professor) - Include visuals when requested by your professor for clarity.

Example of an Article Review

You might wonder why we've dedicated a section of this article to discuss an article review sample. Not everyone may realize it, but examining multiple well-constructed examples of review articles is a crucial step in the writing process. In the following section, our essay writing service experts will explain why.

Looking through relevant article review examples can be beneficial for you in the following ways:

• To get you introduced to the key works of experts in your field.
• To help you identify the key people engaged in a particular field of science.
• To help you define what significant discoveries and advances were made in your field.
• To help you unveil the major gaps within the existing knowledge of your field—which contributes to finding fresh solutions.
• To help you find solid references and arguments for your own review.
• To help you generate some ideas about any further field of research.
• To help you gain a better understanding of the area and become an expert in this specific field.
• To get a clear idea of how to write a good review.

View Our Writer’s Sample Before Crafting Your Own!

Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists?

Steps for Writing an Article Review

Here is a guide with critique paper format on how to write a review paper:

Step 1: Write the Title

First of all, you need to write a title that reflects the main focus of your work. Respectively, the title can be either interrogative, descriptive, or declarative.

Step 2: Cite the Article

Next, create a proper citation for the reviewed article and input it following the title. At this step, the most important thing to keep in mind is the style of citation specified by your instructor in the requirements for the paper. For example, an article citation in the MLA style should look as follows:

Author's last and first name. "The title of the article." Journal's title and issue(publication date): page(s). Print

Abraham John. "The World of Dreams." Virginia Quarterly 60.2(1991): 125-67. Print.

Step 3: Article Identification

After your citation, you need to include the identification of your reviewed article:

• Title of the article
• Title of the journal
• Year of publication

All of this information should be included in the first paragraph of your paper.

The report "Poverty increases school drop-outs" was written by Brian Faith – a Health officer – in 2000.

Step 4: Introduction

Your organization in an assignment like this is of the utmost importance. Before embarking on your writing process, you should outline your assignment or use an article review template to organize your thoughts coherently.

• If you are wondering how to start an article review, begin with an introduction that mentions the article and your thesis for the review.
• Follow up with a summary of the main points of the article.
• Highlight the positive aspects and facts presented in the publication.
• Critique the publication by identifying gaps, contradictions, disparities in the text, and unanswered questions.

Step 5: Summarize the Article

Make a summary of the article by revisiting what the author has written about. Note any relevant facts and findings from the article. Include the author's conclusions in this section.

Step 6: Critique It

Present the strengths and weaknesses you have found in the publication. Highlight the knowledge that the author has contributed to the field. Also, write about any gaps and/or contradictions you have found in the article. Take a standpoint of either supporting or not supporting the author's assertions, but back up your arguments with facts and relevant theories that are pertinent to that area of knowledge. Rubrics and templates can also be used to evaluate and grade the person who wrote the article.

Step 7: Craft a Conclusion

In this section, revisit the critical points of your piece, your findings in the article, and your critique. Also, write about the accuracy, validity, and relevance of the results of the article review. Present a way forward for future research in the field of study. Before submitting your article, keep these pointers in mind:

• As you read the article, highlight the key points. This will help you pinpoint the article's main argument and the evidence that they used to support that argument.
• While you write your review, use evidence from your sources to make a point. This is best done using direct quotations.
• Select quotes and supporting evidence adequately and use direct quotations sparingly. Take time to analyze the article adequately.
• Every time you reference a publication or use a direct quotation, use a parenthetical citation to avoid accidentally plagiarizing your article.
• Re-read your piece a day after you finish writing it. This will help you to spot grammar mistakes and to notice any flaws in your organization.
• Use a spell-checker and get a second opinion on your paper.

The Post-Writing Process: Proofread Your Work

Finally, when all of the parts of your article review are set and ready, you have one last thing to take care of — proofreading. Although students often neglect this step, proofreading is a vital part of the writing process and will help you polish your paper to ensure that there are no mistakes or inconsistencies.

To proofread your paper properly, start by reading it fully and checking the following points:

• Punctuation
• Other mistakes

Afterward, take a moment to check for any unnecessary information in your paper and, if found, consider removing it to streamline your content. Finally, double-check that you've covered at least 3-4 key points in your discussion.

And remember, if you ever need help with proofreading, rewriting your essay, or even want to buy essay , our friendly team is always here to assist you.

Need an Article REVIEW WRITTEN?

Just send us the requirements to your paper and watch one of our writers crafting an original paper for you.

What Is A Review Article?

How to write an article review, how to write an article review in apa format.

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

Related Articles

Literature Reviews

What this handout is about.

This handout will explain what literature reviews are and offer insights into the form and construction of literature reviews in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Introduction

OK. You’ve got to write a literature review. You dust off a novel and a book of poetry, settle down in your chair, and get ready to issue a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” as you leaf through the pages. “Literature review” done. Right?

Wrong! The “literature” of a literature review refers to any collection of materials on a topic, not necessarily the great literary texts of the world. “Literature” could be anything from a set of government pamphlets on British colonial methods in Africa to scholarly articles on the treatment of a torn ACL. And a review does not necessarily mean that your reader wants you to give your personal opinion on whether or not you liked these sources.

What is a literature review, then?

A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a certain time period.

A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. And depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

But how is a literature review different from an academic research paper?

The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, and a research paper is likely to contain a literature review as one of its parts. In a research paper, you use the literature as a foundation and as support for a new insight that you contribute. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.

Why do we write literature reviews?

Literature reviews provide you with a handy guide to a particular topic. If you have limited time to conduct research, literature reviews can give you an overview or act as a stepping stone. For professionals, they are useful reports that keep them up to date with what is current in the field. For scholars, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the writer in his or her field. Literature reviews also provide a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers.

Who writes these things, anyway?

Literature reviews are written occasionally in the humanities, but mostly in the sciences and social sciences; in experiment and lab reports, they constitute a section of the paper. Sometimes a literature review is written as a paper in itself.

Let’s get to it! What should I do before writing the literature review?

If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your instructor:

• Roughly how many sources should you include?
• What types of sources (books, journal articles, websites)?
• Should you summarize, synthesize, or critique your sources by discussing a common theme or issue?
• Should you evaluate your sources?
• Should you provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history?

Find models

Look for other literature reviews in your area of interest or in the discipline and read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or ways to organize your final review. You can simply put the word “review” in your search engine along with your other topic terms to find articles of this type on the Internet or in an electronic database. The bibliography or reference section of sources you’ve already read are also excellent entry points into your own research.

Narrow your topic

There are hundreds or even thousands of articles and books on most areas of study. The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to get a good survey of the material. Your instructor will probably not expect you to read everything that’s out there on the topic, but you’ll make your job easier if you first limit your scope.

Keep in mind that UNC Libraries have research guides and to databases relevant to many fields of study. You can reach out to the subject librarian for a consultation: https://library.unc.edu/support/consultations/ .

And don’t forget to tap into your professor’s (or other professors’) knowledge in the field. Ask your professor questions such as: “If you had to read only one book from the 90’s on topic X, what would it be?” Questions such as this help you to find and determine quickly the most seminal pieces in the field.

Consider whether your sources are current

Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. In the sciences, for instance, treatments for medical problems are constantly changing according to the latest studies. Information even two years old could be obsolete. However, if you are writing a review in the humanities, history, or social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be what is needed, because what is important is how perspectives have changed through the years or within a certain time period. Try sorting through some other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to consider what is currently of interest to scholars in this field and what is not.

Strategies for writing the literature review

Find a focus.

A literature review, like a term paper, is usually organized around ideas, not the sources themselves as an annotated bibliography would be organized. This means that you will not just simply list your sources and go into detail about each one of them, one at a time. No. As you read widely but selectively in your topic area, consider instead what themes or issues connect your sources together. Do they present one or different solutions? Is there an aspect of the field that is missing? How well do they present the material and do they portray it according to an appropriate theory? Do they reveal a trend in the field? A raging debate? Pick one of these themes to focus the organization of your review.

Convey it to your reader

A literature review may not have a traditional thesis statement (one that makes an argument), but you do need to tell readers what to expect. Try writing a simple statement that lets the reader know what is your main organizing principle. Here are a couple of examples:

The current trend in treatment for congestive heart failure combines surgery and medicine. More and more cultural studies scholars are accepting popular media as a subject worthy of academic consideration.

Consider organization

You’ve got a focus, and you’ve stated it clearly and directly. Now what is the most effective way of presenting the information? What are the most important topics, subtopics, etc., that your review needs to include? And in what order should you present them? Develop an organization for your review at both a global and local level:

First, cover the basic categories

Just like most academic papers, literature reviews also must contain at least three basic elements: an introduction or background information section; the body of the review containing the discussion of sources; and, finally, a conclusion and/or recommendations section to end the paper. The following provides a brief description of the content of each:

• Introduction: Gives a quick idea of the topic of the literature review, such as the central theme or organizational pattern.
• Body: Contains your discussion of sources and is organized either chronologically, thematically, or methodologically (see below for more information on each).
• Conclusions/Recommendations: Discuss what you have drawn from reviewing literature so far. Where might the discussion proceed?

Organizing the body

Once you have the basic categories in place, then you must consider how you will present the sources themselves within the body of your paper. Create an organizational method to focus this section even further.

To help you come up with an overall organizational framework for your review, consider the following scenario:

You’ve decided to focus your literature review on materials dealing with sperm whales. This is because you’ve just finished reading Moby Dick, and you wonder if that whale’s portrayal is really real. You start with some articles about the physiology of sperm whales in biology journals written in the 1980’s. But these articles refer to some British biological studies performed on whales in the early 18th century. So you check those out. Then you look up a book written in 1968 with information on how sperm whales have been portrayed in other forms of art, such as in Alaskan poetry, in French painting, or on whale bone, as the whale hunters in the late 19th century used to do. This makes you wonder about American whaling methods during the time portrayed in Moby Dick, so you find some academic articles published in the last five years on how accurately Herman Melville portrayed the whaling scene in his novel.

Now consider some typical ways of organizing the sources into a review:

• Chronological: If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials above according to when they were published. For instance, first you would talk about the British biological studies of the 18th century, then about Moby Dick, published in 1851, then the book on sperm whales in other art (1968), and finally the biology articles (1980s) and the recent articles on American whaling of the 19th century. But there is relatively no continuity among subjects here. And notice that even though the sources on sperm whales in other art and on American whaling are written recently, they are about other subjects/objects that were created much earlier. Thus, the review loses its chronological focus.
• By publication: Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend. For instance, you could order a review of literature on biological studies of sperm whales if the progression revealed a change in dissection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies.
• By trend: A better way to organize the above sources chronologically is to examine the sources under another trend, such as the history of whaling. Then your review would have subsections according to eras within this period. For instance, the review might examine whaling from pre-1600-1699, 1700-1799, and 1800-1899. Under this method, you would combine the recent studies on American whaling in the 19th century with Moby Dick itself in the 1800-1899 category, even though the authors wrote a century apart.
• Thematic: Thematic reviews of literature are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time. However, progression of time may still be an important factor in a thematic review. For instance, the sperm whale review could focus on the development of the harpoon for whale hunting. While the study focuses on one topic, harpoon technology, it will still be organized chronologically. The only difference here between a “chronological” and a “thematic” approach is what is emphasized the most: the development of the harpoon or the harpoon technology.But more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. For instance, a thematic review of material on sperm whales might examine how they are portrayed as “evil” in cultural documents. The subsections might include how they are personified, how their proportions are exaggerated, and their behaviors misunderstood. A review organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point made.
• Methodological: A methodological approach differs from the two above in that the focusing factor usually does not have to do with the content of the material. Instead, it focuses on the “methods” of the researcher or writer. For the sperm whale project, one methodological approach would be to look at cultural differences between the portrayal of whales in American, British, and French art work. Or the review might focus on the economic impact of whaling on a community. A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed. Once you’ve decided on the organizational method for the body of the review, the sections you need to include in the paper should be easy to figure out. They should arise out of your organizational strategy. In other words, a chronological review would have subsections for each vital time period. A thematic review would have subtopics based upon factors that relate to the theme or issue.

Sometimes, though, you might need to add additional sections that are necessary for your study, but do not fit in the organizational strategy of the body. What other sections you include in the body is up to you. Put in only what is necessary. Here are a few other sections you might want to consider:

• Current Situation: Information necessary to understand the topic or focus of the literature review.
• History: The chronological progression of the field, the literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
• Methods and/or Standards: The criteria you used to select the sources in your literature review or the way in which you present your information. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed articles and journals.

Questions for Further Research: What questions about the field has the review sparked? How will you further your research as a result of the review?

Begin composing

Once you’ve settled on a general pattern of organization, you’re ready to write each section. There are a few guidelines you should follow during the writing stage as well. Here is a sample paragraph from a literature review about sexism and language to illuminate the following discussion:

However, other studies have shown that even gender-neutral antecedents are more likely to produce masculine images than feminine ones (Gastil, 1990). Hamilton (1988) asked students to complete sentences that required them to fill in pronouns that agreed with gender-neutral antecedents such as “writer,” “pedestrian,” and “persons.” The students were asked to describe any image they had when writing the sentence. Hamilton found that people imagined 3.3 men to each woman in the masculine “generic” condition and 1.5 men per woman in the unbiased condition. Thus, while ambient sexism accounted for some of the masculine bias, sexist language amplified the effect. (Source: Erika Falk and Jordan Mills, “Why Sexist Language Affects Persuasion: The Role of Homophily, Intended Audience, and Offense,” Women and Language19:2).

Use evidence

In the example above, the writers refer to several other sources when making their point. A literature review in this sense is just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence to show that what you are saying is valid.

Be selective

Select only the most important points in each source to highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to mention should relate directly to the review’s focus, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological.

Use quotes sparingly

Falk and Mills do not use any direct quotes. That is because the survey nature of the literature review does not allow for in-depth discussion or detailed quotes from the text. Some short quotes here and there are okay, though, if you want to emphasize a point, or if what the author said just cannot be rewritten in your own words. Notice that Falk and Mills do quote certain terms that were coined by the author, not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. But if you find yourself wanting to put in more quotes, check with your instructor.

Summarize and synthesize

Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each paragraph as well as throughout the review. The authors here recapitulate important features of Hamilton’s study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study’s significance and relating it to their own work.

Keep your own voice

While the literature review presents others’ ideas, your voice (the writer’s) should remain front and center. Notice that Falk and Mills weave references to other sources into their own text, but they still maintain their own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with their own ideas and their own words. The sources support what Falk and Mills are saying.

Use caution when paraphrasing

When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be sure to represent the author’s information or opinions accurately and in your own words. In the preceding example, Falk and Mills either directly refer in the text to the author of their source, such as Hamilton, or they provide ample notation in the text when the ideas they are mentioning are not their own, for example, Gastil’s. For more information, please see our handout on plagiarism .

Revise, revise, revise

Draft in hand? Now you’re ready to revise. Spending a lot of time revising is a wise idea, because your main objective is to present the material, not the argument. So check over your review again to make sure it follows the assignment and/or your outline. Then, just as you would for most other academic forms of writing, rewrite or rework the language of your review so that you’ve presented your information in the most concise manner possible. Be sure to use terminology familiar to your audience; get rid of unnecessary jargon or slang. Finally, double check that you’ve documented your sources and formatted the review appropriately for your discipline. For tips on the revising and editing process, see our handout on revising drafts .

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Jones, Robert, Patrick Bizzaro, and Cynthia Selfe. 1997. The Harcourt Brace Guide to Writing in the Disciplines . New York: Harcourt Brace.

Lamb, Sandra E. 1998. How to Write It: A Complete Guide to Everything You’ll Ever Write . Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

Rosen, Leonard J., and Laurence Behrens. 2003. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook , 5th ed. New York: Longman.

Troyka, Lynn Quittman, and Doug Hesse. 2016. Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers , 11th ed. London: Pearson.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Make a Gift

Review Essays for the Biological Sciences

A review essay for the biological sciences serves to discuss and synthesize key findings on a particular subject. Review papers are helpful to the writer and their colleagues in gaining critical awareness in specialized fields that may or may not be their own.

This guide explains what a review essay is and identifies several approaches to writing a review essay. Although much of the information is geared directly to the biological sciences, it is generally applicable to review essays in all fields.

What is a Review Essay?

A review essay is a synthesis of primary sources (mainly research papers presented in academic journals) on a given topic. A biological review essay demonstrates that the writer has thorough understanding of the literature and can formulate a useful analysis. While no new research is presented by the writer, the field benefits from the review by recieving a new perspective. There are several approaches one may take when writing a biological review:

A State of the art review

A state of the art review considers mainly the most current research in a given area. The review may offer new perspectives on an issue or point out an area in need of further research.

A Historical review

A historical review is a survey of the development of a particular field of study. It may examine the early stages of the field, key findings to present, key theoretical models and their evolution, etc.

A Comparison of perspectives review

A comparison of perspectives review contrasts various ways of looking at a certain topic. If in fact there is a debate over some process or idea, a comparison of perspectives review may illustrate the research that supports both sides. A comparison of perspectives review may introduce a new perspective by way of comparing it to another.

A Synthesis of two fields review

Many times researchers in different fields may be working on similar problems. A synthesis of two fields review provides insights into a given topic based on a review of the literature from two or more disciplines.

A Theoretical model building review

A theoretical model building review examines the literature within a given area with the intention of developing new theoretical assumptions.

Key considerations for writing a biological review essay

This guide will inform you of certain things not to miss when writing a review essay. It will also give you some information about using and documenting your sources.

Keep your focus narrow.

When writing a review essay it is important to keep the scope of the topic narrow enough so that you can discuss it thoroughly. For example a topic such as air quality in factories could be narrowed significantly to something like carbon dioxide levels in auto manufacturing plants .

A good way to narrow your focus is to start with a broad topic that is of some interest to you, then read some of the literature in the field. Look for a thread of the discussion that points to a more specific topic.

Analyze, synthesize, and interpret.

A review essay is not a pure summary of the information you read for your review. You are required to analyze, synthesize, and interpret the information you read in some meaningful way.

It is not enough to simply present the material you have found, you must go beyond that and explain its relevance and significance to the topic at hand.

Establish a clear thesis from the onset of your writing and examine which pieces of your reading help you in developing and supporting the ideas in your thesis.

Use only academic sources.

A review essay reviews the academic body of literature—articles and research presented in academic journals. Lay periodicals such as, Discover , Scientific America , or Popular Science , are not adequate sources for an academic review essay.

If you are having trouble finding the academic journals in your field, ask one of your professors or a reference librarian.

Document your sources.

The material that you discuss in a review essay is obviously not your own, therefore it is crucial to document your sources properly. Proper documentation is crucial for two reasons: 1. It prevents the writer from being accused of plagiarism and 2. It gives the reader the opportunity to locate the sources the writer has reviewed because they may find them valuable in their own academic pursuits. Proper documentation depends on which style guide you are following.

Quote sparingly and properly.

No one wants to read a paper that is simply a string of quotes; reserve direct quotations for when you want to create a big impact. Often times the way a quote is written will not fit with the language or the style of your paper so paraphrase the authors words carefully and verbage as necessary to create a well formed paragraph.

Choose an informative title.

The title you choose for your review essay should give some indication of what lies ahead for the reader. You might consider the process you took in narrowing your topic to help you with your title—think of the title as something specific rather than a vague representation of your paper's topic. For example the title Wastewater Treatment might be more informative if rewritten as The Removal of Cloroform Bacteria as Practiced by California's Municipal Water Treatment Facilities .

Consider your audience.

More than likely your audience will be your academic peers, therefore you can make a couple assumptions and choose a writing style that suits the audience. Though your audience may lack the detailed knowledge you have about your topic, they do have similar background knowledge to you. You can assume that you audience understands much of the technical language you have to use to write about your topic and you do not have to go into great detail about background information.

Elements of a review essay

This guide explains each section of a review essay and gives specific information about what should be included in each.

On the title page include the title, your name, and the date. Your instructor may have additional requirements (such as the course number, etc.) so be sure to follow the guidelines on the assignment sheet. Professional journals may also have more specific requirements for the title page.

An abstract is a brief summary of your review. The abstract should include only the main points of your review. Think of the abstract as a chance for the reader to preview your paper and decide if they want to read on for the details.

Introduction

The introduction of your review should accomplish three things:

• It may sound redundant to "introduce" your topic in the introduction, but often times writer's fail to do so. Let the reader in on background information specific to the topic, define terms that may be unfamiliar to them, explain the scope of the discussion, and your purpose for writing the review.
• Think of your review essay as a statement in the larger conversation of your academic community. Your review is your way of entering into that conversation and it is important to briefly address why your review is relevant to the discussion. You may feel the relevance is obvious because you are so familiar with the topic, but your readers have not yet established that familiarity.
• The thesis is the main idea that you want to get across to your reader. your thesis should be a clear statement of what you intend to prove or illustrate by your review. By revealing your thesis in the introduction the reader knows what to expect in the rest of the paper.

The discussion section is the body of your paper. The discussion section contains information that develops and supports your thesis. While there is no particular form that a discussion section must take there are several considerations that a writer must follow when building a discussion.

• A review essay is not simply a summary of literature you have reviewed. Be careful not to leave out your own analysis of the ideas presented in the literature. Synthesize the material from all the works—what are the connections you see, or the connections you are trying to illustrate, among your readings.

A review essay is not a pure summary of the information you read for your review. You are required to analyze, synthesize, and interpret the information you read in some meaningful way. It is not enough to simply present the material you have found, you must go beyond that and explain its relevance and significance to the topic at hand. Establish a clear thesis from the onset of your writing and examine which pieces of your reading help you in developing and supporting the ideas in your thesis.

• Keep your discussion focused on your topic and more importantly your thesis. Don't let tangents or extraneous material get in the way of a concise, coherent discussion. A well focused paper is crucial in getting your message across to your reader.
• Keeping your points organized makes it easier for the reader to follow along and make sense of your review. Start each paragraph with a topic sentence that relates back to your thesis. The headings used for this guide give you some idea of how to organize the overall paper, but as far as the discussion section goes use meaningful subheadings that relate to your content to organize your points.
• Your thesis should illustrate your objectives in writing the review and your discussion should serve to accomplish your objectives. Make sure your keep your discussion related to the thesis in order to meet your objectives. If you find that your discussion does not relate so much to your thesis, don't panic, you might want to revise your thesis instead of reworking the discussion.

Conclusions

Because the conclusions section often gets left for last it is often the weakest part of a student review essay. It is as crucial a part of the paper as any and should be treated as such.

A good conclusion should illustrate the key connections between your major points and your thesis as well as they key connections between your thesis and the broader discussion—what is the significance of your paper in a larger context? Make some conclusions —where have you arrived as a result of writing this paper?

Be careful not to present any new information in the conclusion section.

Here you report all the works you have cited in your paper. The format for a references page varies by discipline as does how you should cite your references within the paper.

Citation Information

Neal Bastek. (1994-2024). Review Essays for the Biological Sciences. The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/writing/guides/.

Copyright Information

Copyright © 1994-2024 Colorado State University and/or this site's authors, developers, and contributors . Some material displayed on this site is used with permission.

• How To Write A Review: Cambridge B2 First

• Posted on 24/07/2019
• Categories: Blog
• Tags: B2 First , Cambridge Exams , FCE , First Certificate , Resources to learn English , Writing

Students who are taking their B2 First Certificate exam (FCE) will be asked to do two pieces of writing within an 80 minute time limit. Part 1 is always an essay . Part 2 is where you can get a bit more creative. You might, for example, be asked to write a letter, a report or a review, all of which have their own style and set guidelines.

When writing a review it can be difficult to know where to start. But don’t be afraid! We are here to help you every step of the way.

Remember a review could be for a book, a film, a magazine, a restaurant or even a product .

Three steps to writing a great review

Let’s start with something simple. Imagine. You turn over the page to your writing part 2 and you see this question:

Question taken from Cambridge Assessment English website . (Feb 2018)

Step One: Make a plan

The first thing to do is to make a plan, just like we did in our B2 First essay guidelines .

Think of a book you read in which the main character behaved in a surprising way. This could be surprising in a good way, where the character does something amazing and helps somebody. Or maybe there’s a twist at the end and the character does something really shocking. Either way take some time to really think about your choice.

E.g. I’m going to choose The Great Gatsby, because I had to read the book 3 times when I was at school and I’ve seen the film so I feel like I know it really well .

The structure

Next, think of the structure. Consider all the parts of the question and use that to help organise your review. Make notes about the following:

• An interesting title
• A catchy introduction
• A summary of the plot
• A surprising moment
• Your recommendation

Remember you’re going to want to separate these with clear paragraphs that are going to help the examiner read to the end without getting a headache.

You also need to consider the tone and how the review should sound to the reader. Remember this is for a magazine. Think about all the magazines you like to read. You want to sound chatty and grab the reader’s attention, but not bore them to sleep. Think semi-formal but friendly!

Useful Vocabulary

Now brainstorm some useful vocabulary for your chosen book, including lots of adjectives. Avoid using boring adjectives like good or bad . It’s much more exciting to say ‘amazing’ and ‘disappointing’ or ‘ terrific ’ and ‘terrible’ .

Here’s some more useful vocabulary to get you started:

superficial / deceptive / fascinating / unbelievable / rich / lonely / kind / reserved/ to be set in / to be written by / prosperity / characters / jazz age / protagonist / atmosphere / author / chapter / ending / fictional towns / prohibition / novel / on the outskirts / sad story.

Your next step is to think of some linking phrases. These are going to help tie together your thoughts and bring your review to life!

• Overall if you like…
• I was pleasantly surprised by…
• In fact…
• What I disliked the most was…
• The book contains…
• As well as…
• This well-written book…
• Unbelievably…

Step Two: Write it

Once you have a solid plan, writing your review should be easy!

First start with an interesting title. E.g. The Unexpected Anti-Hero. It relates to both the book that’s being reviewed and the question. It’s also short and snappy .

Next write an engaging introduction. Maybe start with a rhetorical question, for example:

Are you a fan of the Jazz Age? Then this is the book for you!

Or a general statement about the book that will hook the reader:

The Great Gatsby is a classic, with many twists and turns.

You could also give some background information. Here we use the past simple:

The Great Gatsby was written by F.S.Fitzgerald and is set in prosperous Long Island in 1922.

The second paragraph should summarise the plot (note – we usually describe a story in present tense ):

Gatsby is a mysterious character, he has big extravagant parties, and we never know if we can trust him.

The third paragraph is where we introduce the surprising moment and reveal what the main character did and why it was surprising:

• The most shocking part is when…
• I couldn’t believe it when…
• It was so surprising when…

In the fourth paragraph, give a recommendation! Here the examiner wants to hear your overall opinion. It can be something simple:

• I strongly recommend..

Or something more inventive:

• I wouldn’t read the novel again because…
• Everyone should read this immediately!

But don’t forget to say why!

Step Three: Check it

Now you have your winning book review it’s time to check for all those little (and big) mistakes.

Make sure you check:

• You’ve answered all parts of the question.
• It is easy to read.
• Your spelling is correct.
• You’ve used the 3rd person(s).
• You have used punctuation.
• There’s a variety of nouns and adjectives.
• Pick a book you know quite well! Whether it’s Harry Potter or The Hunger Games , make sure you have lots to say about it!
• Don’t be afraid to give both negative and positive opinions!
• Experiment with using first person and try addressing the reader with ‘you’.
• Read lots of real authentic reviews online, anything from holidays to music concerts, exhibitions to video games!
• Remember to put some of your own personality into your review. Have some fun with it and good luck!

Follow the links for some excellent phrases and vocabulary for other types of reviews.

Restaurant Reviews

Film Reviews

TV / Theatre Reviews

Exhibition & Concert Reviews

Here are some more sample questions for you to practice on your own:

Choose one and post your reviews in the comments section.

Glossary for Language Learners

Find the following words in the article and then write down any new ones you didn’t know.

Twist (n): : a sudden change in a story that you do not expect..

Chatty (adj): having a friendly style.

Avoid doing something (v): to intentionally not do something.

Terrific (adj): excellent.

Snappy (adj): concise.

Hook (v): to catch.

adj = adjective

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Email (required)

8 Hidden Benefits of Being Bilingual

• By: oxfordadmin
• Posted on 17/07/2019

4 Past Tenses and When to Use Them

• Posted on 31/07/2019

Related Post

A Guide to English Accents Aro

Countries can have extremely different English accents despite sharing the same language. Just take the word ‘water’... Read More

Passing Cambridge C2 Proficien

Many sections of the Cambridge Proficiency are multiple-choice, so Part 2 of the Reading and Use of English can seem cha... Read More

Exploring the Impact of AI in

Gone are the days of learning from phrasebooks and filling in worksheets for homework. Now students have access to a wid... Read More

Everything You Need To Know Ab

Although you learn plural nouns early on, they can be challenging. There are many rules and exceptions to remember plus ... Read More

The Importance of English For

No matter where you live, you’ve probably experienced record-breaking temperatures and severe weather. You may have se... Read More

Discovering Barcelona Through

We all know that Barcelona is a fantastic city to live in. You only need to spend the afternoon wandering around one of ... Read More

8 New Words To Improve Your Vo

The arrival of a new year presents an ideal opportunity to work on your language goals. Whether you’re preparing for a... Read More

Learning English through Chris

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! If you resisted the urge to sing that line instead of saying it, then, we... Read More

24 Christmas Phrases for Joyfu

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and what better way to get ready for the festive period than by learning some typical Chr... Read More

3 Easy Ways To Use Music To Im

Are you ready to embark on your latest journey towards mastering the English language? We all know that music is there f... Read More

Grammar Guide – Understandin

Do you sometimes feel a bit lost when deciding which tense to use? Are you a little unsure of the differences between th... Read More

Halloween Humour: Jokes, Puns

We all need a break from time to time. Sometimes we’re up to our eyeballs in projects at work, and we just need a mome... Read More

English for Business: 7 Ways L

If you’re interested in getting a promotion at work, earning a higher salary or landing your dream job, then working o... Read More

A Beginner’s Guide to Ch

Understanding the need for exams   An official exam is a fantastic way to demonstrate your English. Why? Firstly,... Read More

English Tongue Twisters to Imp

One of the most fun ways to practise and improve your pronunciation is with tongue twisters. That’s because they’re ... Read More

25 years of Oxford House – O

We all know that fantastic feeling we have after completing an academic year: nine months of English classes, often twic... Read More

Guide to the Cambridge C2 Prof

Are you working towards the Cambridge C2 Proficiency (CPE) exam? Have you been having sleepless nights thinking about wh... Read More

9 Tips For Communicating With

When travelling to or living in an English-speaking country, getting to know the local people can greatly enhance your e... Read More

Are you preparing for the Cambridge C2 Proficiency (CPE) writing exam? If those pre-exam jitters have started to appear,... Read More

English Vocabulary For Getting

Are you feeling bored of the way your hair looks? Perhaps it’s time for a new you. All you need to do is make an appoi... Read More

5 Spelling Rules For Comparati

Messi or Ronaldo? Pizza or sushi? Going to the cinema or bingeing on a series at home? A beach holiday or a walking trip... Read More

Are you preparing for the Cambridge C2 Proficiency (CPE) writing exam? If so, you may be feeling a little nervous and co... Read More

Improve your English pronuncia

What are some of the trickiest words to pronounce in English? Well, we’ve compiled a useful list of ten of the most di... Read More

Using Language Reactor To Lear

If you love watching Netflix series and videos on YouTube to learn English, then you need to download the Language React... Read More

Are you preparing for the Cambridge C2 Proficiency (CPE) exam? Would you like to know some tips to help you feel more at... Read More

How to use ChatGPT to practise

Are you on the lookout for an extra way to practise your English? Do you wish you had an expert available at 2 a.m. that... Read More

Well done. You’ve been moving along your English language journey for some time now. You remember the days of telling ... Read More

Tips for the IELTS listening s

Are you preparing for the IELTS exam and need some help with the listening section? If so, then you’ll know that the l... Read More

7 new English words to improve

A new year is a perfect opportunity to focus on your language goals. Maybe you are working towards an official exam. Per... Read More

How to Write a C1 Advanced Ema

Did you know that there are two parts to the C1 Advanced Writing exam? Part 1 is always a mandatory . Part 2 has ... Read More

5 Interesting Christmas tradit

When you think of the word Christmas, what springs to mind? For most people, it will be words like home, family and trad... Read More

How to write a C1 Advanced Rep

Are you preparing for the Cambridge C1 Advanced exam and need a hand with writing your report/proposal for Part 2 of the... Read More

5 of the best apps to improve

Would you like to improve your English listening skills? With all the technology that we have at our fingertips nowadays... Read More

Tips for the IELTS Reading sec

Looking for some tips to get a high band score in the IELTS Academic Reading exam? If so, then you’re in the right pla... Read More

The 5 best Halloween movies to

Boo! Are you a fan of Halloween? It’s that scary time of year again when the creepy creatures come out to play, and th... Read More

How to Write a Review for Camb

Are you planning to take the Cambridge C1 Advanced (CAE) exam? If so, you will need to complete two pieces of writin... Read More

How To Use Relative Pronouns i

Today we’re taking a look at some English grammar that sometimes trips up language learners. In fact, we’ve just use... Read More

How To Get Top Marks: Cambridg

So you’re taking the ? If so, you’ll know that you have four sections to prepare for: speaking, reading and use of E... Read More

Travel Vocabulary To Get Your

Summer is here and we can’t wait to go on our summer holidays! If you’re thinking about travelling overseas this yea... Read More

How To Get A High Score In The

So you’re preparing for the ! From wanting to live and work abroad to going to university in an English-speaking count... Read More

10 English Idioms To Take To T

Is there anything better than cooling off in the sea on a hot summer’s day? Well, if you live in Barcelona you hav... Read More

Tips for IELTS speaking sectio

Are you preparing for the IELTS test? If so, you’ll need to do the speaking section. While many people find speaking t... Read More

How to use 6 different English

Just when you think English couldn’t get any more confusing, we introduce you to English pronouns! The reason why peop... Read More

How to get top marks: B2 First

Congratulations – you’ve made it to the B2 First Reading and Use of English Part 7! Yet, before we get too excited, ... Read More

5 Of The Best Apps For Improvi

Speaking is often thought to be the hardest skill to master when learning English. What’s more, there are hundreds of ... Read More

Do you like putting together puzzles? If so, your problem solving skills can actually help you with B2 First Reading and... Read More

8 Vocabulary Mistakes Spanish

If you ask a Spanish speaker what they find difficult about English language learning, they may mention false friends an... Read More

How To Get Top Marks: B2 First

Picture this: You’re in your B2 First exam and you’ve finished the Use of English part. You can put it behind you fo... Read More

12 Business Phrasal Verbs to K

Want to improve your English for professional reasons? You’re in the right place. When working in English, it’s comm... Read More

How to use articles (a, an, th

Knowing what articles are and when to use them in English can be difficult for language learners to pick up. Especially ... Read More

Are you preparing for ? Reading and Use of English Part 4 may not be your cup of tea – in fact most students feel quit... Read More

Passing B2 First Part 3: Readi

Are you studying for the B2 First exam? You’re in the right place! In this series of blogs we want to show you al... Read More

8 new English words you need f

New words spring up each year! They often come from popular culture, social and political issues, and innovations in tec... Read More

7 of the Best Apps for Learnin

If you find yourself commuting often and spending a lot of time on the bus, you’ll most likely turn towards playing ga... Read More

The B2 First is one of the most popular English exams for students of English. It is a recognised qualification that can... Read More

4 Different Types Of Modal Ver

What are modal verbs? They are not quite the same as regular verbs such as play, walk and swim. Modal verbs are a type o... Read More

So you’ve decided to take the ! Formerly known as FCE or the First Certificate, this is by far most popular exam. Whe... Read More

Useful Expressions For Negotia

A lot of our global business is conducted in English. So, there’s a strong chance you may have to learn how to negotia... Read More

Passing C1 Advanced Part 8: Re

If you’re wondering how to do Part 8 of the Reading and Use of English paper, you’re in the right place! After s... Read More

The Difference Between IELTS G

You’ve probably heard of . It’s the world’s leading test for study, work and migration after all. And as the world... Read More

Passing C1 Advanced Part 7: Re

Welcome to Part 7 of the Reading and Use of English paper. This task is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. One where you have ... Read More

The Benefits Of Learning Engli

Who said learning English was just for the young? You're never too old to learn something new. There are plenty of benef... Read More

So, you’re preparing to take the . You’ve been studying for each of the four sections; reading, writing, speaking an... Read More

6 Reels Accounts to Learn Engl

Are you looking for ways to learn English during the summer holidays? We’ve got you covered – Instagram Reels is a n... Read More

Passing Cambridge C1 Advanced

Well done you! You’ve made it to Part 6 of the Reading and Use of English exam. Not long to go now – just three mor... Read More

8 Resources To Help Beginner E

Learning a new language is hard, but fun. If you are learning English but need some help, our monthly course is what y... Read More

5 Famous Speeches To Help you

Everyone likes listening to inspiring speeches. Gifted speakers have a way of making people want to listen and take acti... Read More

How To Write A B2 First Formal

Dear reader… We sincerely hope you enjoyed our previous blog posts about the Writing section of the B2 First. As promi... Read More

4 Conditionals In English And

Conditionals? Is that something you use after shampooing your hair? Not quite. You may have heard your English teacher t... Read More

After racing through the first four parts of the Cambridge English Reading and Use of English paper, you’ve managed t... Read More

7 Of The Best Apps For Learnin

There are roughly 170,000 words in use in the English language. Thankfully, most native English speakers only have a voc... Read More

How to write a B2 First inform

You're probably very familiar with sending emails (and sometimes letters) in your first language. But how about in Engli... Read More

How can I teach my kids Englis

Keep kids’ minds sharp over the Easter holidays with some entertaining, educational activities in English. There are l... Read More

How Roxana went from Beginner

Roxana Milanes is twenty five and from Cuba. She began English classes back in May 2019 at Oxford House, and since then ... Read More

4 Future Tenses In English And

“Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.” - Doc Brown, Back to the future. Just like the and... Read More

10 Business Idioms For The Wor

Business idioms are used throughout the workplace. In meetings, conversations and even whilst making at the coffee mac... Read More

5 Tips For Reading The News In

We spend hours consuming the news. With one click of a button we have access to thousands of news stories all on our pho... Read More

How To Write a Report: Cambrid

Imagine the scene. It’s exam day. You’re nearly at the end of your . You’ve just finished writing Part 1 - , and n... Read More

8 English Words You Need For 2

Back in December 2019, we sat down and attempted to make a list of . No one could have predicted the year that was about... Read More

5 Christmas Movies On Netflix

Christmas movies are one of the best things about the holiday season. They’re fun, they get you in the mood for the ho... Read More

MigraCode: An Inspiring New Pa

Oxford House are extremely proud to announce our partnership with MigraCode - a Barcelona-based charity which trains ref... Read More

The Ultimate Guide To Video Co

The age of telecommunication is well and truly here. Most of our business meetings now take place via video conferencing... Read More

6 Pronunciation Mistakes Spani

One of the biggest challenges for Spanish speakers when learning English is pronunciation. Often it’s a struggle to pr... Read More

6 Ways You Can Learn English w

“Alexa, what exactly are you?” Alexa is a virtual AI assistant owned by Amazon. She is voice-activated - like Sir... Read More

Passing Cambridge C1 Advanced:

Okay, take a deep breath. We’re about to enter the danger zone of the Cambridge exam - Reading and Use of English Par... Read More

What’s new at Oxford House f

Welcome to the new school year! It’s great to have you back. We’d like to remind you that , and classes are all st... Read More

European Languages Day: Where

The 26th of September is . It’s a day to celebrate Europe’s rich linguistic diversity and show the importance of lan... Read More

Back To School: 9 Tips For Lan

It’s the start of a new academic term and new courses are about to begin. This is the perfect opportunity to set your ... Read More

How to Maximise Your Online Co

If there’s one good thing to come out of this year, it’s that learning a language has never been so easy or accessib... Read More

How To Learn English With TikT

Are you bored of Facebook? Tired of Instagram? Don’t feel part of the Twitter generation? Perhaps what you’re lookin... Read More

A Brief Guide To Different Bri

It’s a fact! The UK is obsessed with the way people talk. And with , it’s no surprise why. That’s right, accents a... Read More

Study English This Summer At O

Summer is here! And more than ever, we’re in need of a bit of sunshine. But with travel restrictions still in place, m... Read More

5 Reasons To Learn English Out

As Barcelona and the rest of Spain enters the ‘new normality’, it’s time to plan ahead for the summer. Kids and te... Read More

5 Free Online Resources For Ca

Are you preparing for a Cambridge English qualification? Have you devoured all of your past papers and need some extra e... Read More

6 Different Uses Of The Word �

The word ‘get’ is one of the most common and versatile verbs in English. It can be used in lots of different ways, a... Read More

What Are The 4 Present Tenses

There are three main verb tenses in English - , the present and the future - which each have various forms and uses. Tod... Read More

5 Of The Best Netflix Series T

On average, Netflix subscribers spend streaming their favourite content. With so many binge-worthy series out there, it... Read More

Continue Studying Online At Ox

Due to the ongoing emergency lockdown measures imposed by the Spanish Government . We don’t know when we will be a... Read More

Five Ways To celebrate Sant Jo

The feast of Sant Jordi is one of Barcelona’s most popular and enduring celebrations. Sant Jordi is the patron saint o... Read More

What’s It Like To Study Onli

Educational institutions all over the world have shut their doors. From nurseries to universities, business schools to l... Read More

6 Benefits of Learning English

Whatever your new year’s resolution was this year, it probably didn’t involve staying at home all day. For many of u... Read More

9 Tips For Studying A Language

With the recent outbreak of Covid-19, many of us may have to gather our books and study from home. Schools are clos... Read More

10 Ways To Learn English At Ho

Being stuck inside can make you feel like you’re going crazy. But why not use this time to your advantage, and work on... Read More

Important Information –

Dear students, Due to the recent emergency measures from the Government concerning COVID-19, Oxford House premises wi... Read More

7 Books You Should Read To Imp

Reading is one of the best ways to practice English. It’s fun, relaxing and helps you improve your comprehension skill... Read More

Your Guide To Moving To The US

So that’s it! It’s decided, you’re moving to the USA. It’s time to hike the soaring mountains, listen to country... Read More

How to write a C1 Advanced Ess

The is an excellent qualification to aim for if you’re thinking of studying or working abroad. It’s recognised by u... Read More

Small Talk For Business Englis

Like it or not, small talk is an important part of business. Whether it’s in a lift, at a conference, in a meeting roo... Read More

English Vocabulary For Going O

It’s time for that famous celebration of love and romance - Valentine’s Day! It is inspired by the sad story of Sain... Read More

IELTS: Writing Part 2 –

When it comes to exams, preparation is the key to success - and the IELTS Writing Paper Part 2 is no exception! It is wo... Read More

5 Unmissable Events at Oxford

At Oxford House, we know learning a language extends beyond the classroom. It’s important to practise your skills in m... Read More

Am I ready for the C1 Advanced

Congratulations! You’ve passed your Cambridge B2 First exam. It was a hard road but you did it. Now what’s next? Som... Read More

Ireland is known as the Emerald Isle. When you see its lush green landscape and breathtaking views, it’s easy to see w... Read More

How SMART Goals Can Help You I

New year, new you. As one year ends and another begins, many of us like to set ourselves goals in order to make our live... Read More

15 New English Words You Need

Each year new words enter the English language. Some are added to dictionaries like . Others are old words that are give... Read More

Our Year In Review: Top 10 Blo

2019 went by in a flash - and what a year it’s been! We’re just as excited to be looking back on the past 12 months ... Read More

Telephone Interviews In Englis

Telephone interviews in English can seem scary. Employers often use them to filter-out candidates before the face-to-fa... Read More

How to Write a Great Article i

Writing in your only language can be a challenge, but writing in another language can be a complete nightmare ! Where do... Read More

A Black Friday Guide to Shoppi

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. Traditionally, it signals the start of the Christmas shopping period. Expect... Read More

Passing C1 Advanced: Part 3 Re

The (CAE) is a high-level qualification, designed to show that candidates are confident and flexible language users who... Read More

AI Translators: The Future Of

Many people believe that artificial intelligence (AI) translators are surpassing human translators in their ability to a... Read More

8 Of The Best Apps For Learnin

Apps are a great tool for learning English. They are quick, easy to access and fun. It’s almost like having a mini cla... Read More

6 Ways To Improve Your Speakin

There are four linguistic skills that you utilise when learning a new language: reading, writing speaking and listening.... Read More

So, you’ve moved onto Part 3, and after completing Part 2 it’s probably a welcome relief to be given some help with ... Read More

8 Resources To Build Your Busi

Whether it’s in meetings, telephone conversations or networking events, you’ll find specific vocabulary and buzzword... Read More

5 Ways to Become a Better Lear

It’s time for some back-to-school motivation. The new school year is about to start and everyone is feeling refreshed ... Read More

Our 10 Favourite YouTubers To

Haven’t you heard? Nobody is watching the TV anymore - 2019 is the year of the YouTuber! If you’re an English langu... Read More

So, you’ve completed the of your Cambridge C1 Advanced (CAE). Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy the rest of the e... Read More

The Secret French Words Hidden

“The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.” This phrase was attributed to George W. B... Read More

The Ultimate Guide To Gràcia

The Gràcia Festival, or , is an annual celebration taking place in the lovely, bohemian neighbourhood of Gràcia in upt... Read More

5 Things To Do In Barcelona In

Barcelona residents will often tell you than nothing happens in August. It’s too hot and everyone escapes to little vi... Read More

4 Past Tenses and When to Use

Do you have difficulty with the past tenses in English? Do you know the difference between the past simple and past perf... Read More

8 Hidden Benefits of Being Bil

Unless you were raised to be bilingual, speaking two languages can require years of study and hard work. Even once you�... Read More

7 Films to Practise Your Engli

What’s better than watching a fantastic, original-language movie in a theatre? Watching a fantastic, original-language... Read More

The 10 Best Instagram Accounts

Ever wonder how much time you spend on your phone a day? According to the latest studies, the average person spends on ... Read More

Challenge Yourself This Summer

Here comes the sun! That’s right, summer is on its way and, for many, that means a chance to take a well-deserved brea... Read More

You’ve done the hard part and finally registered for your , congratulations! Now all you need to do is pass it! H... Read More

These 5 Soft Skills Will Boost

Everyone is talking about soft skills. They are the personal traits that allow you to be mentally elastic, to adapt to n... Read More

Which English Exam Is Right Fo

Are you struggling to decide which English language exam to take? You’re not alone: with so many different options on ... Read More

Passing C2 Proficiency: A Guid

We’re sure you’ve done a great job answering the questions for of your . But now you’re faced with a completely d... Read More

Sant Jordi – Dragons, Bo

Imagine you have woken up in Barcelona for the first time in your life. You walk outside and you notice something unusua... Read More

5 Ways To Improve Your Listeni

Have you ever put on an English radio station or podcast and gone to sleep, hoping that when you wake up in the morning ... Read More

The Simple Guide To Communicat

What’s the most challenging thing about going on holiday in an English speaking country? Twenty years ago you might ha... Read More

Stop Making These 7 Grammar Mi

No matter how long you've been learning a language, you're likely to make a mistake every once in a while. The big ones ... Read More

How To Pass Your First Job Int

Passing a job interview in a language that’s not your mother tongue is always a challenge – but however daunting i... Read More

5 Ways To Practise Your Speaki

“How many languages do you speak?” This is what we ask when we want to know about someone’s language skills... Read More

You have survived the Use of English section of your , but now you are faced with a long text full of strange language, ... Read More

Improve Your English Accent Wi

Turn on a radio anywhere in the world and it won’t take long before you’re listening to an English song. And, if you... Read More

10 English Expressions To Fall

It’s nearly Valentine’s day and love is in the air at Oxford House. We’ll soon be surrounded by heart-shaped ballo... Read More

7 Graded Readers To Help You P

Graded readers are adaptations of famous stories, or original books aimed at language learners. They are written to help... Read More

6 Tools To Take Your Writing T

Written language is as important today as it has ever been. Whether you want to prepare for an , to respond to or it’... Read More

EF Report: Do Spanish Schools

The new year is here and many of us will be making promises about improving our language skills in 2019. However, how ma... Read More

Our 10 Most Popular Blog Posts

It’s been a whirlwind 2018. We’ve made so many amazing memories - from our twentieth-anniversary party to some enter... Read More

Time For A Career Change? Here

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to get a job in an international company? Perhaps you’ve thought about tr... Read More

Eaquals Accreditation: A Big S

We are delighted to be going through the final stages of our accreditation, which will help us provide the best languag... Read More

A Guide To The Cambridge Engli

Making the decision to do a Cambridge English language qualification can be intimidating. Whether you’re taking it bec... Read More

8 Top Tips To Get The Most Out

A language exchange (or Intercambio in Spanish) is an excellent way to practise English outside of the classroom. The a... Read More

The Haunted History And Terrib

The nights are drawing in and the leaves are falling from the trees. As our minds turn to the cold and frosty winter nig... Read More

Why Oxford House Is More Than

If you’re a student at , you’ll know it is far more than just a language academy. It’s a place to socialise, make ... Read More

10 Crazy Things You Probably D

From funny bananas, super long words and excitable foxes, our latest infographic explores 10 intriguing facts about the ... Read More

Meet our Director of Studies &

If you’ve been studying at Oxford House for a while there’s a good chance that you’ll recognise Judy - with her bi... Read More

Which English Course Is Right

The new school year is about to begin and many of you are probably thinking that it’s about time to take the plunge an... Read More

5 Ways To Get Over The Holiday

We head off on vacation full of excitement and joy. It’s a time to explore somewhere new, relax and spend time with ou... Read More

10 Essential Aussie Expression

Learning English is difficult! With its irregular verbs, tricky pronunciation and even harder spelling, lots of students... Read More

5 Great Apps To Give Your Engl

The next time you’re walking down the street, in a waiting room, or on public transport in Barcelona take a look aroun... Read More

Here’s Why You Should Move T

Many students have aspirations to move abroad. This might be for a number of reasons such as to find a new job, to impro... Read More

Improving Your Pronunciation W

What do English, Maori, Vietnamese and Zulu have in common? Along with another , they all use the . If your first la... Read More

How To Improve Your English Us

Netflix has changed the way we spend our free time. We don’t have to wait a week for a new episode of our favourite TV... Read More

Oxford House Community: Meet O

The year has flown by and we are already into the second week of our summer intensive courses. Today we look back at th... Read More

6 Amazing Events to Make It an

Things are hotting up in Barcelona. There’s so much to see and do during the summer months that it’s hard to know wh... Read More

How to Improve Your English Ov

The long summer holiday is almost here and we’ve got some top tips on how you can keep up your English over the summer... Read More

World Cup Vocabulary: Let’s

Football, football, football: the whole world is going crazy for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar! The beautiful game i... Read More

The 10 Characteristics Of A �

Learning a second language has a lot in common with learning to play an instrument or sport. They all require frequent p... Read More

Catch Your Child’s Imaginati

Imagine, for a moment, taking a cooking class in a language you didn’t know - it could be Japanese, Greek, Russian. It... Read More

Exam Day Tips: The Written Pap

Exams are nerve-wracking. Between going to class, studying at home and worrying about the results, it’s easy to forget... Read More

10 Reasons to Study English at

Learning a second language, for many people, is one of the best decisions they ever make. Travel, work, culture, educati... Read More

Shadowing: A New Way to Improv

Speech shadowing is an advanced language learning technique. The idea is simple: you listen to someone speaking and you ... Read More

The Best Websites to Help Your

Our children learn English at school from a young age - with some even starting basic language classes from as early as ... Read More

15 Useful English Expressions

When was the last time you painted the town red or saw a flying pig? We wouldn’t be surprised if you are scratchin... Read More

Help Your Teens Practise Engli

Teenagers today are definitely part of the smartphone generation and many parents are concerned about the amount of time... Read More

IELTS: Writing Part 1 –

Are you taking an IELTS exam soon? Feeling nervous about the writing paper? Read this article for some top tips and usef... Read More

Business skills: How to delive

Love them or hate them, at some point we all have to give a business presentation. Occasionally we have to deliver them ... Read More

10 phrasal verbs to help you b

A lot of students think English is easy to learn - that is until they encounter phrasal verbs! We are sure you have hear... Read More

6 Unbelievably British Easter

Have you heard of these fascinating British Easter traditions? Great Britain is an ancient island, full of superstition... Read More

Guide to getting top marks in

Your is coming to an end and exam day is fast approaching. It’s about time to make sure you are prepared for what man... Read More

4 Ways English Words are Born

Have you ever wondered where English words come from? There are a whopping 171,476 words in the . From aardvark to zyzz... Read More

Writing an effective essay: Ca

Students take language certifications like the Cambridge B2 First qualification for lots of different reasons. You might... Read More

5 Powerful Tools to Perfect Yo

Foreign accent and understanding When you meet someone new, what’s the first thing you notice? Is it how they look?... Read More

Essential Ski Vocabulary [Info

Are you a ski-fanatic that spends all week dreaming about white-capped peaks, fluffy snow and hearty mountain food? ... Read More

5 Tips to Get the Best Out of

Quizlet, Duolingo, Busuu...there are lots of apps on the market nowadays to help you learn and improve your English. But... Read More

10 False Friends in English an

Is English really that difficult? English is a Germanic language, which means it has lots of similarities with Germa... Read More

How to Improve your English wi

If you’ve been studying English for a long time, you’ve probably tried lots of different ways of learning the langua... Read More

Myths and Mysteries of the Eng

Learning another language as an adult can be frustrating. We’re problem-solvers. We look for patterns in language and ... Read More

10 Ways to Improve your Englis

Every year is the same. We promise ourselves to eat more healthily, exercise more and save money. It all seems very easy... Read More

10 English words you need for

Languages are constantly on the move and English is no exception! As technology, culture and politics evolve, we’re fa... Read More

Catalan Christmas Vs British C

All countries are proud of their quirky traditions and this is no more evident than . In South Africa they eat deep-fri... Read More

9 Ideas To Kickstart Your Read

You’ve heard about the four skills: reading, writing, and . Some might be more important to you than others. Although... Read More

How to Write the Perfect Busin

Business is all about communication. Whether it’s colleagues, clients or suppliers, we spend a big chunk of our workin... Read More

10 Phrasal Verbs You Should Le

Why are phrasal verbs so frustrating? It’s like they’ve been sent from the devil to destroy the morale of English la... Read More

How to Ace the Cambridge Speak

Exams are terrifying! The big day is here and after all that studying and hard work, it’s finally time to show what y... Read More

7 Podcasts To Improve Your Lis

Speaking in a foreign language is hard work. Language learners have to think about pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary... Read More

IELTS: Your Ticket to the Worl

Have you ever thought about dropping everything to go travelling around the world? Today, more and more people are quit... Read More

6 Language Hacks to Learn Engl

It’s October and you’ve just signed up for an English course. Maybe you want to pass an official exam. Maybe you nee... Read More

5 Reasons to Learn English in

Learning English is more fun when you do it in a fantastic location like Barcelona. Find out why we think this is the pe... Read More

FAQ Cambridge courses and Exam

  Is it better to do the paper-based or the computer-based exam? We recommend the computer-based exam to our stud... Read More

Cambridge English Exams or IEL

What exactly is the difference between an IELTS exam and a Cambridge English exam such as the First (FCE) or Advanced (C... Read More

Oxford House Language School C/Diputación 279, Bajos (entre Pau Claris y Paseo de Gracia). 08007 - Barcelona (Eixample) Tel: 93 174 00 62 | Fax: 93 488 14 05 [email protected]

Oxford TEFL Barcelona Oxford House Prague Oxford TEFL Jobs

Legal Notice – Cookie Policy Ethical channel

• Remember Me

Privacy Overview

Review articles: purpose, process, and structure

• Published: 02 October 2017
• Volume 46 , pages 1–5, ( 2018 )

Cite this article

• Robert W. Palmatier 1 ,
• Mark B. Houston 2 &
• John Hulland 3  

233k Accesses

444 Citations

64 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Many research disciplines feature high-impact journals that are dedicated outlets for review papers (or review–conceptual combinations) (e.g., Academy of Management Review , Psychology Bulletin , Medicinal Research Reviews ). The rationale for such outlets is the premise that research integration and synthesis provides an important, and possibly even a required, step in the scientific process. Review papers tend to include both quantitative (i.e., meta-analytic, systematic reviews) and narrative or more qualitative components; together, they provide platforms for new conceptual frameworks, reveal inconsistencies in the extant body of research, synthesize diverse results, and generally give other scholars a “state-of-the-art” snapshot of a domain, often written by topic experts (Bem 1995 ). Many premier marketing journals publish meta-analytic review papers too, though authors often must overcome reviewers’ concerns that their contributions are limited due to the absence of “new data.” Furthermore, relatively few non-meta-analysis review papers appear in marketing journals, probably due to researchers’ perceptions that such papers have limited publication opportunities or their beliefs that the field lacks a research tradition or “respect” for such papers. In many cases, an editor must provide strong support to help such review papers navigate the review process. Yet, once published, such papers tend to be widely cited, suggesting that members of the field find them useful (see Bettencourt and Houston 2001 ).

In this editorial, we seek to address three topics relevant to review papers. First, we outline a case for their importance to the scientific process, by describing the purpose of review papers . Second, we detail the review paper editorial initiative conducted over the past two years by the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science ( JAMS ), focused on increasing the prevalence of review papers. Third, we describe a process and structure for systematic ( i.e. , non-meta-analytic) review papers , referring to Grewal et al. ( 2018 ) insights into parallel meta-analytic (effects estimation) review papers. (For some strong recent examples of marketing-related meta-analyses, see Knoll and Matthes 2017 ; Verma et al. 2016 ).

Purpose of review papers

In their most general form, review papers “are critical evaluations of material that has already been published,” some that include quantitative effects estimation (i.e., meta-analyses) and some that do not (i.e., systematic reviews) (Bem 1995 , p. 172). They carefully identify and synthesize relevant literature to evaluate a specific research question, substantive domain, theoretical approach, or methodology and thereby provide readers with a state-of-the-art understanding of the research topic. Many of these benefits are highlighted in Hanssens’ ( 2018 ) paper titled “The Value of Empirical Generalizations in Marketing,” published in this same issue of JAMS.

The purpose of and contributions associated with review papers can vary depending on their specific type and research question, but in general, they aim to

Resolve definitional ambiguities and outline the scope of the topic.

Provide an integrated, synthesized overview of the current state of knowledge.

Identify inconsistencies in prior results and potential explanations (e.g., moderators, mediators, measures, approaches).

Evaluate existing methodological approaches and unique insights.

Develop conceptual frameworks to reconcile and extend past research.

Describe research insights, existing gaps, and future research directions.

Not every review paper can offer all of these benefits, but this list represents their key contributions. To provide a sufficient contribution, a review paper needs to achieve three key standards. First, the research domain needs to be well suited for a review paper, such that a sufficient body of past research exists to make the integration and synthesis valuable—especially if extant research reveals theoretical inconsistences or heterogeneity in its effects. Second, the review paper must be well executed, with an appropriate literature collection and analysis techniques, sufficient breadth and depth of literature coverage, and a compelling writing style. Third, the manuscript must offer significant new insights based on its systematic comparison of multiple studies, rather than simply a “book report” that describes past research. This third, most critical standard is often the most difficult, especially for authors who have not “lived” with the research domain for many years, because achieving it requires drawing some non-obvious connections and insights from multiple studies and their many different aspects (e.g., context, method, measures). Typically, after the “review” portion of the paper has been completed, the authors must spend many more months identifying the connections to uncover incremental insights, each of which takes time to detail and explicate.

The increasing methodological rigor and technical sophistication of many marketing studies also means that they often focus on smaller problems with fewer constructs. By synthesizing these piecemeal findings, reconciling conflicting evidence, and drawing a “big picture,” meta-analyses and systematic review papers become indispensable to our comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon, among both academic and practitioner communities. Thus, good review papers provide a solid platform for future research, in the reviewed domain but also in other areas, in that researchers can use a good review paper to learn about and extend key insights to new areas.

This domain extension, outside of the core area being reviewed, is one of the key benefits of review papers that often gets overlooked. Yet it also is becoming ever more important with the expanding breadth of marketing (e.g., econometric modeling, finance, strategic management, applied psychology, sociology) and the increasing velocity in the accumulation of marketing knowledge (e.g., digital marketing, social media, big data). Against this backdrop, systematic review papers and meta-analyses help academics and interested managers keep track of research findings that fall outside their main area of specialization.

JAMS’ review paper editorial initiative

With a strong belief in the importance of review papers, the editorial team of JAMS has purposely sought out leading scholars to provide substantive review papers, both meta-analysis and systematic, for publication in JAMS . Many of the scholars approached have voiced concerns about the risk of such endeavors, due to the lack of alternative outlets for these types of papers. Therefore, we have instituted a unique process, in which the authors develop a detailed outline of their paper, key tables and figures, and a description of their literature review process. On the basis of this outline, we grant assurances that the contribution hurdle will not be an issue for publication in JAMS , as long as the authors execute the proposed outline as written. Each paper still goes through the normal review process and must meet all publication quality standards, of course. In many cases, an Area Editor takes an active role to help ensure that each paper provides sufficient insights, as required for a high-quality review paper. This process gives the author team confidence to invest effort in the process. An analysis of the marketing journals in the Financial Times (FT 50) journal list for the past five years (2012–2016) shows that JAMS has become the most common outlet for these papers, publishing 31% of all review papers that appeared in the top six marketing journals.

As a next step in positioning JAMS as a receptive marketing outlet for review papers, we are conducting a Thought Leaders Conference on Generalizations in Marketing: Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses , with a corresponding special issue (see www.springer.com/jams ). We will continue our process of seeking out review papers as an editorial strategy in areas that could be advanced by the integration and synthesis of extant research. We expect that, ultimately, such efforts will become unnecessary, as authors initiate review papers on topics of their own choosing to submit them to JAMS . In the past two years, JAMS already has increased the number of papers it publishes annually, from just over 40 to around 60 papers per year; this growth has provided “space” for 8–10 review papers per year, reflecting our editorial target.

Consistent with JAMS ’ overall focus on managerially relevant and strategy-focused topics, all review papers should reflect this emphasis. For example, the domains, theories, and methods reviewed need to have some application to past or emerging managerial research. A good rule of thumb is that the substantive domain, theory, or method should attract the attention of readers of JAMS .

The efforts of multiple editors and Area Editors in turn have generated a body of review papers that can serve as useful examples of the different types and approaches that JAMS has published.

Domain-based review papers

Domain-based review papers review, synthetize, and extend a body of literature in the same substantive domain. For example, in “The Role of Privacy in Marketing” (Martin and Murphy 2017 ), the authors identify and define various privacy-related constructs that have appeared in recent literature. Then they examine the different theoretical perspectives brought to bear on privacy topics related to consumers and organizations, including ethical and legal perspectives. These foundations lead in to their systematic review of privacy-related articles over a clearly defined date range, from which they extract key insights from each study. This exercise of synthesizing diverse perspectives allows these authors to describe state-of-the-art knowledge regarding privacy in marketing and identify useful paths for research. Similarly, a new paper by Cleeren et al. ( 2017 ), “Marketing Research on Product-Harm Crises: A Review, Managerial Implications, and an Agenda for Future Research,” provides a rich systematic review, synthesizes extant research, and points the way forward for scholars who are interested in issues related to defective or dangerous market offerings.

Theory-based review papers

Theory-based review papers review, synthetize, and extend a body of literature that uses the same underlying theory. For example, Rindfleisch and Heide’s ( 1997 ) classic review of research in marketing using transaction cost economics has been cited more than 2200 times, with a significant impact on applications of the theory to the discipline in the past 20 years. A recent paper in JAMS with similar intent, which could serve as a helpful model, focuses on “Resource-Based Theory in Marketing” (Kozlenkova et al. 2014 ). The article dives deeply into a description of the theory and its underlying assumptions, then organizes a systematic review of relevant literature according to various perspectives through which the theory has been applied in marketing. The authors conclude by identifying topical domains in marketing that might benefit from additional applications of the theory (e.g., marketing exchange), as well as related theories that could be integrated meaningfully with insights from the resource-based theory.

Method-based review papers

Method-based review papers review, synthetize, and extend a body of literature that uses the same underlying method. For example, in “Event Study Methodology in the Marketing Literature: An Overview” (Sorescu et al. 2017 ), the authors identify published studies in marketing that use an event study methodology. After a brief review of the theoretical foundations of event studies, they describe in detail the key design considerations associated with this method. The article then provides a roadmap for conducting event studies and compares this approach with a stock market returns analysis. The authors finish with a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the event study method, which in turn suggests three main areas for further research. Similarly, “Discriminant Validity Testing in Marketing: An Analysis, Causes for Concern, and Proposed Remedies” (Voorhies et al. 2016 ) systematically reviews existing approaches for assessing discriminant validity in marketing contexts, then uses Monte Carlo simulation to determine which tests are most effective.

Our long-term editorial strategy is to make sure JAMS becomes and remains a well-recognized outlet for both meta-analysis and systematic managerial review papers in marketing. Ideally, review papers would come to represent 10%–20% of the papers published by the journal.

Process and structure for review papers

In this section, we review the process and typical structure of a systematic review paper, which lacks any long or established tradition in marketing research. The article by Grewal et al. ( 2018 ) provides a summary of effects-focused review papers (i.e., meta-analyses), so we do not discuss them in detail here.

Systematic literature review process

Some review papers submitted to journals take a “narrative” approach. They discuss current knowledge about a research domain, yet they often are flawed, in that they lack criteria for article inclusion (or, more accurately, article exclusion), fail to discuss the methodology used to evaluate included articles, and avoid critical assessment of the field (Barczak 2017 ). Such reviews tend to be purely descriptive, with little lasting impact.

In contrast, a systematic literature review aims to “comprehensively locate and synthesize research that bears on a particular question, using organized, transparent, and replicable procedures at each step in the process” (Littell et al. 2008 , p. 1). Littell et al. describe six key steps in the systematic review process. The extent to which each step is emphasized varies by paper, but all are important components of the review.

Topic formulation . The author sets out clear objectives for the review and articulates the specific research questions or hypotheses that will be investigated.

Study design . The author specifies relevant problems, populations, constructs, and settings of interest. The aim is to define explicit criteria that can be used to assess whether any particular study should be included in or excluded from the review. Furthermore, it is important to develop a protocol in advance that describes the procedures and methods to be used to evaluate published work.

Sampling . The aim in this third step is to identify all potentially relevant studies, including both published and unpublished research. To this end, the author must first define the sampling unit to be used in the review (e.g., individual, strategic business unit) and then develop an appropriate sampling plan.

Data collection . By retrieving the potentially relevant studies identified in the third step, the author can determine whether each study meets the eligibility requirements set out in the second step. For studies deemed acceptable, the data are extracted from each study and entered into standardized templates. These templates should be based on the protocols established in step 2.

Data analysis . The degree and nature of the analyses used to describe and examine the collected data vary widely by review. Purely descriptive analysis is useful as a starting point but rarely is sufficient on its own. The examination of trends, clusters of ideas, and multivariate relationships among constructs helps flesh out a deeper understanding of the domain. For example, both Hult ( 2015 ) and Huber et al. ( 2014 ) use bibliometric approaches (e.g., examine citation data using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis techniques) to identify emerging versus declining themes in the broad field of marketing.

Reporting . Three key aspects of this final step are common across systematic reviews. First, the results from the fifth step need to be presented, clearly and compellingly, using narratives, tables, and figures. Second, core results that emerge from the review must be interpreted and discussed by the author. These revelatory insights should reflect a deeper understanding of the topic being investigated, not simply a regurgitation of well-established knowledge. Third, the author needs to describe the implications of these unique insights for both future research and managerial practice.

A new paper by Watson et al. ( 2017 ), “Harnessing Difference: A Capability-Based Framework for Stakeholder Engagement in Environmental Innovation,” provides a good example of a systematic review, starting with a cohesive conceptual framework that helps establish the boundaries of the review while also identifying core constructs and their relationships. The article then explicitly describes the procedures used to search for potentially relevant papers and clearly sets out criteria for study inclusion or exclusion. Next, a detailed discussion of core elements in the framework weaves published research findings into the exposition. The paper ends with a presentation of key implications and suggestions for the next steps. Similarly, “Marketing Survey Research Best Practices: Evidence and Recommendations from a Review of JAMS Articles” (Hulland et al. 2017 ) systematically reviews published marketing studies that use survey techniques, describes recent trends, and suggests best practices. In their review, Hulland et al. examine the entire population of survey papers published in JAMS over a ten-year span, relying on an extensive standardized data template to facilitate their subsequent data analysis.

Structure of systematic review papers

There is no cookie-cutter recipe for the exact structure of a useful systematic review paper; the final structure depends on the authors’ insights and intended points of emphasis. However, several key components are likely integral to a paper’s ability to contribute.

Depth and rigor

Systematic review papers must avoid falling in to two potential “ditches.” The first ditch threatens when the paper fails to demonstrate that a systematic approach was used for selecting articles for inclusion and capturing their insights. If a reader gets the impression that the author has cherry-picked only articles that fit some preset notion or failed to be thorough enough, without including articles that make significant contributions to the field, the paper will be consigned to the proverbial side of the road when it comes to the discipline’s attention.

Authors that fall into the other ditch present a thorough, complete overview that offers only a mind-numbing recitation, without evident organization, synthesis, or critical evaluation. Although comprehensive, such a paper is more of an index than a useful review. The reviewed articles must be grouped in a meaningful way to guide the reader toward a better understanding of the focal phenomenon and provide a foundation for insights about future research directions. Some scholars organize research by scholarly perspectives (e.g., the psychology of privacy, the economics of privacy; Martin and Murphy 2017 ); others classify the chosen articles by objective research aspects (e.g., empirical setting, research design, conceptual frameworks; Cleeren et al. 2017 ). The method of organization chosen must allow the author to capture the complexity of the underlying phenomenon (e.g., including temporal or evolutionary aspects, if relevant).

Replicability

Processes for the identification and inclusion of research articles should be described in sufficient detail, such that an interested reader could replicate the procedure. The procedures used to analyze chosen articles and extract their empirical findings and/or key takeaways should be described with similar specificity and detail.

We already have noted the potential usefulness of well-done review papers. Some scholars always are new to the field or domain in question, so review papers also need to help them gain foundational knowledge. Key constructs, definitions, assumptions, and theories should be laid out clearly (for which purpose summary tables are extremely helpful). An integrated conceptual model can be useful to organize cited works. Most scholars integrate the knowledge they gain from reading the review paper into their plans for future research, so it is also critical that review papers clearly lay out implications (and specific directions) for research. Ideally, readers will come away from a review article filled with enthusiasm about ways they might contribute to the ongoing development of the field.

Helpful format

Because such a large body of research is being synthesized in most review papers, simply reading through the list of included studies can be exhausting for readers. We cannot overstate the importance of tables and figures in review papers, used in conjunction with meaningful headings and subheadings. Vast literature review tables often are essential, but they must be organized in a way that makes their insights digestible to the reader; in some cases, a sequence of more focused tables may be better than a single, comprehensive table.

In summary, articles that review extant research in a domain (topic, theory, or method) can be incredibly useful to the scientific progress of our field. Whether integrating the insights from extant research through a meta-analysis or synthesizing them through a systematic assessment, the promised benefits are similar. Both formats provide readers with a useful overview of knowledge about the focal phenomenon, as well as insights on key dilemmas and conflicting findings that suggest future research directions. Thus, the editorial team at JAMS encourages scholars to continue to invest the time and effort to construct thoughtful review papers.

Barczak, G. (2017). From the editor: writing a review article. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 34 (2), 120–121.

Article   Google Scholar  

Bem, D. J. (1995). Writing a review article for psychological bulletin. Psychological Bulletin, 118 (2), 172–177.

Bettencourt, L. A., & Houston, M. B. (2001). Assessing the impact of article method type and subject area on citation frequency and reference diversity. Marketing Letters, 12 (4), 327–340.

Cleeren, K., Dekimpe, M. G., & van Heerde, H. J. (2017). Marketing research on product-harm crises: a review, managerial implications. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45 (5), 593–615.

Grewal, D., Puccinelli, N. M., & Monroe, K. B. (2018). Meta-analysis: error cancels and truth accrues. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 46 (1).

Hanssens, D. M. (2018). The value of empirical generalizations in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 46 (1).

Huber, J., Kamakura, W., & Mela, C. F. (2014). A topical history of JMR . Journal of Marketing Research, 51 (1), 84–91.

Hulland, J., Baumgartner, H., & Smith, K. M. (2017). Marketing survey research best practices: evidence and recommendations from a review of JAMS articles. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-017-0532-y .

Hult, G. T. M. (2015). JAMS 2010—2015: literature themes and intellectual structure. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43 (6), 663–669.

Knoll, J., & Matthes, J. (2017). The effectiveness of celebrity endorsements: a meta-analysis. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45 (1), 55–75.

Kozlenkova, I. V., Samaha, S. A., & Palmatier, R. W. (2014). Resource-based theory in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 42 (1), 1–21.

Littell, J. H., Corcoran, J., & Pillai, V. (2008). Systematic reviews and meta-analysis . New York: Oxford University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Martin, K. D., & Murphy, P. E. (2017). The role of data privacy in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45 (2), 135–155.

Rindfleisch, A., & Heide, J. B. (1997). Transaction cost analysis: past, present, and future applications. Journal of Marketing, 61 (4), 30–54.

Sorescu, A., Warren, N. L., & Ertekin, L. (2017). Event study methodology in the marketing literature: an overview. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45 (2), 186–207.

Verma, V., Sharma, D., & Sheth, J. (2016). Does relationship marketing matter in online retailing? A meta-analytic approach. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44 (2), 206–217.

Voorhies, C. M., Brady, M. K., Calantone, R., & Ramirez, E. (2016). Discriminant validity testing in marketing: an analysis, causes for concern, and proposed remedies. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44 (1), 119–134.

Watson, R., Wilson, H. N., Smart, P., & Macdonald, E. K. (2017). Harnessing difference: a capability-based framework for stakeholder engagement in environmental innovation. Journal of Product Innovation Management. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12394 .

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Box: 353226, Seattle, WA, 98195-3226, USA

Robert W. Palmatier

Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

Mark B. Houston

Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

John Hulland

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robert W. Palmatier .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Palmatier, R.W., Houston, M.B. & Hulland, J. Review articles: purpose, process, and structure. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 46 , 1–5 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-017-0563-4

Download citation

Published : 02 October 2017

Issue Date : January 2018

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-017-0563-4

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Turk J Urol
• v.39(Suppl 1); 2013 Sep

How to write a review article?

In the medical sciences, the importance of review articles is rising. When clinicians want to update their knowledge and generate guidelines about a topic, they frequently use reviews as a starting point. The value of a review is associated with what has been done, what has been found and how these findings are presented. Before asking ‘how,’ the question of ‘why’ is more important when starting to write a review. The main and fundamental purpose of writing a review is to create a readable synthesis of the best resources available in the literature for an important research question or a current area of research. Although the idea of writing a review is attractive, it is important to spend time identifying the important questions. Good review methods are critical because they provide an unbiased point of view for the reader regarding the current literature. There is a consensus that a review should be written in a systematic fashion, a notion that is usually followed. In a systematic review with a focused question, the research methods must be clearly described. A ‘methodological filter’ is the best method for identifying the best working style for a research question, and this method reduces the workload when surveying the literature. An essential part of the review process is differentiating good research from bad and leaning on the results of the better studies. The ideal way to synthesize studies is to perform a meta-analysis. In conclusion, when writing a review, it is best to clearly focus on fixed ideas, to use a procedural and critical approach to the literature and to express your findings in an attractive way.

The importance of review articles in health sciences is increasing day by day. Clinicians frequently benefit from review articles to update their knowledge in their field of specialization, and use these articles as a starting point for formulating guidelines. [ 1 , 2 ] The institutions which provide financial support for further investigations resort to these reviews to reveal the need for these researches. [ 3 ] As is the case with all other researches, the value of a review article is related to what is achieved, what is found, and the way of communicating this information. A few studies have evaluated the quality of review articles. Murlow evaluated 50 review articles published in 1985, and 1986, and revealed that none of them had complied with clear-cut scientific criteria. [ 4 ] In 1996 an international group that analyzed articles, demonstrated the aspects of review articles, and meta-analyses that had not complied with scientific criteria, and elaborated QUOROM (QUality Of Reporting Of Meta-analyses) statement which focused on meta-analyses of randomized controlled studies. [ 5 ] Later on this guideline was updated, and named as PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). [ 6 ]

Review articles are divided into 2 categories as narrative, and systematic reviews. Narrative reviews are written in an easily readable format, and allow consideration of the subject matter within a large spectrum. However in a systematic review, a very detailed, and comprehensive literature surveying is performed on the selected topic. [ 7 , 8 ] Since it is a result of a more detailed literature surveying with relatively lesser involvement of author’s bias, systematic reviews are considered as gold standard articles. Systematic reviews can be diivded into qualitative, and quantitative reviews. In both of them detailed literature surveying is performed. However in quantitative reviews, study data are collected, and statistically evaluated (ie. meta-analysis). [ 8 ]

Before inquring for the method of preparation of a review article, it is more logical to investigate the motivation behind writing the review article in question. The fundamental rationale of writing a review article is to make a readable synthesis of the best literature sources on an important research inquiry or a topic. This simple definition of a review article contains the following key elements:

• The question(s) to be dealt with
• Methods used to find out, and select the best quality researches so as to respond to these questions.
• To synthetize available, but quite different researches

For the specification of important questions to be answered, number of literature references to be consulted should be more or less determined. Discussions should be conducted with colleagues in the same area of interest, and time should be reserved for the solution of the problem(s). Though starting to write the review article promptly seems to be very alluring, the time you spend for the determination of important issues won’t be a waste of time. [ 9 ]

The PRISMA statement [ 6 ] elaborated to write a well-designed review articles contains a 27-item checklist ( Table 1 ). It will be reasonable to fulfill the requirements of these items during preparation of a review article or a meta-analysis. Thus preparation of a comprehensible article with a high-quality scientific content can be feasible.

PRISMA statement: A 27-item checklist

Contents and format

Important differences exist between systematic, and non-systematic reviews which especially arise from methodologies used in the description of the literature sources. A non-systematic review means use of articles collected for years with the recommendations of your colleagues, while systematic review is based on struggles to search for, and find the best possible researches which will respond to the questions predetermined at the start of the review.

Though a consensus has been reached about the systematic design of the review articles, studies revealed that most of them had not been written in a systematic format. McAlister et al. analyzed review articles in 6 medical journals, and disclosed that in less than one fourth of the review articles, methods of description, evaluation or synthesis of evidence had been provided, one third of them had focused on a clinical topic, and only half of them had provided quantitative data about the extend of the potential benefits. [ 10 ]

Use of proper methodologies in review articles is important in that readers assume an objective attitude towards updated information. We can confront two problems while we are using data from researches in order to answer certain questions. Firstly, we can be prejudiced during selection of research articles or these articles might be biased. To minimize this risk, methodologies used in our reviews should allow us to define, and use researches with minimal degree of bias. The second problem is that, most of the researches have been performed with small sample sizes. In statistical methods in meta-analyses, available researches are combined to increase the statistical power of the study. The problematic aspect of a non-systematic review is that our tendency to give biased responses to the questions, in other words we apt to select the studies with known or favourite results, rather than the best quality investigations among them.

As is the case with many research articles, general format of a systematic review on a single subject includes sections of Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion ( Table 2 ).

Structure of a systematic review

Preparation of the review article

Steps, and targets of constructing a good review article are listed in Table 3 . To write a good review article the items in Table 3 should be implemented step by step. [ 11 – 13 ]

Steps of a systematic review

The research question

It might be helpful to divide the research question into components. The most prevalently used format for questions related to the treatment is PICO (P - Patient, Problem or Population; I-Intervention; C-appropriate Comparisons, and O-Outcome measures) procedure. For example In female patients (P) with stress urinary incontinence, comparisons (C) between transobturator, and retropubic midurethral tension-free band surgery (I) as for patients’ satisfaction (O).

Finding Studies

In a systematic review on a focused question, methods of investigation used should be clearly specified.

Ideally, research methods, investigated databases, and key words should be described in the final report. Different databases are used dependent on the topic analyzed. In most of the clinical topics, Medline should be surveyed. However searching through Embase and CINAHL can be also appropriate.

While determining appropriate terms for surveying, PICO elements of the issue to be sought may guide the process. Since in general we are interested in more than one outcome, P, and I can be key elements. In this case we should think about synonyms of P, and I elements, and combine them with a conjunction AND.

One method which might alleviate the workload of surveying process is “methodological filter” which aims to find the best investigation method for each research question. A good example of this method can be found in PubMed interface of Medline. The Clinical Queries tool offers empirically developed filters for five different inquiries as guidelines for etiology, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis or clinical prediction.

Evaluation of the Quality of the Study

As an indispensable component of the review process is to discriminate good, and bad quality researches from each other, and the outcomes should be based on better qualified researches, as far as possible. To achieve this goal you should know the best possible evidence for each type of question The first component of the quality is its general planning/design of the study. General planning/design of a cohort study, a case series or normal study demonstrates variations.

A hierarchy of evidence for different research questions is presented in Table 4 . However this hierarchy is only a first step. After you find good quality research articles, you won’t need to read all the rest of other articles which saves you tons of time. [ 14 ]

Determination of levels of evidence based on the type of the research question

Formulating a Synthesis

Rarely all researches arrive at the same conclusion. In this case a solution should be found. However it is risky to make a decision based on the votes of absolute majority. Indeed, a well-performed large scale study, and a weakly designed one are weighed on the same scale. Therefore, ideally a meta-analysis should be performed to solve apparent differences. Ideally, first of all, one should be focused on the largest, and higher quality study, then other studies should be compared with this basic study.

Conclusions

In conclusion, during writing process of a review article, the procedures to be achieved can be indicated as follows: 1) Get rid of fixed ideas, and obsessions from your head, and view the subject from a large perspective. 2) Research articles in the literature should be approached with a methodological, and critical attitude and 3) finally data should be explained in an attractive way.

ESSAY SAUCE

FOR STUDENTS : ALL THE INGREDIENTS OF A GOOD ESSAY

Guide: How to write a review essay

Guide details:.

• Subject area(s): Types of essay
• Reading time: 2 minutes
• Price: Free download
• Published: 6 December 2019*
• File format: Text
• Words: 594 (approx)
• Number of pages: 3 (approx)
• Tags: Guides

Text preview of this guide:

This page of the guide has 594 words. Download the full version above.

A review essay examines a piece of writing, a film or some other form of art, but it differs from a literary essay in a couple of key ways. A review essay is evaluative . That means that its purpose is to tell the reader whether the work is good or not and whether the work is recommended. Also, unlike a literary essay, a review essay is not written for someone who is already familiar with the work in question. The audience for a review essay is someone who is wondering whether to spend their time and money on the work reviewed. A review essay may contain more plot summary than a literary essay , but it shouldn’t give away any of the major revelations or the ending.

Read Sample Reviews

Reviews are common in journalism, and examples of reviews of everything from movies to video games to computer software and more can be found online. Reading a few reviews of films and books from major publications such as nationally known magazines or large city newspapers can be a good way to get a sense of what is expected in a review essay.

Characteristics of a Good Review Essay

A good review essay will place the work in some sort of context. For example, a good review about a movie that tells the story of traveling circus people would briefly mention other movies about traveling circus people and how this film compares with those others or how it fits into the overall picture of traveling circus people that film has presented over the years. In a literary essay, this might be the whole point of the paper, but in a review essay, it would only be a paragraph or two. The introduction or the paragraph just after the introduction is a good place for this context.

A review essay is somewhat subjective, but it still needs to have standards and examples to demonstrate its points. It needs to give some reasons that the work is good or bad and it needs to support those reasons. This will help the audience to decide whether to follow the reviewer’s advice.

Thesis Statement

A thesis statement for a review essay should make an evaluation of the film and explain why the writer has made that evaluation. Here’s an example:

“Sideshow on the Road” is a terrible movie about traveling circus people with poor acting, an implausible plot and a boring, talky script.

The body of the review would then expand on these reasons to convince the reader to avoid the film.

The review itself should use specific examples from the work to illustrate the reviewer’s point. For example, the reviewer has complained about the poor acting in the movie. To illustrate this, the reviewer might describe a scene in which a character learns a loved one has died and seems to have no reaction at all. The boring, talky script might be illustrated by explaining that the characters spend a full ten minutes arguing about whether they took a wrong turn.

Review essays may be formal or informal and may be more or less personal. Depending on the style of the review, “I” may or may not be used. More informal reviews may use humor, sarcasm and personal stories to highlight points about the work in question. Formal reviews should avoid these devices. With tone, it’s important to stay consistent. If a formal tone is chosen, it should be maintained throughout the piece, and the same is true for an informal tone.

...(download the rest of the guide above)

Discover more:

Recommended for you.

• How to write an extended essay
• How to write an exploratory essay
• How to write a business research proposal

About this guide:

This is a free guide to help you with your studies.

Essay Categories:

• Accounting essays
• Architecture essays
• Business essays
• Computer science essays
• Criminology essays
• Economics essays
• Education essays
• Engineering essays
• English language essays
• Environmental studies essays
• Essay examples
• Finance essays
• Geography essays
• Health essays
• History essays
• Hospitality and tourism essays
• Human rights essays
• Information technology essays
• International relations
• Leadership essays
• Linguistics essays
• Literature essays
• Management essays
• Marketing essays
• Mathematics essays
• Media essays
• Medicine essays
• Military essays
• Miscellaneous essays
• Music Essays
• Nursing essays
• Philosophy essays
• Photography and arts essays
• Politics essays
• Project management essays
• Psychology essays
• Religious studies and theology essays
• Sample essays
• Science essays
• Social work essays
• Sociology essays
• Sports essays
• Types of essay
• Zoology essays

• UConn Library
• Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide
• Introduction

Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide — Introduction

• Getting Started
• How to Pick a Topic
• Strategies to Find Sources
• Evaluating Sources & Lit. Reviews
• Tips for Writing Literature Reviews
• Writing Literature Review: Useful Sites
• Citation Resources
• Other Academic Writings

What are Literature Reviews?

So, what is a literature review? "A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries." Taylor, D.  The literature review: A few tips on conducting it . University of Toronto Health Sciences Writing Centre.

Goals of Literature Reviews

What are the goals of creating a Literature Review?  A literature could be written to accomplish different aims:

• To develop a theory or evaluate an existing theory
• To summarize the historical or existing state of a research topic
• Identify a problem in a field of research 

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1997). Writing narrative literature reviews .  Review of General Psychology , 1 (3), 311-320.

What kinds of sources require a Literature Review?

• A research paper assigned in a course
• A thesis or dissertation
• A grant proposal
• An article intended for publication in a journal

All these instances require you to collect what has been written about your research topic so that you can demonstrate how your own research sheds new light on the topic.

Types of Literature Reviews

What kinds of literature reviews are written?

Narrative review: The purpose of this type of review is to describe the current state of the research on a specific topic/research and to offer a critical analysis of the literature reviewed. Studies are grouped by research/theoretical categories, and themes and trends, strengths and weakness, and gaps are identified. The review ends with a conclusion section which summarizes the findings regarding the state of the research of the specific study, the gaps identify and if applicable, explains how the author's research will address gaps identify in the review and expand the knowledge on the topic reviewed.

• Example : Predictors and Outcomes of U.S. Quality Maternity Leave: A Review and Conceptual Framework:  10.1177/08948453211037398  

Systematic review : "The authors of a systematic review use a specific procedure to search the research literature, select the studies to include in their review, and critically evaluate the studies they find." (p. 139). Nelson, L. K. (2013). Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders . Plural Publishing.

• Example : The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review:  10.1057/s41599-022-01270-w

Meta-analysis : "Meta-analysis is a method of reviewing research findings in a quantitative fashion by transforming the data from individual studies into what is called an effect size and then pooling and analyzing this information. The basic goal in meta-analysis is to explain why different outcomes have occurred in different studies." (p. 197). Roberts, M. C., & Ilardi, S. S. (2003). Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology . Blackwell Publishing.

• Example : Employment Instability and Fertility in Europe: A Meta-Analysis:  10.1215/00703370-9164737

Meta-synthesis : "Qualitative meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative study that uses as data the findings from other qualitative studies linked by the same or related topic." (p.312). Zimmer, L. (2006). Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts .  Journal of Advanced Nursing , 53 (3), 311-318.

• Example : Women’s perspectives on career successes and barriers: A qualitative meta-synthesis:  10.1177/05390184221113735

Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences

• UConn Health subject guide on systematic reviews Explanation of the different review types used in health sciences literature as well as tools to help you find the right review type
• << Previous: Getting Started
• Next: How to Pick a Topic >>
• Last Updated: Sep 21, 2022 2:16 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.uconn.edu/literaturereview

Reference management. Clean and simple.

Literature review

How to write a literature review in 6 steps

How do you write a good literature review? This step-by-step guide on how to write an excellent literature review covers all aspects of planning and writing literature reviews for academic papers and theses.

How to write a systematic literature review [9 steps]

How do you write a systematic literature review? What types of systematic literature reviews exist and where do you use them? Learn everything you need to know about a systematic literature review in this guide

What is a literature review? [with examples]

Not sure what a literature review is? This guide covers the definition, purpose, and format of a literature review.

• University of Texas Libraries

Literature Reviews

• What is a literature review?
• Steps in the Literature Review Process
• Define your research question
• Determine inclusion and exclusion criteria
• Choose databases and search
• Review Results
• Synthesize Results
• Analyze Results
• Librarian Support

What is a Literature Review?

A literature or narrative review is a comprehensive review and analysis of the published literature on a specific topic or research question. The literature that is reviewed contains: books, articles, academic articles, conference proceedings, association papers, and dissertations. It contains the most pertinent studies and points to important past and current research and practices. It provides background and context, and shows how your research will contribute to the field. 

A literature review should: 

• Provide a comprehensive and updated review of the literature;
• Explain why this review has taken place;
• Articulate a position or hypothesis;
• Acknowledge and account for conflicting and corroborating points of view

From  S age Research Methods

Purpose of a Literature Review

A literature review can be written as an introduction to a study to:

• Demonstrate how a study fills a gap in research
• Compare a study with other research that's been done

Or it can be a separate work (a research article on its own) which:

• Organizes or describes a topic
• Describes variables within a particular issue/problem

Limitations of a Literature Review

Some of the limitations of a literature review are:

• It's a snapshot in time. Unlike other reviews, this one has beginning, a middle and an end. There may be future developments that could make your work less relevant.
• It may be too focused. Some niche studies may miss the bigger picture.
• It can be difficult to be comprehensive. There is no way to make sure all the literature on a topic was considered.
• It is easy to be biased if you stick to top tier journals. There may be other places where people are publishing exemplary research. Look to open access publications and conferences to reflect a more inclusive collection. Also, make sure to include opposing views (and not just supporting evidence).

Source: Grant, Maria J., and Andrew Booth. “A Typology of Reviews: An Analysis of 14 Review Types and Associated Methodologies.” Health Information & Libraries Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 91–108. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/j.1471-1842.2009.00848.x.

Meryl Brodsky : Communication and Information Studies

Hannah Chapman Tripp : Biology, Neuroscience

Carolyn Cunningham : Human Development & Family Sciences, Psychology, Sociology

Larayne Dallas : Engineering

Janelle Hedstrom : Special Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Ed Leadership & Policy ​

Susan Macicak : Linguistics

Imelda Vetter : Dell Medical School

For help in other subject areas, please see the guide to library specialists by subject .

Periodically, UT Libraries runs a workshop covering the basics and library support for literature reviews. While we try to offer these once per academic year, we find providing the recording to be helpful to community members who have missed the session. Following is the most recent recording of the workshop, Conducting a Literature Review. To view the recording, a UT login is required.

• October 26, 2022 recording
• Last Updated: Oct 26, 2022 2:49 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/literaturereviews

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Writing a Literature Review

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

• An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
• A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
• Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
• Summarize and synthesize: Give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: 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 sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

• Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
• Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

• Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
• Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
• Qualitative versus quantitative research
• Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
• Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

• It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
• Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
• Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
• Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

How to Write a Movie Review

Writing a Film Review

Movies have become a cultural mainstay of our society. Not only are they art and entertainment, but they have also become a way for people to bond and make connections. Finding someone who has a similar taste in movies can create new friendships and start interesting conversations. That's why understanding how to analyze a movie and write movie reviews is such a useful skill. 

Do you need to know how to write a movie review for college? Or how to write a movie critique? Or maybe just how to do a movie review? In this article, you will learn how to write a movie review step by step, as well as get an in-depth guide into each section of a movie review.

What is a Movie Review?

A film review essay is more than just a plot summary followed by a recommendation. A movie review analyzes different elements of a movie and mixes personal opinion with objective analysis. The goal of the movie review is to tell the reader about the details of a movie while giving them enough information to decide for themselves whether it's worth watching or not. Of course, a good movie review also has to be interesting and engaging! 

How to Write a Good Movie Review

More than most other pieces of writing, there are a lot of steps to take before actually getting into writing a movie review. But don't worry though, most of these steps are pretty fun and if you follow them, you will know how to review movies. 

Watch the film! 

It goes without saying that you need to watch a movie before you write a review for it, so, before you do anything else, watch the movie at least once. Don't worry about trying to pick up specific details on your first watch, just enjoy the movie and get a general impression of whether you liked it or not and what you liked or disliked. Ideally, you should watch the movie at least two times. On your second and third viewings, pay attention to movie review criteria like cinematography, acting, dialogue, character development, deeper meanings, etc. Read some film review examples to get a sense of the things they talk about.

Pause the movie on your second and third viewings and take notes on things that stand out to you. Don't be afraid to take as many notes as you want, after all these notes are just for you.  You might not use all the notes you have taken, but they will help you compose the main part of your body paragraphs.

Express your opinions

Once you have watched the movie a few times and taken notes, make a list of the strongest opinions you have about the movie. If you think that the quality of acting was one of the best parts of the movie, use your notes to come up with specific examples. You should have between 3 and 5 key opinions that you will elaborate on when writing a film review along with examples to back up your claims.

Think about your audience

The language you use is going to change based on who you are writing the movie review for. If it is an assignment for school or university, then you may have to use more technical language.  If you're writing an article for a website or personal blog, then think about who the audience is and use language appropriate for them. Keep in mind that your audience also depends on the genre of the movie you are critiquing. A movie review for a serious period drama will have a different audience than a buddy cop comedy and therefore different language. Look at a movie review sample from different genres to get an idea of the type of language to use. 

Research the actors

Having big movie stars associated with a film is often one of the main selling points of a movie.  If an actor is critically acclaimed, it’s especially important to mention the awards they have won as this is often a sign of the overall quality of the movie. It's also possible that you didn't like the movie overall, but one of your favorite actors was in it so you enjoyed the movie and another fan might enjoy it too. 

Do background research

An easy way to make a movie review interesting is to search for interesting details about the making of the movie. It may be worth mentioning if it was shot in a particularly beautiful place or a unique location, or if the special effects were practical rather than CGI. Include interesting casting decisions or other actors that were considered for a particular role. Think about what information could be interesting to someone who might want to watch the movie and include those details. Go over some movie critique examples to get inspiration. 

Research the professionals

People can be fans not just of the actors, but of directors, writers, cinematographers, costume designers, and many other elements of filmmaking. Many directors are auteurs, which means they have a very particular visual style or storytelling method. How much time you spend on this section is dependent on your audience. If you're writing for social media or a blog for general people, then this might not be interesting to most. But if you're writing for film school or for a specific audience interested in filmmaking, then this section will need to be more elaborate. Look at a film review example written for different audiences to understand the differences. 

Draft an outline

Now that you've done all the required research, it's time to come up with a review outline. An outline is always useful when doing any piece of writing because it gives you a  chance to visualize the structure and plan how you want to incorporate information. This is the general film review format.

Introduction

• Brief summary of the film
• Discuss plot, tone, characters
• Discuss creative and technical elements
• Your opinions

Conclusion 

Come up with a catchy title.

Almost more than any other piece of writing, a movie review’s title needs to be engaging. A title like ”film review of (name of the movie) might be to the point, but isn't going to stand out. A good title should grab the reader's attention and make them want to read more. A few ways you can do this is by talking about a specific actor or director, or by using one of the main plot points of the movie. For example, “A Romantic Comedy for the Unromantic”,  or “Chris Pratt Plays Against Type in the Best Possible Way”. Look at the titles of some movie review examples for inspiration!

Write your review

It's finally time to get to the actual writing! The next part of this article talks in-depth about each section of a film review. 

People aren't going to take a review seriously if you have spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. If it's an assignment for school, then you’re going to lose marks because of mistakes like that. Make sure you reread your paper a few times and check for typos and other silly mistakes.  Read the paper out loud once or twice to get an idea of if it has a good flow. Don't be afraid to move sections around if you think it helps you build a stronger case.

Struggling with the Film Review?

Get your assignments done by real pros. Save your precious time and boost your marks with ease.

How to Write a Film Review

Do you want a ‘how to write a movie review’ template? Let's go over the specific parts of a film review and what to include in each one.

Your first sentence needs to capture the reader's attention. You can do this by stating an interesting fact about the movie, starting off by expressing your opinion of whether it's good or bad, mentioning some of the important actors, comparing it to other movies in the genre or to real-world events, whatever it is, make sure it's catchy!

Next, give background information about the movie. This includes things like the title, release date, studio, important cast members, director, budget, etc. Make sure to highlight any achievements of the movie, for example, if it was nominated for any awards. The same goes for the director as well as important members of the cast. This shouldn't just be a dry stating of facts, rather this should be a collection of interesting information about the background of the movie. 

Finally, end your introduction paragraph with your thesis. In the case of a film review, your thesis is essentially what you thought about the film. Without giving away too much, express your overall impression of the movie noting particular things that you thought stood out or were weak.

Summary of the story

The trick to writing the summary of the story is giving readers an idea of what to expect without giving away any important plot points or spoilers. The goal of this section isn't to explain the plot of the movie, It's to make sure that people have a basic understanding of the story so that the rest of the review can make sense. Describe the setting of the movie, which includes the main locations and time period. Introduce the main characters (including the name of the actor in parentheses after the name of their character). And go over the general storyline. 

Plot elements

This is when you start explaining what you thought about the movie. Start with an analysis of the plot itself. Did it have a rising action that builds suspense? Was the climax a good payoff? What were your overall impressions of the movie? How did it make you feel? What do you think the purpose of the movie was and did the director succeed in their goal? 

This is also the section where you get to talk about the different characters in the movie. Why did you enjoy certain characters? Were some characters better developed than others? Could some characters have benefited from more development? Was the villain particularly interesting? 

Think about the overall mood of the movie, did it change over time? How did the tones and symbols of the movie emphasize elements of the plot? Remember that any point you make in this section has to be backed up by examples. So if you say that there are several plot holes that make the movie complicated to understand, mention the specific scenes.

Creative elements

There are a lot of technical and creative elements in a movie that can stand out even if the overall plot and story weren’t the best. On the other hand, even a great story can be spoiled by bad dialogue or set design. These are some of the creative elements you should pay attention to especially when rewatching the movie and taking notes.

Dialogue : This can refer to the overall writing of the movie as well. If you can get your hands on a script then read it! When thinking about dialogue ask yourself, did the conversation between characters seem natural and flow easily? Or did it seem choppy and unnatural? 

Cinematography : Cinematography refers to the camera effects and the choices of how to film a certain scene. The lighting, the choice of camera angles, essentially the unique perspective of the story as told through the camera. 

Editing : Editing refers to the transition between different scenes as well as how well the movie flows together. This could include things like clever montages, longshots, different perspectives, etc.  

Costumes : Some movies, especially historical movies, fantasy films, and science fiction films, depend heavily on costume design. Costumes are an integral part of making a character stand out or making the world seem more real.

Set Design : Set design refers to the backgrounds of scenes. Some sets might be more elaborate whereas others can be minimalistic. Each choice has its pros and cons and effective set design creates proper ambiance, setting the tone and mood for a scene or the movie.

Music and Sound : Sometimes the movie has a great soundtrack or just incredible sound effects that help make it stand out.

Stunts : More important for action movies, but in general stunts and action sequences can be a major selling point for a film.

Special Effects : Most movies rely on some amount of special effects, and whether it be CGI, or practical, or a combination of the two, the quality is important.

Once you have analyzed multiple different elements of the story from its plot, characterization, and other technical and creative elements, you can state your opinions and provide evidence for them. Make sure you refer to specific scenes or specific situations when looking for substantiating evidence. Remember that the goal of a movie review is not to just state whether you liked or disliked a movie, it is to analyze it in an objective way, and give information so that somebody else can decide whether they want to watch the movie or not.

In the conclusion you express your main opinion of the movie along with the most important pieces of evidence. You can talk about the purpose of the movie and whether the director was successful in showing that purpose. End with a recommendation of whether the movie should be watched or not, along with suggestions of movies that are similar to it.

Did you like our Film Review Guide?

For more help, tap into our pool of professional writers and get expert essay editing services!

Mistakes to avoid

You now know how to write a review on a movie but let's take a look at some mistakes that you should be careful to avoid.

Not focusing on the film

It's easy to start writing about things like the historical events the movie you loved is based on or the importance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe overall rather than focus on the movie itself.  While those elements can be interesting to include as background information, the point of a film review is to go over a particular movie so that is what you should spend the most time on.

Not providing evidence 

A common mistake people make when they write movie reviews is to state their opinions without any objective analysis. An easy way to overcome this mistake is to make sure that you provide evidence for any claims that you make.

Spoilers are an easy way to make sure that people will be upset with your movie review. It is common to accidentally give away too much, especially when writing the plot summary. Find the line between giving enough information so that people understand the general story and revealing important plot twists and turning points. Read some sample movie reviews for examples of how to avoid spoilers.

Using personal pronouns

Statements like “I did not like the special effects” or “I did not like the pacing of the movie” are clearly expressions of opinion. It is better to make statements like “the special effects in certain action scenes were cartoonish and took away from the realism of the film”. 

A movie review essay can be incredibly fun to write, especially if you have a strong opinion about the movie. But keep in mind that a movie review isn't just about your opinion, it has to include an objective analysis with claims backed up by evidence from specific scenes. It's difficult to have a movie review definition, but a great movie review is a blend between personal opinion and objective analysis. It informs the reader about the strengths and weaknesses of the movie while letting them make the decision whether they want to watch it or not. 

If you found your way to this article because you were looking for help on how to write a movie review for college, then you're in the perfect place. If you need any help, don't hesitate to reach out to the experts at Studyfy. At Studyfy, we offer a wide range of custom writing services, coursework writing services, and essay writer service . Our team of experienced writers is well-equipped to handle any writing task you may have, no matter the complexity or urgency. Just say, " write a paper for me ," and we will ensure that you receive a high-quality custom essay that meets all your requirements. Trust us to provide you with the best coursework writing services and custom essay writing that will help you achieve your academic goals.

Featured Posts

How to write a scholarship essay.

How‌ ‌to‌ ‌Write‌ ‌an‌ ‌Argumentative‌ ‌Essay

How to Write a Cause and Effect Essay

How to Write an Expository Essay

How to Write an Analytical Essay

How to Write a Reflective Essay

How to write a literature review introduction (+ examples)

The introduction to a literature review serves as your reader’s guide through your academic work and thought process. Explore the significance of literature review introductions in review papers, academic papers, essays, theses, and dissertations. We delve into the purpose and necessity of these introductions, explore the essential components of literature review introductions, and provide step-by-step guidance on how to craft your own, along with examples.

Why you need an introduction for a literature review

When you need an introduction for a literature review, what to include in a literature review introduction, examples of literature review introductions, steps to write your own literature review introduction.

A literature review is a comprehensive examination of the international academic literature concerning a particular topic. It involves summarizing published works, theories, and concepts while also highlighting gaps and offering critical reflections.

In academic writing , the introduction for a literature review is an indispensable component. Effective academic writing requires proper paragraph structuring to guide your reader through your argumentation. This includes providing an introduction to your literature review.

It is imperative to remember that you should never start sharing your findings abruptly. Even if there isn’t a dedicated introduction section .

Instead, you should always offer some form of introduction to orient the reader and clarify what they can expect.

There are three main scenarios in which you need an introduction for a literature review:

• Academic literature review papers: When your literature review constitutes the entirety of an academic review paper, a more substantial introduction is necessary. This introduction should resemble the standard introduction found in regular academic papers.
• Literature review section in an academic paper or essay: While this section tends to be brief, it’s important to precede the detailed literature review with a few introductory sentences. This helps orient the reader before delving into the literature itself.
• Literature review chapter or section in your thesis/dissertation: Every thesis and dissertation includes a literature review component, which also requires a concise introduction to set the stage for the subsequent review.

You may also like: How to write a fantastic thesis introduction (+15 examples)

It is crucial to customize the content and depth of your literature review introduction according to the specific format of your academic work.

In practical terms, this implies, for instance, that the introduction in an academic literature review paper, especially one derived from a systematic literature review , is quite comprehensive. Particularly compared to the rather brief one or two introductory sentences that are often found at the beginning of a literature review section in a standard academic paper. The introduction to the literature review chapter in a thesis or dissertation again adheres to different standards.

Here’s a structured breakdown based on length and the necessary information:

Academic literature review paper

The introduction of an academic literature review paper, which does not rely on empirical data, often necessitates a more extensive introduction than the brief literature review introductions typically found in empirical papers. It should encompass:

• The research problem: Clearly articulate the problem or question that your literature review aims to address.
• The research gap: Highlight the existing gaps, limitations, or unresolved aspects within the current body of literature related to the research problem.
• The research relevance: Explain why the chosen research problem and its subsequent investigation through a literature review are significant and relevant in your academic field.
• The literature review method: If applicable, describe the methodology employed in your literature review, especially if it is a systematic review or follows a specific research framework.
• The main findings or insights of the literature review: Summarize the key discoveries, insights, or trends that have emerged from your comprehensive review of the literature.
• The main argument of the literature review: Conclude the introduction by outlining the primary argument or statement that your literature review will substantiate, linking it to the research problem and relevance you’ve established.
• Preview of the literature review’s structure: Offer a glimpse into the organization of the literature review paper, acting as a guide for the reader. This overview outlines the subsequent sections of the paper and provides an understanding of what to anticipate.

By addressing these elements, your introduction will provide a clear and structured overview of what readers can expect in your literature review paper.

Regular literature review section in an academic article or essay

Most academic articles or essays incorporate regular literature review sections, often placed after the introduction. These sections serve to establish a scholarly basis for the research or discussion within the paper.

In a standard 8000-word journal article, the literature review section typically spans between 750 and 1250 words. The first few sentences or the first paragraph within this section often serve as an introduction. It should encompass:

• An introduction to the topic: When delving into the academic literature on a specific topic, it’s important to provide a smooth transition that aids the reader in comprehending why certain aspects will be discussed within your literature review.
• The core argument: While literature review sections primarily synthesize the work of other scholars, they should consistently connect to your central argument. This central argument serves as the crux of your message or the key takeaway you want your readers to retain. By positioning it at the outset of the literature review section and systematically substantiating it with evidence, you not only enhance reader comprehension but also elevate overall readability. This primary argument can typically be distilled into 1-2 succinct sentences.

In some cases, you might include:

• Methodology: Details about the methodology used, but only if your literature review employed a specialized method. If your approach involved a broader overview without a systematic methodology, you can omit this section, thereby conserving word count.

By addressing these elements, your introduction will effectively integrate your literature review into the broader context of your academic paper or essay. This will, in turn, assist your reader in seamlessly following your overarching line of argumentation.

Introduction to a literature review chapter in thesis or dissertation

The literature review typically constitutes a distinct chapter within a thesis or dissertation. Often, it is Chapter 2 of a thesis or dissertation.

Some students choose to incorporate a brief introductory section at the beginning of each chapter, including the literature review chapter. Alternatively, others opt to seamlessly integrate the introduction into the initial sentences of the literature review itself. Both approaches are acceptable, provided that you incorporate the following elements:

• Purpose of the literature review and its relevance to the thesis/dissertation research: Explain the broader objectives of the literature review within the context of your research and how it contributes to your thesis or dissertation. Essentially, you’re telling the reader why this literature review is important and how it fits into the larger scope of your academic work.
• Primary argument: Succinctly communicate what you aim to prove, explain, or explore through the review of existing literature. This statement helps guide the reader’s understanding of the review’s purpose and what to expect from it.
• Preview of the literature review’s content: Provide a brief overview of the topics or themes that your literature review will cover. It’s like a roadmap for the reader, outlining the main areas of focus within the review. This preview can help the reader anticipate the structure and organization of your literature review.
• Methodology: If your literature review involved a specific research method, such as a systematic review or meta-analysis, you should briefly describe that methodology. However, this is not always necessary, especially if your literature review is more of a narrative synthesis without a distinct research method.

By addressing these elements, your introduction will empower your literature review to play a pivotal role in your thesis or dissertation research. It will accomplish this by integrating your research into the broader academic literature and providing a solid theoretical foundation for your work.

Comprehending the art of crafting your own literature review introduction becomes significantly more accessible when you have concrete examples to examine. Here, you will find several examples that meet, or in most cases, adhere to the criteria described earlier.

Example 1: An effective introduction for an academic literature review paper

To begin, let’s delve into the introduction of an academic literature review paper. We will examine the paper “How does culture influence innovation? A systematic literature review”, which was published in 2018 in the journal Management Decision.

The entire introduction spans 611 words and is divided into five paragraphs. In this introduction, the authors accomplish the following:

• In the first paragraph, the authors introduce the broader topic of the literature review, which focuses on innovation and its significance in the context of economic competition. They underscore the importance of this topic, highlighting its relevance for both researchers and policymakers.
• In the second paragraph, the authors narrow down their focus to emphasize the specific role of culture in relation to innovation.
• In the third paragraph, the authors identify research gaps, noting that existing studies are often fragmented and disconnected. They then emphasize the value of conducting a systematic literature review to enhance our understanding of the topic.
• In the fourth paragraph, the authors introduce their specific objectives and explain how their insights can benefit other researchers and business practitioners.
• In the fifth and final paragraph, the authors provide an overview of the paper’s organization and structure.

In summary, this introduction stands as a solid example. While the authors deviate from previewing their key findings (which is a common practice at least in the social sciences), they do effectively cover all the other previously mentioned points.

Example 2: An effective introduction to a literature review section in an academic paper

The second example represents a typical academic paper, encompassing not only a literature review section but also empirical data, a case study, and other elements. We will closely examine the introduction to the literature review section in the paper “The environmentalism of the subalterns: a case study of environmental activism in Eastern Kurdistan/Rojhelat”, which was published in 2021 in the journal Local Environment.

The paper begins with a general introduction and then proceeds to the literature review, designated by the authors as their conceptual framework. Of particular interest is the first paragraph of this conceptual framework, comprising 142 words across five sentences:

“ A peripheral and marginalised nationality within a multinational though-Persian dominated Iranian society, the Kurdish people of Iranian Kurdistan (a region referred by the Kurds as Rojhelat/Eastern Kurdi-stan) have since the early twentieth century been subject to multifaceted and systematic discriminatory and exclusionary state policy in Iran. This condition has left a population of 12–15 million Kurds in Iran suffering from structural inequalities, disenfranchisement and deprivation. Mismanagement of Kurdistan’s natural resources and the degradation of its natural environmental are among examples of this disenfranchisement. As asserted by Julian Agyeman (2005), structural inequalities that sustain the domination of political and economic elites often simultaneously result in environmental degradation, injustice and discrimination against subaltern communities. This study argues that the environmental struggle in Eastern Kurdistan can be asserted as a (sub)element of the Kurdish liberation movement in Iran. Conceptually this research is inspired by and has been conducted through the lens of ‘subalternity’ ” ( Hassaniyan, 2021, p. 931 ).

In this first paragraph, the author is doing the following:

• The author contextualises the research
• The author links the research focus to the international literature on structural inequalities
• The author clearly presents the argument of the research
• The author clarifies how the research is inspired by and uses the concept of ‘subalternity’.

Thus, the author successfully introduces the literature review, from which point onward it dives into the main concept (‘subalternity’) of the research, and reviews the literature on socio-economic justice and environmental degradation.

While introductions to a literature review section aren’t always required to offer the same level of study context detail as demonstrated here, this introduction serves as a commendable model for orienting the reader within the literature review. It effectively underscores the literature review’s significance within the context of the study being conducted.

Examples 3-5: Effective introductions to literature review chapters

The introduction to a literature review chapter can vary in length, depending largely on the overall length of the literature review chapter itself. For example, a master’s thesis typically features a more concise literature review, thus necessitating a shorter introduction. In contrast, a Ph.D. thesis, with its more extensive literature review, often includes a more detailed introduction.

Numerous universities offer online repositories where you can access theses and dissertations from previous years, serving as valuable sources of reference. Many of these repositories, however, may require you to log in through your university account. Nevertheless, a few open-access repositories are accessible to anyone, such as the one by the University of Manchester . It’s important to note though that copyright restrictions apply to these resources, just as they would with published papers.

Master’s thesis literature review introduction

The first example is “Benchmarking Asymmetrical Heating Models of Spider Pulsar Companions” by P. Sun, a master’s thesis completed at the University of Manchester on January 9, 2024. The author, P. Sun, introduces the literature review chapter very briefly but effectively:

PhD thesis literature review chapter introduction

The second example is Deep Learning on Semi-Structured Data and its Applications to Video-Game AI, Woof, W. (Author). 31 Dec 2020, a PhD thesis completed at the University of Manchester . In Chapter 2, the author offers a comprehensive introduction to the topic in four paragraphs, with the final paragraph serving as an overview of the chapter’s structure:

PhD thesis literature review introduction

The last example is the doctoral thesis Metacognitive strategies and beliefs: Child correlates and early experiences Chan, K. Y. M. (Author). 31 Dec 2020 . The author clearly conducted a systematic literature review, commencing the review section with a discussion of the methodology and approach employed in locating and analyzing the selected records.

Having absorbed all of this information, let’s recap the essential steps and offer a succinct guide on how to proceed with creating your literature review introduction:

• Contextualize your review : Begin by clearly identifying the academic context in which your literature review resides and determining the necessary information to include.
• Outline your structure : Develop a structured outline for your literature review, highlighting the essential information you plan to incorporate in your introduction.
• Literature review process : Conduct a rigorous literature review, reviewing and analyzing relevant sources.
• Summarize and abstract : After completing the review, synthesize the findings and abstract key insights, trends, and knowledge gaps from the literature.
• Craft the introduction : Write your literature review introduction with meticulous attention to the seamless integration of your review into the larger context of your work. Ensure that your introduction effectively elucidates your rationale for the chosen review topics and the underlying reasons guiding your selection.

Master Academia

Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.

Subscribe and receive Master Academia's quarterly newsletter.

The best answers to "What are your plans for the future?"

10 tips for engaging your audience in academic writing, related articles.

Introduce yourself in a PhD interview (4 simple steps + examples)

37 creative ways to get motivation to study

Types of editorial decisions after peer review (+ how to react)

Minor revisions: Sample peer review comments and examples

Get science-backed answers as you write with Paperpal's Research feature

What is a Literature Review? How to Write It (with Examples)

A literature review is a critical analysis and synthesis of existing research on a particular topic. It provides an overview of the current state of knowledge, identifies gaps, and highlights key findings in the literature. 1 The purpose of a literature review is to situate your own research within the context of existing scholarship, demonstrating your understanding of the topic and showing how your work contributes to the ongoing conversation in the field. Learning how to write a literature review is a critical tool for successful research. Your ability to summarize and synthesize prior research pertaining to a certain topic demonstrates your grasp on the topic of study, and assists in the learning process. 

Table of Contents

• What is the purpose of literature review? 
• a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction: 
• b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes: 
• c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs: 
• d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts: 

How to write a good literature review 

• Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question: 
• Decide on the Scope of Your Review: 
• Select Databases for Searches: 
• Conduct Searches and Keep Track: 
• Review the Literature: 
• Organize and Write Your Literature Review: 
• How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal? 
• Frequently asked questions 

What is a literature review?

A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with the existing literature, establishes the context for their own research, and contributes to scholarly conversations on the topic. One of the purposes of a literature review is also to help researchers avoid duplicating previous work and ensure that their research is informed by and builds upon the existing body of knowledge.

What is the purpose of literature review?

A literature review serves several important purposes within academic and research contexts. Here are some key objectives and functions of a literature review: 2  

1. Contextualizing the Research Problem: The literature review provides a background and context for the research problem under investigation. It helps to situate the study within the existing body of knowledge. 

2. Identifying Gaps in Knowledge: By identifying gaps, contradictions, or areas requiring further research, the researcher can shape the research question and justify the significance of the study. This is crucial for ensuring that the new research contributes something novel to the field. 

Find academic papers related to your research topic faster. Try Research on Paperpal  

3. Understanding Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks: Literature reviews help researchers gain an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in previous studies. This aids in the development of a theoretical framework for the current research. 

4. Providing Methodological Insights: Another purpose of literature reviews is that it allows researchers to learn about the methodologies employed in previous studies. This can help in choosing appropriate research methods for the current study and avoiding pitfalls that others may have encountered. 

5. Establishing Credibility: A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with existing scholarship, establishing their credibility and expertise in the field. It also helps in building a solid foundation for the new research. 

6. Informing Hypotheses or Research Questions: The literature review guides the formulation of hypotheses or research questions by highlighting relevant findings and areas of uncertainty in existing literature. 

Literature review example

Let’s delve deeper with a literature review example: Let’s say your literature review is about the impact of climate change on biodiversity. You might format your literature review into sections such as the effects of climate change on habitat loss and species extinction, phenological changes, and marine biodiversity. Each section would then summarize and analyze relevant studies in those areas, highlighting key findings and identifying gaps in the research. The review would conclude by emphasizing the need for further research on specific aspects of the relationship between climate change and biodiversity. The following literature review template provides a glimpse into the recommended literature review structure and content, demonstrating how research findings are organized around specific themes within a broader topic. 

Literature Review on Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity:

Climate change is a global phenomenon with far-reaching consequences, including significant impacts on biodiversity. This literature review synthesizes key findings from various studies: 

a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction:

Climate change-induced alterations in temperature and precipitation patterns contribute to habitat loss, affecting numerous species (Thomas et al., 2004). The review discusses how these changes increase the risk of extinction, particularly for species with specific habitat requirements. 

b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes:

Observations of range shifts and changes in the timing of biological events (phenology) are documented in response to changing climatic conditions (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003). These shifts affect ecosystems and may lead to mismatches between species and their resources. 

c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs:

The review explores the impact of climate change on marine biodiversity, emphasizing ocean acidification’s threat to coral reefs (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007). Changes in pH levels negatively affect coral calcification, disrupting the delicate balance of marine ecosystems. 

d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts:

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the literature review discusses various adaptive strategies adopted by species and conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change on biodiversity (Hannah et al., 2007). It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for effective conservation planning. 

Strengthen your literature review with factual insights. Try Research on Paperpal for free!    

Writing a literature review involves summarizing and synthesizing existing research on a particular topic. A good literature review format should include the following elements. 

Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your literature review, providing context and introducing the main focus of your review. 

• Opening Statement: Begin with a general statement about the broader topic and its significance in the field. 
• Scope and Purpose: Clearly define the scope of your literature review. Explain the specific research question or objective you aim to address. 
• Organizational Framework: Briefly outline the structure of your literature review, indicating how you will categorize and discuss the existing research. 
• Significance of the Study: Highlight why your literature review is important and how it contributes to the understanding of the chosen topic. 
• Thesis Statement: Conclude the introduction with a concise thesis statement that outlines the main argument or perspective you will develop in the body of the literature review. 

Body: The body of the literature review is where you provide a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, grouping studies based on themes, methodologies, or other relevant criteria. 

• Organize by Theme or Concept: Group studies that share common themes, concepts, or methodologies. Discuss each theme or concept in detail, summarizing key findings and identifying gaps or areas of disagreement. 
• Critical Analysis: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each study. Discuss the methodologies used, the quality of evidence, and the overall contribution of each work to the understanding of the topic. 
• Synthesis of Findings: Synthesize the information from different studies to highlight trends, patterns, or areas of consensus in the literature. 
• Identification of Gaps: Discuss any gaps or limitations in the existing research and explain how your review contributes to filling these gaps. 
• Transition between Sections: Provide smooth transitions between different themes or concepts to maintain the flow of your literature review. 

Write and Cite as you go with Paperpal Research. Start now for free.   

Conclusion: The conclusion of your literature review should summarize the main findings, highlight the contributions of the review, and suggest avenues for future research. 

• Summary of Key Findings: Recap the main findings from the literature and restate how they contribute to your research question or objective. 
• Contributions to the Field: Discuss the overall contribution of your literature review to the existing knowledge in the field. 
• Implications and Applications: Explore the practical implications of the findings and suggest how they might impact future research or practice. 
• Recommendations for Future Research: Identify areas that require further investigation and propose potential directions for future research in the field. 
• Final Thoughts: Conclude with a final reflection on the importance of your literature review and its relevance to the broader academic community. 

Conducting a literature review

Conducting a literature review is an essential step in research that involves reviewing and analyzing existing literature on a specific topic. It’s important to know how to do a literature review effectively, so here are the steps to follow: 1  

Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question:

• Select a topic that is relevant to your field of study. 
• Clearly define your research question or objective. Determine what specific aspect of the topic do you want to explore? 

Decide on the Scope of Your Review:

• Determine the timeframe for your literature review. Are you focusing on recent developments, or do you want a historical overview? 
• Consider the geographical scope. Is your review global, or are you focusing on a specific region? 
• Define the inclusion and exclusion criteria. What types of sources will you include? Are there specific types of studies or publications you will exclude? 

Select Databases for Searches:

• Identify relevant databases for your field. Examples include PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. 
• Consider searching in library catalogs, institutional repositories, and specialized databases related to your topic. 

Conduct Searches and Keep Track:

• Develop a systematic search strategy using keywords, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and other search techniques. 
• Record and document your search strategy for transparency and replicability. 
• Keep track of the articles, including publication details, abstracts, and links. Use citation management tools like EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley to organize your references. 

Review the Literature:

• Evaluate the relevance and quality of each source. Consider the methodology, sample size, and results of studies. 
• Organize the literature by themes or key concepts. Identify patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing research. 
• Summarize key findings and arguments from each source. Compare and contrast different perspectives. 
• Identify areas where there is a consensus in the literature and where there are conflicting opinions. 
• Provide critical analysis and synthesis of the literature. What are the strengths and weaknesses of existing research? 

Organize and Write Your Literature Review:

• Literature review outline should be based on themes, chronological order, or methodological approaches. 
• Write a clear and coherent narrative that synthesizes the information gathered. 
• Use proper citations for each source and ensure consistency in your citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). 
• Conclude your literature review by summarizing key findings, identifying gaps, and suggesting areas for future research. 

Whether you’re exploring a new research field or finding new angles to develop an existing topic, sifting through hundreds of papers can take more time than you have to spare. But what if you could find science-backed insights with verified citations in seconds? That’s the power of Paperpal’s new Research feature!  

How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal?

Paperpal, an AI writing assistant, integrates powerful academic search capabilities within its writing platform. With the Research feature, you get 100% factual insights, with citations backed by 250M+ verified research articles, directly within your writing interface with the option to save relevant references in your Citation Library. By eliminating the need to switch tabs to find answers to all your research questions, Paperpal saves time and helps you stay focused on your writing.   

Here’s how to use the Research feature:  

• Ask a question: Get started with a new document on paperpal.com. Click on the “Research” feature and type your question in plain English. Paperpal will scour over 250 million research articles, including conference papers and preprints, to provide you with accurate insights and citations. 
• Review and Save: Paperpal summarizes the information, while citing sources and listing relevant reads. You can quickly scan the results to identify relevant references and save these directly to your built-in citations library for later access. 
• Cite with Confidence: Paperpal makes it easy to incorporate relevant citations and references into your writing, ensuring your arguments are well-supported by credible sources. This translates to a polished, well-researched literature review. 

The literature review sample and detailed advice on writing and conducting a review will help you produce a well-structured report. But remember that a good literature review is an ongoing process, and it may be necessary to revisit and update it as your research progresses. By combining effortless research with an easy citation process, Paperpal Research streamlines the literature review process and empowers you to write faster and with more confidence. Try Paperpal Research now and see for yourself.  

Frequently asked questions

A literature review is a critical and comprehensive analysis of existing literature (published and unpublished works) on a specific topic or research question and provides a synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a particular field. A well-conducted literature review is crucial for researchers to build upon existing knowledge, avoid duplication of efforts, and contribute to the advancement of their field. It also helps researchers situate their work within a broader context and facilitates the development of a sound theoretical and conceptual framework for their studies.

Literature review is a crucial component of research writing, providing a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. The aim is to keep professionals up to date by providing an understanding of ongoing developments within a specific field, including research methods, and experimental techniques used in that field, and present that knowledge in the form of a written report. Also, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the scholar in his or her field.  

Before writing a literature review, it’s essential to undertake several preparatory steps to ensure that your review is well-researched, organized, and focused. This includes choosing a topic of general interest to you and doing exploratory research on that topic, writing an annotated bibliography, and noting major points, especially those that relate to the position you have taken on the topic. 

Literature reviews and academic research papers are essential components of scholarly work but serve different purposes within the academic realm. 3 A literature review aims to provide a foundation for understanding the current state of research on a particular topic, identify gaps or controversies, and lay the groundwork for future research. Therefore, it draws heavily from existing academic sources, including books, journal articles, and other scholarly publications. In contrast, an academic research paper aims to present new knowledge, contribute to the academic discourse, and advance the understanding of a specific research question. Therefore, it involves a mix of existing literature (in the introduction and literature review sections) and original data or findings obtained through research methods. 

Literature reviews are essential components of academic and research papers, and various strategies can be employed to conduct them effectively. If you want to know how to write a literature review for a research paper, here are four common approaches that are often used by researchers.  Chronological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the chronological order of publication. It helps to trace the development of a topic over time, showing how ideas, theories, and research have evolved.  Thematic Review: Thematic reviews focus on identifying and analyzing themes or topics that cut across different studies. Instead of organizing the literature chronologically, it is grouped by key themes or concepts, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of various aspects of the topic.  Methodological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the research methods employed in different studies. It helps to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies and allows the reader to evaluate the reliability and validity of the research findings.  Theoretical Review: A theoretical review examines the literature based on the theoretical frameworks used in different studies. This approach helps to identify the key theories that have been applied to the topic and assess their contributions to the understanding of the subject.  It’s important to note that these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and a literature review may combine elements of more than one approach. The choice of strategy depends on the research question, the nature of the literature available, and the goals of the review. Additionally, other strategies, such as integrative reviews or systematic reviews, may be employed depending on the specific requirements of the research.

The literature review format can vary depending on the specific publication guidelines. However, there are some common elements and structures that are often followed. Here is a general guideline for the format of a literature review:  Introduction:   Provide an overview of the topic.  Define the scope and purpose of the literature review.  State the research question or objective.  Body:   Organize the literature by themes, concepts, or chronology.  Critically analyze and evaluate each source.  Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the studies.  Highlight any methodological limitations or biases.  Identify patterns, connections, or contradictions in the existing research.  Conclusion:   Summarize the key points discussed in the literature review.  Highlight the research gap.  Address the research question or objective stated in the introduction.  Highlight the contributions of the review and suggest directions for future research.

Both annotated bibliographies and literature reviews involve the examination of scholarly sources. While annotated bibliographies focus on individual sources with brief annotations, literature reviews provide a more in-depth, integrated, and comprehensive analysis of existing literature on a specific topic. The key differences are as follows: 

References 

• Denney, A. S., & Tewksbury, R. (2013). How to write a literature review.  Journal of criminal justice education ,  24 (2), 218-234. 
• Pan, M. L. (2016).  Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches . Taylor & Francis. 
• Cantero, C. (2019). How to write a literature review.  San José State University Writing Center . 

Paperpal is an AI writing assistant that help academics write better, faster with real-time suggestions for in-depth language and grammar correction. Trained on millions of research manuscripts enhanced by professional academic editors, Paperpal delivers human precision at machine speed.  

Try it for free or upgrade to  Paperpal Prime , which unlocks unlimited access to premium features like academic translation, paraphrasing, contextual synonyms, consistency checks and more. It’s like always having a professional academic editor by your side! Go beyond limitations and experience the future of academic writing.  Get Paperpal Prime now at just US$19 a month!

Related Reads:

• Empirical Research: A Comprehensive Guide for Academics 
• How to Write a Scientific Paper in 10 Steps 
• How Long Should a Chapter Be?
• How to Use Paperpal to Generate Emails & Cover Letters?

6 Tips for Post-Doc Researchers to Take Their Career to the Next Level

Self-plagiarism in research: what it is and how to avoid it, you may also like, mla works cited page: format, template & examples, how to ace grant writing for research funding..., powerful academic phrases to improve your essay writing , how to write a high-quality conference paper, how paperpal’s research feature helps you develop and..., how paperpal is enhancing academic productivity and accelerating..., how to write a successful book chapter for..., academic editing: how to self-edit academic text with..., 4 ways paperpal encourages responsible writing with ai, what are scholarly sources and where can you....

Advertisement

Supported by

Everyone Wants a Piece of Kafka, a Writer Who Refused to Be Claimed

A hundred years after Kafka’s death, people and nations are still fighting over his legacy.

• Share full article

By Benjamin Balint

Benjamin Balint is the author of “Kafka’s Last Trial” and, most recently, “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History,” winner of the National Jewish Book Award in biography.

In his novella “The Prague Orgy,” Philip Roth has a Czech writer say: “When I studied Kafka, the fate of his books in the hands of the Kafkologists seemed to me to be more grotesque than the fate of Josef K.” Just as Franz Kafka’s prose both demands and evades interpretation, something about his legacy has both solicited and resisted claims of ownership.

Despite his astonishing clairvoyance about the impersonal cruelty of the bureaucratic state and the profound alienation of contemporary life, Kafka could not have foreseen how many admirers would read and misread his enigmatic fictions after his death, nor how many would-be heirs would seek to appropriate him as their own in the century since.

Competing claims began to swirl almost as soon as Kafka died of tuberculosis, 100 years ago this June, a month short of his 41st birthday. Max Brod — close friend, betrayer of Kafka’s last instruction to burn his manuscripts, heavy-handed editor of his diaries and unfinished novels, and author of the first Kafka biography — depicted him as a modern-day “saint” whose stories and parables “are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time.”

Among other religious readers of the novels Brod published (“The Trial” in 1925, “The Castle” in 1926 and “Amerika” in 1927), Kafka’s first English translators, Edwin and Willa Muir, presented him as an allegorist of Christian grace. (In German, “Die Verwandlung,” the title of Kafka’s tale of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis into an insect, also connotes “transfiguration.”)

As early as 1947, Edmund Wilson warned that all this deification threatened to “oversaturate and stupefy” Kafka’s readers. Still, the Kafka craze continued to swell. In the 1960s, existentialists interpreted Kafka as an angst-ridden precursor who stared into the abyss of absurdity and asked — as Josef K. does in the penultimate paragraph of “The Trial” — “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen?” Simone de Beauvoir said that Kafka “revealed to us our own problems, confronted by a world without God and where nonetheless our salvation was at stake.”

Psychoanalysts claimed the author of stories like “In the Penal Colony” and “A Hunger Artist” as a neurotic herald of the uncanny or a self-tortured “poet of shame and guilt” (as the subtitle of Saul Friedländer’s biography has it). Modernists adopted Kafka not as a patient to be diagnosed but as the writer who most acutely perceived the bewildering breakdown of received ideas in our society. “Had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs,” W.H. Auden said, “Kafka is the first one would think of.”

Others pulled Kafka into this or that political cause, most bizarrely when he was fashioned into a weapon of the Cold War. In a speech in Moscow in 1962, Jean-Paul Sartre cautioned against the “militarization” of culture, likening Kafka to a “grenade in the library” or a cartload of dynamite shunted between East and West. “A true cultural competition,” Sartre said, “raises the following pacifist challenge: To whom, us or you, does Kafka belong; that is to say, who understands him best?”

Soviet critics enlisted Kafka as an ally of the dignified individual bravely clashing with the capitalist system, while anti-communist dissidents turned him into an adversary of the bureaucratic terror practiced by authoritarian regimes. In 1954, long before the writer’s name became a ubiquitous adjectival cliché, Arthur Koestler disparaged the Moscow show trials as “Kafka-esque.” Two years later, as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, the Marxist literary critic György Lukács was arrested in Budapest, held in a Romanian castle and deprived of the right to know the charges, much less to rebut them. “So Kafka was a realist after all!” he declared.

A more recent chapter in the story of Kafka’s contentious afterlife involves those who attempted to connect a national “we” to his name. Beginning in 2007, a nine-year custody battle was waged in Israeli courts over the manuscripts by Kafka that Brod had narrowly rescued from the Nazi occupation of Prague. The case could be read as a commentary on a single question: Does this writer — a member of a Jewish minority within a German-speaking minority within a Czech minority within a heterogeneous Austro-Hungarian Empire — belong to German literature or to the state that regards itself as the representative of Jews everywhere?

On one side was the National Library of Israel, which recruited Kafka as a Jewish writer, despite his ambivalence toward Zionism. Israel saw itself as the rightful home to the cultural products of diaspora, the appropriate ending place for a story begun elsewhere. On the other side, lawyers for the German Literature Archive in Marbach argued that Kafka’s manuscripts belonged in Germany because his language was German — “the purest German prose of the century,” Hannah Arendt said.

When I attended the Israeli Supreme Court hearing on the case in the summer of 2016, one thing seemed beyond doubt: Germany’s claim on a writer whose family was decimated in the Shoah had become entangled with the country’s attempt to overcome its shame. Perhaps some Germans hoped that the act of claiming Kafka — as a Jewish guardian of German prose, and as a Jew fortunate enough to die before he could fall victim to the Nazis — would serve that overcoming. Here lay a potent irony: The writer who raised self-condemnation to an art would be used as an instrument of self-exculpation, of effacing, rather than facing up to, the past. (The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the National Library .)

The Palestinian undergraduates with whom I read Kafka were not preoccupied with questions of cultural ownership. When we read “The Trial” in a course I taught at a Bard College program in East Jerusalem, the students were riveted from the opening line: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”

One student compared the book to Mustafa Khalifa’s “ The Shell ,” a novel (published here in 2023) based on the author’s 13-year imprisonment without trial in Syria. Another found in Josef K.’s futile pursuit of justice a new vocabulary with which to express her family’s decades-long legal efforts to stave off eviction from the home they had lived in since the early 1950s, a two-bedroom apartment in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Since the property had belonged to a Jewish charitable trust before Israel’s creation in 1948, the state argued that ownership should revert to the charity’s trustees.

Like the trial over Kafka’s manuscripts, the family’s appeals would eventually be heard by the Supreme Court. “In ‘The Trial,’” my student said, “you can never obtain an acquittal. So also with us: We can only hope to postpone the eviction, to postpone, to postpone, to postpone.” For these young readers, Kafka conjured a world not surreal but superreal .

It struck me then that the readers who come closest to the essence of Kafka’s singular vision are those who recognize the irony of taking a proprietary attitude toward a writer so faithful to his own non-belonging, and so careful to set his characters — antagonists against authorities divine, political and paternal — in no particular time or place. In a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer, Kafka writes of his “infinite yearning for independence and freedom in all things.” Despite his deep feeling for Yiddish theater and for the Hebrew language, that yearning unmoored him from any kind of collective belonging and untethered his imagination to sail beyond any national canon, “obedient,” in his words, “to its own laws of motion.”

We can only wonder whether the spectacle of a century’s warring over his artistic legacy would have amused this least possessive of writers. “Everything I possess is directed against me,” Kafka confessed to Brod, “and what is directed against me is no longer in my possession.”

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

Don DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here are his essential books .

Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize , the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Kevin Kwan, the author of “Crazy Rich Asians,” left Singapore’s opulent, status-obsessed, upper crust when he was 11. He’s still writing about it .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

• Collections
• Support PDR

Search The Public Domain Review

“You Are My Friend” Early Androids and Artificial Speech

By Jessica Riskin

Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love.

May 29, 2024

Design for parts of a speaking machine from a 1791 treatise by Wolfgang von Kempelen. The bellows act as lungs feeding air into the voice box, which is fitted with a vibrating reed whose sounds are shaped by opening and closing valves. Not pictured here is a rubber “mouth” attachment, which connects to “ o ” with a flange that bears holes resembling nostrils — Source .

The word “android”, derived from Greek roots meaning “manlike”, was the coinage of Gabriel Naudé, French physician and librarian, personal doctor to Louis XIII, and later architect of the forty-thousand-volume library of Cardinal Jules Mazarin. Naudé was a rationalist and an enemy of superstition. In 1625 he published a defense of Scholastic philosophers to whom tradition had ascribed works of magic. He included the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great), who, according to legend, had built an artificial man made of bronze. 1

This story seems to have originated long after Albert’s death with Alfonso de Madrigal (also known as El Tostado), a voluminous commentator of the fifteenth century, who adapted and embellished the tales of moving statues and talking brazen heads in medieval lore. 2 El Tostado said that Albert had worked for thirty years to compose a whole man out of metal. The automaton supplied Albert with the answers to all of his most vexing questions and problems and even, in some versions of the tale, obligingly dictated a large part of Albert’s voluminous writings. The machine had met its fate, according to El Tostado, when Albert’s student, Thomas Aquinas, smashed it to bits in frustration, having grown tired of “its great babbling and chattering”. 3

Naudé did not believe in Albert’s talkative statue. He rejected it and other tales of talking automaton heads as “false, absurd and erroneous”. 4 The reason Naudé cited was the statues’ lack of equipment: being altogether without “muscles, lungs, epiglottis, and all that is necessary for a perfect articulation of the voice”, they simply did not have the necessary “parts and instruments” to speak reasonably. 5 Naudé concluded, in light of all the reports, that Albert the Great probably had built an automaton, but never one that could give him intelligible and articulate responses to questions. Instead, Albert’s machine must have been similar to the Egyptian statue of Memnon, much discussed by ancient authors, which murmured agreeably when the sun shone upon it: the heat caused the air inside the statue to “rarefy” so that it was forced out through little pipes, making a murmuring sound. 6

Despite disbelieving in Albert the Great’s talking head, Naudé gave it a powerful new name, referring to it as the “android”. 7 Thus deftly, he smuggled a new term into the language, for according to the 1695 dictionary by the French philosopher and writer Pierre Bayle, “android” had been “an absolutely unknown word, & purely an invention of Naudé, who used it boldly as though it were established.” 8 It was a propitious moment for neologisms: Naudé’s term quickly infiltrated the emerging genre of dictionaries and encyclopedias. Bayle repeated it in the article on “Albert le Grand” in his dictionary. 9 Thence, “android” secured its immortality as the headword of an article — citing Naudé and Bayle — in the first volume of the supplement to the English encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia . 10 In denying the existence of Albert’s android, Naudé had given life to the android as a category of machine.

“The Talking Head of Albertus Magnus”, plate from J. H. Pepper’s Cyclopædic Science Simplified (1885) — Source .

But the first actual android of the new, experimental-philosphical variety for which the historical record contains rich information — “android” in Naudé’s root sense, a working human-shaped assemblage of “necessary parts” and instruments — went on display on February 3, 1738. The venue was the opening of the annual Saint-Germain fair on Paris’ Left Bank. This android differed crucially from earlier musical automata, the figures on hydraulic organs and musical clocks, in that it really performed the complex task it appeared to perform, in this case, playing a flute, rather than merely making some suggestive motions. The device was, in this sense, a novelty, but it must have looked familiar to many of the fairgoers, being modeled on a well-known statue that stood in the entrance to the Tuileries Gardens and that is now at the Louvre Museum: Antoine Coysevox’s Shepherd Playing the Flute .

Like the statue, the android represented a faun, half man and half goat. The mechanical faun, like the marble one at the Tuileries, held a flute. The second faun, though, became suddenly animate and began to play its instrument, executing twelve tunes in succession. At first, skeptical spectators were persuaded this must be a music box, with an autonomous mechanism inside to produce the sound, while the external figure merely pretended to play. But no, the android actually did play a real flute, blowing air from its lungs (three sets of bellows), and exercising flexible lips, a supple tongue, and soft, padded fingers with a skin of leather. It was even reported that one could bring one’s own flute, and the machine would oblige by playing that one too. 11

The flute-playing android was the work of an ambitious young engineer named Jacques Vaucanson. The last of ten children of a Grenoble glove maker, Vaucanson had been born in the bitterly cold winter of 1709, at the waning of Louis XIV’s long reign, in the midst of a terrible famine and the bloodiest year of a war that France was losing. Emerging from this dark moment, Vaucanson’s life and the Enlightenment would take shape in tandem, and his work would become a point of reference for the world of letters.

As a child, he had liked to build clocks and repair watches. While a school boy, he had begun designing automata. After a brief stint as a novice in Lyon, ending when a church dignitary ordered Vaucanson’s workshop destroyed, he had come to Paris at the age of nineteen to seek his fortune. Thinking he might train as a doctor, he had attended some courses in anatomy and medicine, but had soon decided to apply these studies to a new area of research: re-creating living processes in machinery. The Flutist was the result of five years’ labor. 12 When it was finished, Vaucanson submitted a memoir explaining its mechanism to the Paris Academy of Sciences. This memoir contains the first known experimental and theoretical study of the acoustics of the flute. 13

“Vaucanson”, plate from Alfred des Essarts’ The Great Ancient and Modern Inventors (1864) — Source .

Following an eight-day debut at the Saint-Germain fair, Vaucanson moved his android to the Hôtel de Longueville, a gilded hall in a grand sixteenth-century mansion at the center of the city. There it attracted about seventy-five people a day, each paying a hefty entrance fee of three livres (roughly an average week’s wages for a Parisian worker). Among its audience were the members of the Paris Academy of Sciences, who traveled as a body to the Hôtel de Longueville to witness the android Flutist. 14 Greeting his public in groups of ten or fifteen, Vaucanson explained the Flutist’s mechanism and then set it to play its concert.

The reviews were effusive. “All of Paris is going to admire . . . the most singular and agreeable mechanical phenomenon perhaps ever seen”, wrote one reviewer, emphasizing that the android “really and physically plays the flute”. 15 The music-making statue, another agreed, was “the most marvelous piece of mechanics” that had ever been. 16 The abbé Pierre Desfontaines, a journalist and popular writer, advertising Vaucanson’s show to readers of his literary journal, described the insides of the Flutist as containing “an infinity of wires and steel chains . . . [which] form the movement of the fingers, in the same way as in living man, by the dilation and contraction of the muscles. It is doubtless the knowledge of the anatomy of man . . . that guided the author in his mechanics.” 17 In the article “Androïde” in the monumental Encylopédie , a universal compilation of knowledge edited by the philosopher and writer Denis Diderot and the mathematician and philosopher Jean d’Alembert, Vaucanson’s mechanical Flutist became the paradigm of an android. The article, written by d’Alembert, defines an android as a human figure performing human functions, and virtually the whole piece is devoted to the Flutist. 18

Soon after the Academy of Science members came to the Hôtel de Longueville, Vaucanson returned the visit to read a memoir on the design and function of his Flutist. 19 The android’s mechanism was moved by weights attached to two sets of gears. The bottom set turned an axle with cranks that powered three sets of bellows, leading into three windpipes, giving the Flutist’s lungs three different blowing pressures. The upper set of gears turned a cylinder with cams, triggering a frame of levers that controlled the Flutist’s fingers, windpipe, tongue, and lips. To design a machine that played a flute, Vaucanson had studied human flute players in minute detail. He had devised various ways of transmitting aspects of their playing into the design of his android. For example, to mark out measures he had had a flutist play a tune while another person beat time with a sharp stylus onto the rotating cylinder. 20

The following winter, Vaucanson added two more machines to the show. One was a second android musician, a life-size Provençal shepherd that played twenty minuets and other dance tunes on a pipe grasped in its left hand, while accompanying itself with its right on a drum slung over its shoulder. 21 The pipe had only three holes, which meant that the notes were produced almost entirely by the player’s variations of blowing pressure and tongue stops. Working to reproduce these subtleties in his automaton, Vaucanson found that human pipers employed a much greater range of blowing pressures than they themselves realized. The Piper also yielded another surprising discovery. Vaucanson had assumed that each note would be the product of a given finger position combined with a particular blowing pressure, but he discovered that the blowing pressure for a given note depended upon the preceding note, so that, for example, it required more pressure to produce a D after an E than after a C, obliging him to have twice as many blowing pressures as notes. 22 The higher overtones of the higher note resonate more strongly in the pipe than the lower overtones of the lower note; but pipers themselves were not aware of compensating for this effect, and the physics of overtones was explained only in the 1860s by Hermann von Helmholtz. 23

Detail from an illustration by Gravelot of Vaucanson’s automata: flutist, duck, and piper, ca. 1747–1773. While the bird could flap its wings and cavort duckishly, its main attraction was how it swallowed bits of grain and then excreted them in digested form — Source .

The android musicians did not just make music, a feat that music boxes had achieved for more than two centuries, but they did so using flexible lips, moving tongues, soft fingers, and swelling lungs. They were simulations of the human process of making music, and as the century wore on, the designers of such simulations turned toward the even more complex task of making machines that could mimic human speech.

In 1739, a year after Vaucanson’s duck made its public debut, a surgeon named Claude-Nicolas le Cat, published a description, now lost, of an “automaton man in which one sees executed the principal functions of the animal economy”, circulation, respiration, and “the secretions”. 24 It is not clear what became of this early project, but Le Cat returned to the idea in 1744 when, according to the proceedings of the Académie de Rouen, he read a sensational memoir there. A great crowd was assembled to hear it, and one witness reported, “Monsieur Le Cat told us of his plan for an artificial man . . . . His automaton will have respiration, circulation, quasi-digestion, secretion and chyle, heart, lungs, liver and bladder, and God forgive us, all that follows from it.” 25

Le Cat’s automaton man was to have “all the operations of a living man”, including not only “the circulation of the blood, the movement of the heart, the play of the lungs, the swallowing of food, its digestion, the evacuations, the filling of the blood vessels and their depletion by bleeding”, but also — apparently crossing the Cartesian boundary between mechanical body and rational soul — “even speech and the articulation of words”. 26

This idea, the possibility of simulating articulate speech, had generated a tradition of philosophical discussion over the preceding century. If some continued to find it a quixotic notion, it was in fact literally so: when Don Quixote himself encounters a talking bronze head (connected to a hidden human being), he is fully captivated by it, though his less suggestible squire, Sancho Panza, is unimpressed by its conversation. 27 Cervantes’s contemporary, the Spanish writer on magic, Martín del Río, also found it unreasonable to suppose “that an inanimate thing should produce the human voice and give answers to questions. For this requires life, and breath, and a perfect cooperation of the vital organs, and some discursive ability in the speaker.” 28

1662 print of an engraving by Martin Engelbrecht depicting Don Quixote inspecting the talking, enchanted head — Source .

Several decades later, some if not all the items on del Río’s list seemed possibly achievable in an artificial machine. Athanasius Kircher wrote in 1673, with regard to the legends of Albert the Great’s talking head and the ancient Egyptian speaking statues, that while certain skeptics believed these devices must have been “either non-existent or fraudulent or constructed with the help of the devil”, many others believed it was possible to build such a statue having throat, tongue and other organs of speech that would emit an articulated voice when it was activated by wind. Kircher included a sketch of a design for a talking figure. 29 His student, Gaspar Schott, also a prolific natural philosopher and engineer, adopted the same attitude, even alluding to a question-answering statue that Kircher was building for Queen Christina of Sweden. 30 No doubt the queen’s previous philosophy teacher, Descartes, had interested her in the relations between rational speech and a mechanical body.

Although the idea of simulated speech was not new, around the middle of the eighteenth century, experimental philosophers and mechanicians took a renewed interest in it. They assumed that speech was a bodily function akin to respiration or digestion — they did not explicitly distinguish the rational from the physiological aspects of speaking — and even the skeptics expressed their skepticism in connection with physiological details rather than principled objections. In his effusive review of Vaucanson’s Flutist in 1738, for example, the abbé Desfontaines predicted that articulate speech could never be produced in artificial machinery because the bodily process of speaking would remain impenetrably mysterious: one could never know precisely “what goes on in the larynx and glottis . . . [and] the action of the tongue, its folds, its movements, its varied and imperceptible rubbings, all the modifications of the jaw and the lips.” 31 Speaking was an essentially organic process, Desfontaines reckoned, and could only take place in a living throat.

Desfontaines was not alone in this belief: in this period, skeptics about the possibility of artificial speech generally argued that the human larynx, vocal tract, and mouth were too soft, supple, and malleable to be simulated mechanically. Around 1700, Denys Dodart, personal physician to Louis XIV, presented several memoirs to the Paris Academy of Sciences on the subject of the human voice, in which he argued that the voice and its modulations were caused by constrictions of the glottis, and that these were “inimitable by art”. 32 The writer and academician Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who was then Perpetual Secretary of the Academy, commented that no wind instrument produced its sound by such a mechanism (the variation of a single opening) and that it seemed “altogether outside the realm of imitation . . . . Nature can use materials that are not at all at our disposal, and she knows how to use them in ways that we are not at all permitted to know.” 33

A last skeptic citing material difficulties was the philosopher and writer Antoine Court de Gébelin, who observed that “the trembling that spreads to all the parts of the glottis, the jigging of its muscles, their shock against the hyoid bone that raises and lowers itself, the repercussions that the air undergoes against the sides of the mouth . . . these phenomena” could only take place in living bodies. 34 On the other hand, there were plenty who disagreed. For example, the polemical materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie took a look at Vaucanson’s Flutist and concluded that a speaking machine “could no longer be regarded as impossible”. 35

“Organs of the Voice”, plate from Antoine Court de Gébelin’s Primitive World (ca. 1773–1782) — Source .

During the last three decades of the century, several people took up the project of artificial speech. All of them assumed that the sounds of spoken language required a structure as similar as possible to the throat and mouth. This assumption, that a talking machine required simulated speaking organs, had not always dominated thinking about artificial speech. In 1648, John Wilkins, the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, had described plans for a speaking statue that would synthesize, rather than simulate, speech by making use of “inarticulate sounds”. He wrote, “We may note the trembling of water to be like the letter L, the quenching of hot things to the letter Z, the sound of strings, to the letter Ng [ sic ], the jirking of a switch to the letter Q, etc.” 36 But in the 1770s and 80s, builders of speaking machines mostly assumed that it would be impossible to create artificial speech without building a talking head: reproducing the speech organs and simulating the process of speaking.

The first to attempt such a machine was the English poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin) who in 1771 reported that he had “contrived a wooden mouth with lips of soft leather, and with a valve over the back part of it for nostrils.” Darwin’s talking head had a larynx made of “a silk ribbon . . . stretched between two bits of smooth wood a little hollowed.” It said “mama, papa, map and pam” in “a most plaintive tone”. 37

The next to simulate speech was a Frenchman, the abbé Mical, who presented a pair of talking heads to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1778. The heads contained “several artificial glottises of different forms [arranged] over taut membranes”. By means of these glottises, the heads performed a dialogue in praise of Louis XVI: “The King gives peace to Europe”, intoned the first head; “Peace crowns the King with Glory”, replied the second; “and Peace makes the Happiness of the People”, added the first; “O King Adorable Father of your People their Happiness shows Europe the Glory of your Throne”, concluded the second head. 38

Illustration by E. A. Tilly depicting the abbé Mical’s pair of talking heads, ca. 1783 — Source .

The Paris gossip and memoirist Louis Petit de Bachaumont noted that the heads were life-size, but covered tastelessly in gold. They mumbled some words and swallowed certain letters; moreover, their voices were hoarse and their diction slow (and their conversation, he might have added, uninspiring).

Yet despite all this, they undeniably had “the gift of speech”. The academicians appointed to examine Mical’s talking heads agreed that their enunciation was “very imperfect” but granted their approval to the work anyhow because it was done in imitation of nature and contained “the same results that we admire in dissecting . . . the organ of the voice.” Bachaumont recorded that the academicians were so impressed with the abbé Mical that, on the occasion of the Montgolfière balloon demonstration at Versailles on September 19, 1783, in which a sheep, a rooster, and a duck became the world’s first aviation passengers, the six delegates from the Académie des sciences invited Mical to accompany their delegation and presented him to the king as the author of the celebrated talking heads. 39

The following year, probably at the instigation of the mathematician Leonhard Euler, the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences sponsored a prize competition to determine the nature of the vowels and to construct an instrument like vox humana organ pipes to express them. C. G. Kratzenstein, a member of the Academy, won the prize. He used an artificial glottis (a reed) and organ pipes shaped according to the situation of the tongue, lips, and mouth in the pronunciation of the vowels. 40

Several more people built talking heads before the turn of the century. Among them was a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen who had been hired at the age of twenty-one by the Empress Maria Theresa to serve at the court of the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna. He had achieved fame in 1769 when, for the amusement of his patroness, Kempelen had built an android Turk that played an expert game of chess (by virtue of the expert human chess player cleverly hidden inside). A couple decades later, Kempelen set out to uncover the secret of articulate speech. In 1791, he published “a description of a speaking machine” in which he reported having attached bellows and resonators to musical instruments that resembled the human voice, such as oboes and clarinets; he had also tried, like Kratzenstein, modifying vox humana organ pipes. 41 Through twenty years of such attempts, he had been sustained, he said, by the conviction that “ speech must be imitable ”. The resulting apparatus had bellows for lungs, a glottis of ivory, a leather vocal tract with a hinged tongue, a rubber oral cavity, a mouth whose resonance could be altered by opening and closing valves, and a nose with two little pipes as nostrils. Two levers on the device connected with whistles and a third with a wire that could be dropped onto the reed. These enabled the machine to pronounce liquids and fricatives: Ss, Zs, and Rs. 42

Plates depicting the components of artificial and natural speech from Wolfgang von Kempelen’s The Mechanism of Speech (1791) — Source .

This machine produced an empirical finding reminiscent of Vaucanson’s discovery that the blowing pressure for a given note depended upon the preceding note. Kempelen reported that he had first tried to produce each sound in a given word or phrase independently but failed because the successive sounds needed to take their shape from one another: “The sounds of speech become distinct only by the proportion that exists among them, and in the linking of whole words and phrases.” Listening to his machine’s blurred speech, Kempelen perceived a further constraint upon the mechanization of language: the reliance of comprehension upon context. 43

Kempelen’s machine was only moderately successful. It reportedly prattled in a childish voice, reciting vowels and consonants. It pronounced words such as “Mama” and “Papa”, and uttered some phrases, such as “you are my friend—I love you with all my heart”, “my wife is my friend”, and “come with me to Paris”, but indistinctly. 44 Today the machine resides at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. Kempelen and his supporters emphasized that the device was imperfect and explained that it was not so much a speaking machine in itself as a machine that demonstrated the possibility of constructing a speaking machine. 45

After this flurry of activity in the 1770s, 80s, and 90s, there was a decline in interest in speech simulation. A few people over the course of the nineteenth century, including the inventors Charles Wheatstone and Alexander Graham Bell, built their own versions of Kempelen’s and Mical’s speaking machines and of other talking heads from an earlier period. 46 But for the most part, designers of artificial speech turned their attention once again to speech synthesis rather than simulation: reproducing the sounds of human speech by other means rather than trying to reproduce the actual organs and physiological processes of speech. 47

In 1828, Robert Willis — a professor of applied mechanics at Cambridge who had earlier rejected the possibility of the Chessplayer’s intelligence — wrote disparagingly that most people who had investigated the nature of the vowel sounds “appear never to have looked beyond the vocal organs for their origin”, apparently assuming that the vowel sounds could not exist without being produced by the vocal organs. In other words, they had treated the vowels as “physiological functions of the human body” rather than as “a branch of acoustics”. In fact, Willis argued, vowel sounds could perfectly well be produced by other means. 48 Whether or not the vocal organs themselves could be simulated artificially became a separate question from whether the sounds of speech could be reproduced. As late as 1850, the French physiologist Claude Bernard wrote in his notebook: “The larynx is a larynx and the crystalline lens is a crystalline lens, that is to say their mechanical or physical conditions are realized nowhere but in the living organism.” 49

Photograph of Joseph Faber’s “Euphonia” talking machine, ca. 1846 — Source .

Disenchantment with speech simulation was so deep that when a German immigrant to America named Joseph Faber designed quite an impressive talking head in the late 1840s, he could not get anyone to take any notice of it. Faber’s talking head was modeled on Kempelen’s and Mical’s, but was far more elaborate. It had the head and torso of a man once again dressed like a Turk, and inside were bellows, an ivory glottis and tongue, a variable resonance chamber, and a mouth cavity with a rubber palate, lower jaw, and cheeks. The machine could pronounce all the vowels and consonants, and was connected by way of levers to a keyboard of seventeen keys, so that Faber could play it like a piano. He first exhibited the machine in New York City in 1844, where it aroused very little interest. He then took it to Philadelphia where he had no better luck. P. T. Barnum found Faber and his talking head there, renamed the machine the “Euphonia”, and took them on tour to London, but even Barnum could not make a success of it. Finally the Euphonia was exhibited in Paris in the late 1870s, where it was mostly ignored, and soon thereafter all traces of it disappear. 50

The moment for talking heads had passed. In the early part of the twentieth century, designers of artificial speech moved on from mechanical to electrical speech synthesis. 51 The simulation of the organs and process of speaking — of the trembling glottis, the malleable vocal tract, the supple tongue and mouth — was specific to the last decades of the eighteenth century, when philosophers and mechanicians and paying audiences were briefly preoccupied with the idea that articulate language was a bodily function: that Descartes’ divide between mind and body might be bridged in the organs of speech.

Notes Show Notes

• On the legend of Albertus Magnus’s artificial man, see Eugenio Battisti, L’antirinascimento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), 226; and Sarah Higley, “The Legend of the Learned Man’s Android”, in *Retelling Tales: Essays in
• El Tostado notably adapted a story associated with Pope Sylvester. See Joseph R. Jones, “Historical Materials for the Study of the Cabeza Encantada Episode in Don Quijote II.62", Hispanic Review 41, no. 1 (1979): 91–92.
• El Tostado quoted in Gabriel Naudé, Apologie pour tous les grands hommes, qui ont esté accusez de magie (Paris: Eschart, 1669), 382–83. For the android’s dictation of Albert’s writings, see the article “Androïdes” in Ephraim Chambers et al., A Supplement to Mr. Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences , 2 vols. (London: W. Innys and J. Richardson, 1753).
• Naudé, Apologie , 385–88.
• Ibid., 389–90. Naudé is referring to the statue of Memnon on the Nile River that ancient authors said made sounds with the rising sun. See, for example, Callistratus, “On the Statue of Memnon”, in Elder Philostratus, Younger Philostratus, Callistratus , trans. Arthur Fairbanks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1931. On the speaking statue of Memnon, see also Paul Henry Stanhope, “The Statue of Memnon”, London Quarterly Review (April 1875): 278–84.
• Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique , 4 vols. (Amsterdam: P. Brunel, 1740), 1:131.
• Ibid., 1:130.
• See the article “Androïdes”, in Scott, Supplement .
• Jacques Vaucanson, Mécanisme du fluteur automate , trans. J. T. Desaguliers (Buren, the Netherlands: F. Knuf, 1979), 10–20. “One can substitute another flute entirely in the place of the one he plays”: Luynes, Mémoires, 2:12–13. Similarly, the abbé Desfontaines emphasized that it was “the fingers positioned variously on the holes of the flute that vary the tones . . . . In a word art has done here all that nature does in those who play the flute well. That is what can be seen and heard, beyond a doubt”, in Pierre Desfontaines, “Lettre CLXXX sur le Flûteur automate et l’Aristipe moderne”, Observations sur les écrits modern 12 (March 30, 1738), 339. On audiences’ initial disbelief that the flute player was actually playing his flute, see the reports cited in Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, utomata: A Historical and Technological Study , trans. Alec Reid (Geneva: Editions du Griffon, 1958), 274; Alexander Buchner, Mechanical Musical Instruments , trans. Iris Urwin (London: Batchworth Press, 1959), 85–86; and David Lasocki’s preface to Vaucanson, Mécanisme du fluteur automate , [ii].
• Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, “Eloge de Vaucanson” (1782), in Œuvres de Condorcet , ed. Arthur O'Connor and Fraçois Arago, 12 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1847–49), 2:643–60; André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Jacques Vaucanson, mècanicien de génie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), chaps. 1–2.
• AS, Registre des procès-verbaux des séances for April 26 and 30, 1739.
• “Nouvelles à la main au marquis de Langaunay”, letter dated May 12, 1738, BNF, Ms Fr. 13700, no 2; Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson , 30–34, 41.
• Mercure de France (April 1738), 739; Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson , 51. On the vogue that Vaucanson launched, see also Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), chapter 5.
• Le pour et contre (1738), 213; Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson , 53, 61.
• Desfontaines, “Lettre”, 340. The review of Vaucanson’s treatise on the flute player in the Journal des sçavans also emphasized the role of anatomical and physical research in informing the android’s design. See Journal des sçavans (1739), 441. See also Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson , 51.
• See d’Alembert’s 1751 article “Androïde”, in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie , 1:448.
• Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson , 41.
• See Vaucanson, Mécanisme du fluteur automate , 10–20. This process was the precursor of the procedure by which the first musical recordings were made, during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, when pianists such as Claude Debussy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, George Gershwin, Arthur Rubinstein, and Scott Joplin marked out rolls for player pianos.
• Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson , 53, 61.
• Vaucanson, “Letter to the Abbé Desfontaines”, in Mécanisme du fluteur automate , 23– 24.
• Hermann von Helmholtz explained the effects of partials in his Lehre von den Tonempfindungen . I am grateful to Myles Jackson for helping me to figure out the causes underlying Vaucanson’s acoustical discovery.
• This description appeared in conjunction with Le Cat’s Traité de la saignée (1739) as its “experimental part”, in order “to confirm by experience” Le Cat’s theory of bleeding; see Doyon and Liaigre, “Méthodologie”, 298–99.
• Le Cornier de Cideville to Fontenelle, December 15, 1744, in Tougard, Documents , 1:52–54, at 53. See Doyon and Liaigre, “Méthodologie”, 300.
• Registre-Journal des Assemblées et Déliberations de l’Académie des sciences . . . établie on 1744: 3 (manuscript non classé de la Bibliothèque publique de Rouen), cited in Doyon and Liaigre, “Méthodologie”, 300.
• Cervantes, Don Quixote , trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Viking, 1958), chap. 62. On this episode in the novel, see Jones, “Historical Materials”, 101–2.
• Martin Del Río, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Venice, 1640), 26.
• Kircher, Phonurgia Nova , 161, quoted in Jones, “Historical Materials”, 99.
• Jones, “Historical Materials”, 99.
• Desfontaines, “Lettre”, 341.
• Denys Dodart, “Sur les causes de la voix de l’homme et de ses différens tons”, in Année 1700: Mémoires of Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences (Amsterdam: Gerard Kuyper, 1700): 244–93; Denys Dodart, “Supplément au Mémoire sur la voix et sur les tons”, in Année 1706: Mémoires of Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences (Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup, 1706): 136–48; Denys Dodart, “Suite de la première partie du Supplément”, in Année 1706: Mémoires of Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences *Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup, 1706), 388–410; and Denys Dodart, “Supplément au Mémoire sur la voix et sur les tons”, in Année 1707: Mémoires of Histoire de l’Académie royale des science (Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup, 1707): 66–81. For Fontenelle’s commentary on Dodart’s memoirs, see Fontenelle’s three articles “Sur la formation de la voix” (1700, 1706, and 1707) in the volumes cited above.
• Fontenelle, “Sur la formation de la voix” (1707), 20.
• Antoine Court de Gébelin, Le monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne , 9 vols. (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1773–82), 2:83–84.
• La Mettrie, L’homme machine , 190.
• John Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick, or, The Wonders That May Be Performed by Mathematicall Geometry (London: Sa. Gellibrand, 1648), 177–78.
• Charles Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society (London: For J. Johnson by T. Bensley, 1803): 119–20.
• Têtes parlantes inventées et exécutées par M. l’abbé Mical. (Extrait d’un ouvrage qui a pour titre: Système de prononciation figurée, applicable à toutes les langues et exécuté sur les langues française et anglaise) , VZ-1853, BNF; Rivarol, “Lettre à M. le president de”, 20–24; Rivarol, Discours , 79–82; Bachaumont, Mémoires , 11: 237, 13: 270, 26: 214–216; Séris, Langages et machines , 245; Chapuis and Gélis, Monde , 2:204–206. According to Rivarol, Mical also built “an entire Concert in which the figures, as big as life, made Music from morning till evening”, “Lettre à M. le president de”, 29.
• AS, Registre des procès-verbaux des séances for September 3, 1783; Bachaumont, Mémoires , 26: 214–16.
• Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination , (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 188–89, 198; Jean-Pierre Séris, Langages et machines à l’âge classique (Paris: Hachette, 1995), 247.
• Kempelen, Mécanisme de la parole , 394–464. On Kempelen’s and others’ attempts to simulate human speech in the last third of the eighteenth century, see also Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination , chap. 8; and Séris, Langages et machines , 245– 46.
• Kempelen, Mécanisme de la parole , 395–400, 405, 415–59.
• Ibid., 401.
• Ibid., 463.
• Karl Gottlieb Windisch, Inanimate Reason; or, A Circumstantial Account of that Astonishing Piece of Mechanism, De Kempelen’s Chess-Player (London: S. Bladon, 1784), 49.
• On Wheatstone’s and Bell’s reproductions, see James L. Flanagan, “Voices of Men and Machines”, in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 51 (1972): 1375–87; James L. Flanagan, Speech Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception (Berlin: Springer, 1965), 166–71; M. R. Schroeder, “A Brief History of Synthetic Speech” Speech Communication 13 (1993): 231– 37; and Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination , 218–19.
• Hermann von Helmholtz, for example, built a machine using tuning forks and resonance chambers to produce the vowel sounds, described in Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music , trans. Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Dover, 1954), 399.
• Robert Willis, “On the Vowel Sounds, and on Reed Organ-Pipes.” Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 3 (1830): 231–68.
• Claude Bernard, Cahier de notes, 1850–1860 , ed. Mirko Dražen Grmek (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 171. This was probably in response to the assertion of Bernard’s mentor, François Magendie, that “I see in the lung a bellows, in the trachea, a vent, in the glottis a reed . . . . We have for the eye an optical apparatus, for the voice a musical instrument, for the stomach a living retort.” François Magendie, Phénomènes physiques de la vie: Leçons professées au collège de France , 4 vols (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1842).
• See David Lindsay, “Talking Head”, in Invention and Technology (Summer 1997): 57–63; and Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination , 214–16.
• Cf. Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination , 216, where the authors identify a partial and passing return to “more humanoid apparatus” in the “last years of the nineteenth century”.

Public Domain Works

• Internet Archive
• Library of Congress French original, 1738
• Oregon Health and Science University Library
• Internet Archive French translation
• Project Gutenberg

Further Reading

A collection of essays examining efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms.

An exploration into how the automata of early modern Europe can be seen as models for the new science of living things, tracing questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among others.

The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids that served as illustrations of the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanisation of humans by industrial technology.

The Public Domain Review receives a small percentage commission from sales made via the links to Bookshop.org (10%) and Amazon (4.5%). Thanks for supporting the project! For more recommended books, see all our “ Further Reading ” books, and browse our dedicated Bookshop.org stores for US and UK readers.

Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University. Her teaching, research and writing focus on the history of modern science, ideas, culture and politics. She is the author most recently of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Thing Tick and is currently writing a book about Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French naturalist who coined the term “biology” around 1800 and developed the first theory of evolution.

Excerpted and adapted from “The First Android”, a chapter from The Restless Clock by Jessica Riskin. © 2016 by Jessica Riskin. Reprinted with permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

• Science & Medicine
• Culture & History

If You Liked This…

Get Our Newsletter

Our latest content, your inbox, every fortnight

Prints for Your Walls

Explore our selection of fine art prints, all custom made to the highest standards, framed or unframed, and shipped to your door.

Start Exploring

{{ $localize("payment.title") }}

{{ $localize('payment.no_payment') }}

Pay by Credit Card

Pay with PayPal

{{ $localize('cart.summary') }}

Click for Delivery Estimates

Sorry, we cannot ship to P.O. Boxes.

A charming look at a reader’s many moods

Elisa Gabbert’s essays in “Any Person Is the Only Self” are brimming with pleasure and curiosity about a life with books.

Tell people you read and write for a living, and they picture a ghostly creature, an idea only incidentally appended to a body. What they often fail to understand is that the life of the mind is also a physical life — a life spent lugging irksomely heavy volumes around on the Metro and annotating their margins with a cramping hand. The poet, essayist and New York Times poetry columnist Elisa Gabbert is rare in grasping that reading is, in addition to a mental exercise, a movement performed in a particular place.

“If I remember anything about a book, I also remember where I read it — what room, what chair,” she writes in her charming new essay collection, “ Any Person Is the Only Self .” Writing, too, proves spatial: “I think essays, like buildings, need structure and mood. The first paragraph should function as a foyer or an antechamber, bringing you into the mood.”

The 16 delightfully digressive pieces in this collection are all moods that involve books in one way or another. But they are not just about the content of books, although they are about that, too: They are primarily about the acts of reading and writing, which are as much social and corporeal as cerebral.

In the first essay — the foyer — Gabbert writes about the shelf of newly returned books at her local library. “The books on that shelf weren’t being marketed to me,” she writes. “They weren’t omnipresent in my social media feeds. They were very often old and very often ugly. I came to think of that shelf as an escape from hype.” The haphazard selections on the shelf were also evidence of other people — the sort of invisible but palpable community of readers that she came to miss so sharply during the pandemic.

In another essay, she learns of a previously unpublished story by one of her favorite authors, Sylvia Plath, who makes frequent appearances throughout this book. Fearing that the story will disappoint her, Gabbert puts off reading it. As she waits, she grows “apprehensive, even frightened.”

There are writers who attempt to excise themselves from their writing, to foster an illusion of objectivity; thankfully, Gabbert is not one of them. On the contrary, her writing is full of intimacies, and her book is a work of embodied and experiential criticism, a record of its author’s shifting relationships with the literature that defines her life. In one piece, she rereads and reappraises books she first read as a teenager; in another, she and her friends form a “Stupid Classics Book Club,” to tackle “all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never had.”

Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic, and accordingly, her writing is not didactic; her essays revolve around images and recollections rather than arguments. In place of the analytic pleasures of a robustly defended thesis, we find the fresh thrills of a poet’s perfected phrases and startling observations. “Parties are about the collective gaze, the ability to be seen from all angles, panoramically,” she writes in an essay about fictional depictions of parties. She describes the photos in a book by Rachael Ray documenting home-cooked meals — one of the volumes on the recently returned shelf — as “poignantly mediocre.” Remarking on a listicle of “Books to Read by Living Women (Instead of These 10 by Dead Men),” Gabbert wonders, “Since when is it poor form to die?”

“Any Person Is the Only Self” is both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references, as packed with unexpected treasures as a crowded antique shop. An academic text on architecture, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a rare memory disorder whose victims recall every aspect of their autobiographies in excruciatingly minute detail, “Madame Bovary,” YouTube videos about people who work as professional cuddlers, a psychological study about whether it is possible to be sane in an insane asylum — all these feature in Gabbert’s exuberant essays. She is a fiercely democratic thinker, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity.

Perhaps because she is so indefatigably interested, she gravitates toward writers who see literature as a means of doubling life, allowing it to hold twice as much. Plath confessed in her journals that she wrote in an attempt to extend her biography beyond its biological terminus: “My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.” The very act of keeping a diary, then, splits the self in two.

Plath once insisted that bad things could never happen to her and her peers because “we’re different.” Gabbert asks “Different why?” and concludes that everyone is different: “We are we , not them. Any person is the only self.” But that “only” is, perhaps counterintuitively, not constrained or constricted. Walt Whitman famously wrote that his only self comprised “multitudes,” and Gabbert echoes him when she reflects, “If there is no one self, you can never be yourself, only one of your selves.” And indeed, she is loath to elevate any of her many selves over any of the others. When she rereads a book that she loved in her adolescence, she thinks she was right to love it back then. “That self only knew what she knew,” she writes. “That self wasn’t wrong .” Both her past self and her present self have an equal claim to being Elisa Gabbert, who is too fascinated by the world’s manifold riches to confine herself to a single, limited life.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”

Any Person Is the Only Self

By Elisa Gabbert

FSG Originals. 230 pp. $18, paperback.

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Trump found guilty: Read the court transcript of the hush money trial's final day

History was made Thursday afternoon when a Manhattan jury handed down a guilty verdict to former president Donald Trump .

Judge Juan Merchan was poised to dismiss the jury for the evening on their second day of deliberating when he received the note.

The jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to disguise the hush money payment issued to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election as legal expenses. Trump is expected to appeal the decision .

Cameras were not allowed in the courtroom, but you can experience the historic moment through court transcripts :

Understanding the verdict: What was Trump found guilty of? See the 34 business records the jury decided he falsified

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Read Trump trial transcript of guilty verdict proceedings

You can read all testimony transcripts on the New York Court media website .

Trump found guilty: Catch up on the trial's sex stories, secret tapes and court drama

See the first verdict sheet of a former president

What's next for donald trump.

Judge  Juan Merchan  has scheduled Trump's sentencing for July 11, and Trump is out free until then.

Because this is Trump's first felony offense, his sentence is likely to be as light as probation or home confinement. If he does receive a prison  sentence , it would probably be less than a year.

Trump is also likely to appeal the conviction, further pushing down any chance he serves jailtime before the election.

Contributing: Aysha Bagchi

Green Chemistry

A review on sustainable iron oxide nanoparticles: syntheses and applications in organic catalysis and environmental remediation.

* Corresponding authors

a Department of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai-Marathwada Campus, Jalna 431213, Maharashtra, India E-mail: [email protected]

b Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials, Czech Advanced Technology and Research Institute, (CATRIN), Palacký University Olomouc, Šlechtitelů 27, 779 00 Olomouc, Czech Republic E-mail: [email protected]

c Centre for Energy and Environmental Technologies (CEET), Nanotechnology Centre, VŠB–Technical University of Ostrava, 17. listopadu 2172/15, 708 00 Ostrava-Poruba, Czech Republic E-mail: [email protected]

Iron oxide nanoparticles have been intensively investigated owing to their huge potential as diagnostic, therapeutic, and drug-carrier agents in biomedicine, sorbents in environmental technologies, sensors of various inorganic and organic/biological substances, energy-generating and storing materials, and in assorted biotechnological and industrial processes involving microbiology, pigment industry, recording and magnetic media or (bio)catalysis. An eminent interest in exploring the realm of iron oxides is driven by their chemical and structural diversity, high abundance, low cost, non-toxicity, and broad portfolio of chemical procedures enabling their syntheses with desirable physicochemical features. The current review article centers its attention on the contemporary advancements in the field of catalysis and environmental technologies employing iron oxides in various chemical forms ( e.g. , hematite, magnetite, maghemite), sizes (∼10–100 nm), morphology characteristics ( e.g. , globular, needle-like), and nano architecture ( e.g. , nanoparticles, nanocomposites, core–shell structures). In particular, the catalytic applications of iron oxides and their hybrids are emphasized regarding their efficiency and selectivity in the coupling, oxidation, reduction, alkylation reactions, and Fischer–Tropsch synthesis. The deployment of iron oxides and their nanocomposites in environmental and water treatment technologies is also deliberated with their roles as nanosorbents for heavy metals and organic pollutants, photocatalysts, and heterogeneous catalysts ( e.g. , hydrogen peroxide decomposition) for oxidative treatment of various contaminants. The associated challenges and potential progress in iron-oxide-based catalytic and environmental technologies are highlighted as well. Young chemists, researchers, and scientists could find this review useful in enhancing the usefulness of nano iron oxides in their investigations and developing sustainable methodologies.

• This article is part of the themed collection: 2024 Green Chemistry Reviews

Article information

Download citation, permissions.

D. S. Chaudhari, R. P. Upadhyay, G. Y. Shinde, M. B. Gawande, J. Filip, R. S. Varma and R. Zbořil, Green Chem. , 2024, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D4GC01870B

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page .

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page .

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content .

Social activity

Search articles by author.

This article has not yet been cited.

Advertisements

All Thing Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess - It all gets a bit too much in the end

Becca rothfeld’s collection is energetic and charmingly verbose, but her tendency to demystify everything wears thin.

Becca Rothfeld: Moments of clear insight and great beauty

Towards the end of All Things Are Too Small, Becca’s Rothfeld’s defence of maximalism, she reproduces a quotation that she has “so thoroughly digested and metabolised” that it is now an essential fixture of her “mental repertoire”.

“I love a demystified thing inordinately.”

Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the problem with this book: Rothfeld’s tendency towards such relentless demystification of her subjects that they’re pallid and lifeless by the time she’s through.

This is not true of all the essays in the collection. It opens promisingly and with astounding energy and vigour. Initially, one forgives Rothfeld’s immediately evident habit of making grand, inaccurate statements, such as: “Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else.” If anything, her verbosity and inexactitude seem charming – she’s wrong because she’s passionate. Reading, I felt myself at a dinner table surrounded by voices stridently debating all manner of interesting things: literature, meaning, mindfulness, feminism, sex, sex and more sex (to give an idea of the topics of these essays).

Minor travel disasters and me: Ask me about how I discovered Germany had two Freiburgs

Ben Kane: When writing about combat and injuries, it helps that I know what blades do to flesh

Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women; Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children - listening to a wider narrative

The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won The War by Giles Milton

My God, though, did I want that dinner to end, so I could return somewhere peaceful and reflective, to cease the ringing in my ears of all this terribly intelligent demystifying. The humour, too, wears thin. Yes, it’s hilarious to mock the bourgeois aesthetic of Marie Kondo (I laughed aloud at “the declutterer dreams of a house without f**king or sh**ting”), but by the end of the collection, these knowing asides and the unremitting sarcasm made me feel like I was trying to converse with a surly, unimpressed teenager.

Also, Rothfeld’s attempts at love-writing made me physically cringe. At one point, she tells us that her husband loves reading so much, he does so in the shower. The impossible logistics of this image will never, I fear, cease to irritate me.

Yet, there are moments of clear insight, and of great beauty. Rothfeld’s capacious vocabulary left me stunned, and exquisite phrases such as “the gleaming purity of a history” almost made up for her agonising attempts at poeticism.

“The night was cool as mint. Behind him, the light from the streetlamp became butter melting. His voice was flat and nasal, mouthy as saltwater toffee.”

Ultimately, this collection’s great weakness is that these pieces have been gathered into a collection at all. I can see that, taken one at a time, Rothfeld’s tone would be pithy and gratifying, and these qualities would make up for her prolix, excessive demystification and broad, questionable statements. Alas, reading her thoughts over and over, all in a row, I grew frustrated, tired and harried. By the end, I wanted to leave the dinner party, to run out into the street, to regain the relief of a little mystery.

IN THIS SECTION

Around the world in 80 years by ranulph fiennes: extraordinary exploration stories, international protection applicant helps rescue woman from river liffey in dublin city centre, fired supervalu worker accused of clocking in and going to sleep, anatomy of a fake story: how anti-immigration candidates spread false information to boost their profile, abs fab on the canvass as richard bruton goes topless to attract votes, flying is becoming more volatile. here is what pilots have to say on the issue, latest stories, scientists develop method of making healthier, more sustainable chocolate, israel’s netanyahu says there cannot be permanent gaza ceasefire until hamas is destroyed, failure to inform official appearing at pac about extra €107m ‘undermines public confidence’, says kelly, campaign to destroy sunningdale holds lessons for today, ‘enjoy it while we have it’: weekend weather to hit 20 degrees but rain to return.

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Information
• Cookie Settings
• Community Standards