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How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

Search for relevant literature
Evaluate sources
Identify themes, debates, and gaps
Outline the structure
Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

Quick Run-through
Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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See an example

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

Your university’s library catalogue
Google Scholar
Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
EconLit (economics)
Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

What question or problem is the author addressing?
What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
What are the key theories, models, and methods?
Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
What are the results and conclusions of the study?
How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

Most research has focused on young women.
There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

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 sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Sampling methods
Simple random sampling
Stratified sampling
Cluster sampling
Likert scales
Reproducibility

Statistics

Null hypothesis
Statistical power
Probability distribution
Effect size
Poisson distribution

Research bias

Optimism bias
Cognitive bias
Implicit bias
Hawthorne effect
Anchoring bias
Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An annotated bibliography is a list of source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a paper .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, September 11). How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/

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17 strong academic phrases to write your literature review (+ real examples)

A well-written academic literature review not only builds upon existing knowledge and publications but also involves critical reflection, comparison, contrast, and identifying research gaps. The following 17 strong academic key phrases can assist you in writing a critical and reflective literature review.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase using the links below at no additional cost to you . I only recommend products or services that I truly believe can benefit my audience. As always, my opinions are my own.

Academic key phrases to present existing knowledge in a literature review

Academic key phrases to contrast and compare findings in a literature review, academic key phrases to highlight research gaps in a literature review, the topic has received significant interest within the wider literature..

Example: “ The topic of big data and its integration with AI has received significant interest within the wider literature .” ( Dwivedi et al. 2021, p. 4 )

The topic gained considerable attention in the academic literature in…

Example: “ The relationship between BITs and FDI gained considerable attention in the academic literature in the last two decades .” ( Amendolagine and Prota, 2021, p. 173 )

Studies have identified…

Example: “ Studies have identified the complexities of implementing AI based systems within government and the public sector .” ( Dwivedi et al. 2021, p. 6 )

Researchers have discussed…

Example: “ Researchers have discussed the ethical dimensions of AI and implications for greater use of the technology. ” ( Dwivedi et al. 2021, p. 6)

Recent work demonstrated that…

Example: “Recent work demonstrated that dune grasses with similar morphological traits can build contrasting landscapes due to differences in their spatial shoot organization.” ( Van de Ven, 2022 et al., p. 1339 )

Existing research frequently attributes…

Example: “Existing research frequently attributes these challenges to AI’s technical complexity, demand for data, and unpredictable interactions.” ( Yang et al., 2020, p. 174 )

Prior research has hypothesized that…

Example: “Prior research has hypothesized that racial and ethnic disparities may be mitigated if the patient and provider share the same race due to improved communication and increased trust” ( Otte, 2022, p. 1 )

Prior studies have found that…

Example: “ Prior studies have found that court-referred individuals are more likely to complete relationship violence intervention programs (RVIP) than self-referred individuals. ” ( Evans et al. 2022, p. 1 )

You may also like: 26 powerful academic phrases to write your introduction (+ real examples)

While some scholars…, others…

Example: “On the sustainable development of microcredit, some scholars emphasize the effect of its poverty alleviation, while some scholars emphasize the factors such as institutional innovation and government support.” ( Huang et al., 2021, p. 2117 )

The findings of Scholar A showcase that… . Scholar B , on the other hand, found…

Example: “ The findings of Arinto (2016) call for administrators concerning the design of faculty development programs, provision of faculty support, and strategic planning for online distance learning implementation across the institution. Francisco and Nuqui (2020) on the other hand found that the new normal leadership is an adaptive one while staying strong on their commitment. ” ( Asio and Bayucca, 2021, p. 20 )

Interestingly, all the arguments refer to…

Example: “Interestingly, all the arguments above refer to daily role transitions—more specifically: role transitions on teleworking days—as an important explanatory mechanism for both the possible conflict-reducing effect and the potential conflict enhancing effects of telework.” ( Delanoeije et al., 2019, p. 1845 )

This argument is similar to…

Example: “The third argument against physician involvement in lethal injection is that physicians are prohibited from deliberately harming patients or the argument from nonmaleficence. This argument is similar to the argument from healing but has different implications and must therefore be considered independently.” ( Sawicki, 2022, p. 22 )

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Yet, it remains unknown how…

Example: “Yet, it remains unknown how findings from aeolian landscapes translate to aquatic systems and how young clonally expanding plants in hydrodynamically exposed conditions overcome these establishment thresholds by optimizing shoot placement.” ( Van de Ven, 2022 et al., p. 1339 )

There is, however, still little research on…

Example: “There is, however, still little research on what integrated STEM approaches require from schools and teachers, and on the potential obstacles that may prevent teachers from running this kind of teaching.” ( Bungum and Mogstad, 2022, p. 2 )

Existing studies have failed to address…

Example: “ University–industry relations (UIR) are usually analysed by the knowledge transfer channels, but existing studies have failed to address what knowledge content is being transferred – impacting the technology output aimed by the partnership.” (Dalmarco et al. 2019, p. 1314 )

Several scholars have recommended to move away…

Example: “Several scholars have recommended to move away from such a stable-level approach (i.e. using a global judgment of work-home conflict) to a dynamic episodes approach ” ( Delanoeije et al., 2019, p. 1847 )

New approaches are needed to address…

Example: “ Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. ” ( Jumper et al. 2021,p. 583 )

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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.

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:
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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

How to write a good literature review

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.

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.

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 literature review is an ongoing process, and it may be necessary to revisit and update it as your research progresses.

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 .

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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 An A-Grade Literature Review

3 straightforward steps (with examples) + free template.

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Expert Reviewed By: Dr. Eunice Rautenbach | October 2019

Quality research is about building onto the existing work of others , “standing on the shoulders of giants”, as Newton put it. The literature review chapter of your dissertation, thesis or research project is where you synthesise this prior work and lay the theoretical foundation for your own research.

Long story short, this chapter is a pretty big deal, which is why you want to make sure you get it right . In this post, I’ll show you exactly how to write a literature review in three straightforward steps, so you can conquer this vital chapter (the smart way).

Overview: The Literature Review Process

Understanding the “ why “
Finding the relevant literature
Cataloguing and synthesising the information
Outlining & writing up your literature review
Example of a literature review

But first, the “why”…

Before we unpack how to write the literature review chapter, we’ve got to look at the why . To put it bluntly, if you don’t understand the function and purpose of the literature review process, there’s no way you can pull it off well. So, what exactly is the purpose of the literature review?

Well, there are (at least) four core functions:

For you to gain an understanding (and demonstrate this understanding) of where the research is at currently, what the key arguments and disagreements are.
For you to identify the gap(s) in the literature and then use this as justification for your own research topic.
To help you build a conceptual framework for empirical testing (if applicable to your research topic).
To inform your methodological choices and help you source tried and tested questionnaires (for interviews ) and measurement instruments (for surveys ).

Most students understand the first point but don’t give any thought to the rest. To get the most from the literature review process, you must keep all four points front of mind as you review the literature (more on this shortly), or you’ll land up with a wonky foundation.

Okay – with the why out the way, let’s move on to the how . As mentioned above, writing your literature review is a process, which I’ll break down into three steps:

Finding the most suitable literature
Understanding , distilling and organising the literature
Planning and writing up your literature review chapter

Importantly, you must complete steps one and two before you start writing up your chapter. I know it’s very tempting, but don’t try to kill two birds with one stone and write as you read. You’ll invariably end up wasting huge amounts of time re-writing and re-shaping, or you’ll just land up with a disjointed, hard-to-digest mess . Instead, you need to read first and distil the information, then plan and execute the writing.

Step 1: Find the relevant literature

Naturally, the first step in the literature review journey is to hunt down the existing research that’s relevant to your topic. While you probably already have a decent base of this from your research proposal , you need to expand on this substantially in the dissertation or thesis itself.

Essentially, you need to be looking for any existing literature that potentially helps you answer your research question (or develop it, if that’s not yet pinned down). There are numerous ways to find relevant literature, but I’ll cover my top four tactics here. I’d suggest combining all four methods to ensure that nothing slips past you:

Method 1 – Google Scholar Scrubbing

Google’s academic search engine, Google Scholar , is a great starting point as it provides a good high-level view of the relevant journal articles for whatever keyword you throw at it. Most valuably, it tells you how many times each article has been cited, which gives you an idea of how credible (or at least, popular) it is. Some articles will be free to access, while others will require an account, which brings us to the next method.

Method 2 – University Database Scrounging

Generally, universities provide students with access to an online library, which provides access to many (but not all) of the major journals.

So, if you find an article using Google Scholar that requires paid access (which is quite likely), search for that article in your university’s database – if it’s listed there, you’ll have access. Note that, generally, the search engine capabilities of these databases are poor, so make sure you search for the exact article name, or you might not find it.

Method 3 – Journal Article Snowballing

At the end of every academic journal article, you’ll find a list of references. As with any academic writing, these references are the building blocks of the article, so if the article is relevant to your topic, there’s a good chance a portion of the referenced works will be too. Do a quick scan of the titles and see what seems relevant, then search for the relevant ones in your university’s database.

Method 4 – Dissertation Scavenging

Similar to Method 3 above, you can leverage other students’ dissertations. All you have to do is skim through literature review chapters of existing dissertations related to your topic and you’ll find a gold mine of potential literature. Usually, your university will provide you with access to previous students’ dissertations, but you can also find a much larger selection in the following databases:

Open Access Theses & Dissertations
Stanford SearchWorks

Keep in mind that dissertations and theses are not as academically sound as published, peer-reviewed journal articles (because they’re written by students, not professionals), so be sure to check the credibility of any sources you find using this method. You can do this by assessing the citation count of any given article in Google Scholar. If you need help with assessing the credibility of any article, or with finding relevant research in general, you can chat with one of our Research Specialists .

Alright – with a good base of literature firmly under your belt, it’s time to move onto the next step.

Need a helping hand?

Step 2: Log, catalogue and synthesise

Once you’ve built a little treasure trove of articles, it’s time to get reading and start digesting the information – what does it all mean?

While I present steps one and two (hunting and digesting) as sequential, in reality, it’s more of a back-and-forth tango – you’ll read a little , then have an idea, spot a new citation, or a new potential variable, and then go back to searching for articles. This is perfectly natural – through the reading process, your thoughts will develop , new avenues might crop up, and directional adjustments might arise. This is, after all, one of the main purposes of the literature review process (i.e. to familiarise yourself with the current state of research in your field).

As you’re working through your treasure chest, it’s essential that you simultaneously start organising the information. There are three aspects to this:

Logging reference information
Building an organised catalogue
Distilling and synthesising the information

I’ll discuss each of these below:

2.1 – Log the reference information

As you read each article, you should add it to your reference management software. I usually recommend Mendeley for this purpose (see the Mendeley 101 video below), but you can use whichever software you’re comfortable with. Most importantly, make sure you load EVERY article you read into your reference manager, even if it doesn’t seem very relevant at the time.

2.2 – Build an organised catalogue

In the beginning, you might feel confident that you can remember who said what, where, and what their main arguments were. Trust me, you won’t. If you do a thorough review of the relevant literature (as you must!), you’re going to read many, many articles, and it’s simply impossible to remember who said what, when, and in what context . Also, without the bird’s eye view that a catalogue provides, you’ll miss connections between various articles, and have no view of how the research developed over time. Simply put, it’s essential to build your own catalogue of the literature.

I would suggest using Excel to build your catalogue, as it allows you to run filters, colour code and sort – all very useful when your list grows large (which it will). How you lay your spreadsheet out is up to you, but I’d suggest you have the following columns (at minimum):

Author, date, title – Start with three columns containing this core information. This will make it easy for you to search for titles with certain words, order research by date, or group by author.
Categories or keywords – You can either create multiple columns, one for each category/theme and then tick the relevant categories, or you can have one column with keywords.
Key arguments/points – Use this column to succinctly convey the essence of the article, the key arguments and implications thereof for your research.
Context – Note the socioeconomic context in which the research was undertaken. For example, US-based, respondents aged 25-35, lower- income, etc. This will be useful for making an argument about gaps in the research.
Methodology – Note which methodology was used and why. Also, note any issues you feel arise due to the methodology. Again, you can use this to make an argument about gaps in the research.
Quotations – Note down any quoteworthy lines you feel might be useful later.
Notes – Make notes about anything not already covered. For example, linkages to or disagreements with other theories, questions raised but unanswered, shortcomings or limitations, and so forth.

If you’d like, you can try out our free catalog template here (see screenshot below).

2.3 – Digest and synthesise

Most importantly, as you work through the literature and build your catalogue, you need to synthesise all the information in your own mind – how does it all fit together? Look for links between the various articles and try to develop a bigger picture view of the state of the research. Some important questions to ask yourself are:

What answers does the existing research provide to my own research questions ?
Which points do the researchers agree (and disagree) on?
How has the research developed over time?
Where do the gaps in the current research lie?

To help you develop a big-picture view and synthesise all the information, you might find mind mapping software such as Freemind useful. Alternatively, if you’re a fan of physical note-taking, investing in a large whiteboard might work for you.

Mind mapping is a useful way to plan your literature review.

Step 3: Outline and write it up!

Once you’re satisfied that you have digested and distilled all the relevant literature in your mind, it’s time to put pen to paper (or rather, fingers to keyboard). There are two steps here – outlining and writing:

3.1 – Draw up your outline

Having spent so much time reading, it might be tempting to just start writing up without a clear structure in mind. However, it’s critically important to decide on your structure and develop a detailed outline before you write anything. Your literature review chapter needs to present a clear, logical and an easy to follow narrative – and that requires some planning. Don’t try to wing it!

Naturally, you won’t always follow the plan to the letter, but without a detailed outline, you’re more than likely going to end up with a disjointed pile of waffle , and then you’re going to spend a far greater amount of time re-writing, hacking and patching. The adage, “measure twice, cut once” is very suitable here.

In terms of structure, the first decision you’ll have to make is whether you’ll lay out your review thematically (into themes) or chronologically (by date/period). The right choice depends on your topic, research objectives and research questions, which we discuss in this article .

Once that’s decided, you need to draw up an outline of your entire chapter in bullet point format. Try to get as detailed as possible, so that you know exactly what you’ll cover where, how each section will connect to the next, and how your entire argument will develop throughout the chapter. Also, at this stage, it’s a good idea to allocate rough word count limits for each section, so that you can identify word count problems before you’ve spent weeks or months writing!

PS – check out our free literature review chapter template…

3.2 – Get writing

With a detailed outline at your side, it’s time to start writing up (finally!). At this stage, it’s common to feel a bit of writer’s block and find yourself procrastinating under the pressure of finally having to put something on paper. To help with this, remember that the objective of the first draft is not perfection – it’s simply to get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper, after which you can refine them. The structure might change a little, the word count allocations might shift and shuffle, and you might add or remove a section – that’s all okay. Don’t worry about all this on your first draft – just get your thoughts down on paper.

Once you’ve got a full first draft (however rough it may be), step away from it for a day or two (longer if you can) and then come back at it with fresh eyes. Pay particular attention to the flow and narrative – does it fall fit together and flow from one section to another smoothly? Now’s the time to try to improve the linkage from each section to the next, tighten up the writing to be more concise, trim down word count and sand it down into a more digestible read.

Once you’ve done that, give your writing to a friend or colleague who is not a subject matter expert and ask them if they understand the overall discussion. The best way to assess this is to ask them to explain the chapter back to you. This technique will give you a strong indication of which points were clearly communicated and which weren’t. If you’re working with Grad Coach, this is a good time to have your Research Specialist review your chapter.

Finally, tighten it up and send it off to your supervisor for comment. Some might argue that you should be sending your work to your supervisor sooner than this (indeed your university might formally require this), but in my experience, supervisors are extremely short on time (and often patience), so, the more refined your chapter is, the less time they’ll waste on addressing basic issues (which you know about already) and the more time they’ll spend on valuable feedback that will increase your mark-earning potential.

Literature Review Example

In the video below, we unpack an actual literature review so that you can see how all the core components come together in reality.

Let’s Recap

In this post, we’ve covered how to research and write up a high-quality literature review chapter. Let’s do a quick recap of the key takeaways:

It is essential to understand the WHY of the literature review before you read or write anything. Make sure you understand the 4 core functions of the process.
The first step is to hunt down the relevant literature . You can do this using Google Scholar, your university database, the snowballing technique and by reviewing other dissertations and theses.
Next, you need to log all the articles in your reference manager , build your own catalogue of literature and synthesise all the research.
Following that, you need to develop a detailed outline of your entire chapter – the more detail the better. Don’t start writing without a clear outline (on paper, not in your head!)
Write up your first draft in rough form – don’t aim for perfection. Remember, done beats perfect.
Refine your second draft and get a layman’s perspective on it . Then tighten it up and submit it to your supervisor.

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling Udemy Course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

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38 Comments

Thank you very much. This page is an eye opener and easy to comprehend.

This is awesome!

I wish I come across GradCoach earlier enough.

But all the same I’ll make use of this opportunity to the fullest.

Thank you for this good job.

Keep it up!

You’re welcome, Yinka. Thank you for the kind words. All the best writing your literature review.

Thank you for a very useful literature review session. Although I am doing most of the steps…it being my first masters an Mphil is a self study and one not sure you are on the right track. I have an amazing supervisor but one also knows they are super busy. So not wanting to bother on the minutae. Thank you.

You’re most welcome, Renee. Good luck with your literature review 🙂

This has been really helpful. Will make full use of it. 🙂

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Thank you so much for your guide of video and other instructions for the dissertation writing.

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It is very good video of guidance for writing a research proposal and a dissertation. Since I have been watching and reading instructions, I have started my research proposal to write. I appreciate to Mr Jansen hugely.

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Thank you for sharing your knowledge. As a research student, you learn better with your learning tips in research

I was really stuck in reading and gathering information but after watching these things are cleared thanks, it is so helpful.

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Thank you for this whole literature writing review.You have simplified the process.

I’m so glad I found GradCoach. Excellent information, Clear explanation, and Easy to follow, Many thanks Derek!

You’re welcome, Maithe. Good luck writing your literature review 🙂

Thank you Coach, you have greatly enriched and improved my knowledge

Great piece, so enriching and it is going to help me a great lot in my project and thesis, thanks so much

This is THE BEST site for ANYONE doing a masters or doctorate! Thank you for the sound advice and templates. You rock!

Thanks, Stephanie 🙂

This is mind blowing, the detailed explanation and simplicity is perfect.

I am doing two papers on my final year thesis, and I must stay I feel very confident to face both headlong after reading this article.

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if anyone is to get a paper done on time and in the best way possible, GRADCOACH is certainly the go to area!

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Good morning scholar. I’m delighted coming to know you even before the commencement of my dissertation which hopefully is expected in not more than six months from now. I would love to engage my study under your guidance from the beginning to the end. I love to know how to do good job

Thank you so much Derek for such useful information on writing up a good literature review. I am at a stage where I need to start writing my one. My proposal was accepted late last year but I honestly did not know where to start

Like the name of your YouTube implies you are GRAD (great,resource person, about dissertation). In short you are smart enough in coaching research work.

This is a very well thought out webpage. Very informative and a great read.

Very timely.

I appreciate.

Very comprehensive and eye opener for me as beginner in postgraduate study. Well explained and easy to understand. Appreciate and good reference in guiding me in my research journey. Thank you

Thank you. I requested to download the free literature review template, however, your website wouldn’t allow me to complete the request or complete a download. May I request that you email me the free template? Thank you.

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Reader and Text

English Majors Practising Criticism

Reflection on Studying Literature

My last English teacher in high school did a great job in making sure I would be able to read and write at a college level. He essentially taught me two things: how to understand a story thoroughly and the way in which a proper essay is constructed. He explained that in order to fully grasp something intellectually, one must go from concept to context. This methodology allowed me to enjoy works like Hamlet and Heart of Darkness because I was never lost in the plot and never felt confused about the characters. There was a clear focus on esteemable western works. It was because I was able to recognize the true meaning and beauty behind the aforementioned pieces, as well as others, that I fell in love with Literature. However, if one could just read all day, that would be a job.

I must learn how to write effectively, for that is where success in this field of study lies. Yet, this is where things become difficult for me. I read famous works of literature by people infinitely smarter than me and I became discouraged. Indeed, this is something that many scholars must go through at some point. Acknowledging that I am at the beginning of my literary career helped me move past this mental barrier. People like Harold Bloom and Albert Camus have dedicated their lives to pursuing knowledge, and that probably explains their insights. I digress. The idea of writing academically can be intimidating, and that’s why my teacher did everything he could to show how writing an essay is “moronically simple.” Ladies and gentlemen, the point, evidence, synthesis model! In short, this is a highly effective way to structure an essay. By planning out the ideas you have and their relationship with each other before writing, one can theoretically be allowed to focus on the pizzazz elements of a piece such as diction, syntax, and punctuation. I nailed this process down because I saw it as the magic pill that could solve all my future writing problems. My only objection to this class as a whole is that it was all very straightforward. There was no real opportunity to develop your own interpretation of works, as the teacher settled that problem for us ahead of time.

And so, I arrive at college enrolled in English 203 thinking it is going to be easy. After all, I knew how to write an essay. During the first days of class, many things caught me off-guard. For instance, I picked up on the informality of the setting right away. Every day, we would either get into small groups or one huge circle. This setup strengthened my connections with my peers by encouraging personal and meaningful discussions. It also helped me improve my ability to communicate. Such a capacity helped me to be involved in a group blog post . The academic conversations that were had gave me an opportunity I never really had before, a time to share my ideas. The class felt as if it was run by the students and Professor McCoy was just directing us. She would always have a direct goal for the day such as discovering the meaning or meanings of a new word, analyzing a film, or even interpreting a picture. If I had to give a metaphor to convey what I mean, the best one I can think of is the relationship between a bull and the bullfighter. Specifically, the typical scene in which the man is holding out a red flag to entice the bull to charge forward. We, the students, are the bull waiting to capitalize on our potential. That red flag symbolizes the next step for us as writers (usually the concept of unpacking), and Professor McCoy tries to manipulate our intellectual energy into feverishly going after improvement. Undoubtedly, I grew as a scholar as a result of this dynamic which encouraged collaboration and creating your own insightful interpretations. Looking back on it, the people in this class always seemed happy to be there. Moreover, we understood each other better since we shared a passion for learning and embraced the idea of having a growth mindset.

Another thing that initially surprised me was the literature we were covering. We concentrated on the works of Percival Everett. He is someone who defies categorization and carries an aura of vagueness. I say that because he rarely seems to unpack, leaving the reader thinking. Regardless, both Frenzy and I Am Not Sidney Poitier had a focus on such topics as race and sexuality that I was not expecting. I found the change exciting. Subjects of that nature are rarely looked at with an intellectual eye, at least in my experience. My excitement may have gone too far, as is evident by the first version of my first blog post . There was a sentence in there where I compared Onondaga to one huge bacchanal. It was basically my attempt to test the waters. Even though I knew it was not in good taste, I still wrote it. Perhaps it was a reflection of my idea of college before I came, or maybe I just wanted to use the word “bacchanal”. Regardless, It was an amateur mistake. Upon looking at the feedback on that post from Professor McCoy, I actually sent her an apology email. Of course, she said that it was no big deal but I still felt embarrassed. Embracing the social cognitive theory, I learned what to say and how to act in class over time. This perspective allowed me to create a few introspective blog posts throughout my time here. Among these are “ Be Your Own Vlepo! ”, “ The Soul and Sex ”, and “ The Importance of Being Present ”. My fifth blog post titled “Dropping the Beads” also fits within this category. It was themed on the class activity where we had to string beads together. This process resembles how one must string body paragraphs in an essay along the main idea. As I was physically stringing the beads along, I dropped them twice. It was a powerful moment for me because it reinforced the idea that I am not good enough to be here. I submitted the post not expecting much and that was that. To my amazement, Professor McCoy gave it a hundred. She said that it was “insightful and honest” and revealed how reflection on failure can be an opportunity for growth. This feedback made me feel better about the course and my place in it. I was inspired again, and that helped me be involved in discussions again and complete assignments. This is an example of how writing can help your psyche. I never really explored this before coming to college as I felt my ideas were stupid or invalid. That is really what I liked about this class, it was such a supportive and constructive environment.

I was expecting the course to be black and white, not gray. Before I was a student here, I was always told upfront what a story meant and what the author’s purpose in writing it was. Through engaging in this class, I have come to realize that studying Literature relies heavily on your ability to interpret the story and justify that interpretation. However, one must be able to effectively unpack their reasoning behind their beliefs. I recognized the importance of this idea immediately. This is evident by two of my blog posts that are titled, “ Pushing the Envelope ” and “ How Should We Judge Art? ”. Far too often, people say and do things without thinking deeply about them. Incorporating the concept of unpacking my ideas into my life and writing was challenging at first, but I soon became better at it. I found a sense of confidence through my ability to think as a result of this class, which is what I came to college for. This course gave me a new perspective on how to study English.

I feel it is important to establish that I am hoping to become an English teacher. That being said, two methods of teaching this subject were revealed to me as a result of taking both my high school English class and English 203. One in which I assign relatively famous works and hold my students’ hands, guiding them through their interpretations or one where I let my students develop their own abilities to critique literature that focuses on raunchy subjects and modern-day issues. Both are sound and credible processes, but I feel like the latter puts the students at the forefront of the class, not the actual literature. Undoubtedly, this is the ideal method as criticizing literature should promote unique understandings and genuine human connection. It should encourage meaningful personal growth through intellectual leaps of faith. This class helped me gain the courage to create, and that is the service I want to provide for my future students.

On Self-Reflection, Stories, and and What Mirrors Really Tell Us

“the narrative of your present is crafted by the past.”.

I can recall the moment I realized the girl staring back at me in the mirror was already past, that the reality reflected in the glass was of a time already gone.

As a child I retreated to the restroom to read when I should have been getting ready for bed, the room full of echoes: the steady faucet drip, the gentle ring of bubble bath around the tub, my parents murmuring from the living room. Climbing to the sink, I would seek myself in the mirror above the counter.

One evening when I was five or six, my reflection became a question. I knew it was me, but the longer I stared, the more fully my image became a stranger.

The odd feeling that I existed both in and out of that reflection was unsettling, for neither was fully real. She was girl and ghost, and the contradiction of duality weighed heavy in my stomach as I began to float. I could not tell where or when or even if I began.

Holding my face close to the mirror, I studied the image closely, so convinced it could not be me at the same time I knew it to be true, that I scarcely noticed that my breath fogged the glass, barely heard my mother from the other room calling me back.

Created in 1970 by American psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr., the mirror test is designed to determine whether an animal is capable of self-recognition. The test is simple—animals are anesthetized and marked with a spot of red paint or a sticker on a part of their body they can’t normally see. When they wake, they are placed in front of a mirror. If the animal investigates the new mark, they are considered capable of self-awareness.

Most animals fail the test. Only humans, a few apes, a single Asiatic elephant, dolphins, orcas, the Eurasian magpie, and cleaner wrasse fish have passed—and scientists disagree on the majority of these successes. Most animals simply gaze in the mirror.

Humans don’t pass the test until they are toddlers, and this often occurs after extensive coaxing where the toddlers learn to mirror the adults around them. Recently, rhesus monkeys and small fish have learned to pass the test, indicating that they are latently aware of the self, or, at the very least, capable of learning new cognitive skills.

For many years, it was assumed that animals who passed the test were capable of reflecting on their being and identity, and, by extension, potentially understanding that other animals have distinct selves and minds. But this is assumption, abstraction based on what we observe when watching animals watch themselves.

In 2011, photographer James Geddes captured the image of an eagle standing on frozen ice, staring down at its reflection. The photo seems quintessentially American—the symbol of freedom pensive at its likeness, a national self-reflection captured a few years after Obama took office and began to write a narrative of hope and the country responded by beginning to unravel.

The eagle’s reflection is crisp and sharp, the bird craning its neck forward to peer closer. It is easy to read the image as one of contemplation: the eagle considering its place in a changing world, assessing the apparent stability of ground even as the water rushes underneath.

The world is always leaving.

I realized this young. My body was a vehicle, time a stretch of road. There was no choice but to move forward, try to stay in the careful lines to avoid a collision. If I did stray, the car would rumble, the road designed to keep me in, to startle me back in position if I tried to leave or simply drifted unaware.

From my position in the passenger seat, I witnessed how the reality of the road in front of me could become a memory fading behind. We were always heading to the future, even if the destination was a museum that celebrated the past: polished silver cups or obsidian knives glinting under the lights, my gape-mouthed reflection in the glass. The beach was full of waves retreating forward and back, and I tried to capture that blurring sense of time on my tiny camera, though mostly I strained my eye to find the mirror inside. I tried to capture my kitten growing bigger each day, the way the window reflected sunlight on my lap, rainbows through the air, my own face looking in a mirror so I could see both versions of myself at once.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear , read the rear-view mirror. I did not understand, for perceptions of depth and time have always made me dizzy. I like the unreality of compressing time, past and present not so different, or looking down from a tall building, stomach drooping into my temple.

Caution , my parents explained. It meant that when you’ve left something behind it can sneak up on you, that you are never as far ahead of something as you believe. That the narrative of your present is crafted by the past.

Invented in 1903, the two-way mirror is not a mirror of binaries, of doubles. The mirror is actually referred to as a one-way , the name a trick, much like the device.

A mirror is made by applying a thick layer of reflective material to the back of a sheet of glass in order to make it opaque. When we gaze into the mirror, the layer of silvering reflects our image back at us. In a one-way mirror, however, the silvering is applied by half, so that the glass is not opaque, but translucent, ethereal. Half the light striking the glass passes through it, the other half reflects.

This mirror is often used to mislead, to interrogate. Those gazing at the mirror from a brightly-lit room see themselves reflected, while those on the other side in a room dimly-lit are obscured. The mirror is deception, a play of light and shadow, expectation and ego.

Turn the lighting up on both sides and the reflection disappears, the mirror simply glass, images free to float between the veil.

At the start of 2020, I have not looked into a mirror for over four years. I do not know when my childhood fascination with the self—the certainty of its mutability—shifted into grief. I only know that at some point I grew wary of the reflection, not my likeness but my living.

The last time I can recall looking into the mirror without dread was when the world was on the cusp of dismantling. There was a new president, a new climate, a new decade approaching, time gone fast and slow all at once. Trump took office as I reluctantly claimed a new job and thus a new home, neither of which I wanted, though I knew I was lucky.

In my early twenties I’d watched eagerly as California faded from the rear-view mirror, a new home in Nebraska on the horizon, but nearly a decade later as Nebraska faded from sight and Massachusetts came into focus, I felt only disappointment. The life, the home, the country were nothing like I’d expected, nothing I’d written for myself.

Within days of arriving, I caught sight of my face in the mirror, saw my mouth pinched into a straight line like the horizon behind me, eyes glazed like a museum specimen frozen in the past. The image was a ghost of who I had been before, and for months I stood before her, tried to fake-smile at the me in the mirror the way I did with people at work, though there was no one I wanted to smile at, or at strangers in the street, though Massachusetts seemed full of resentments bitter as the cold and I missed the quiet comfort of Nebraska and the golden beaches of my California youth.

Soon I was haunting my own life, caught in the present while longing for the past. I was nostalgic for my father’s classic rock buzzing through the radio while we dipped low into a backroad, or peeling the skin of a California acorn to reveal the mealy flesh beneath. I missed the way the ocean wind made me forget precision, hair whipping in my mouth, nose running, and the way the summer heat pooled in the parts of my body I would otherwise forget, mingling with the smell of sunscreen and BBQ.

I wanted the messy freedom of my girlhood, where time stretched long into the afternoon and abandoned walls were for bouncing balls against, rocks for gathering heavy in your pocket and flinging from high vistas or across a still lake. I missed the promise of a few years past, sipping wine with friends late into the night, knowing I might never see them again, which was what made our stories more compelling long after the candles had spilled their wax across the table to pool like amorphous phantoms.

I was nostalgic for the environment of my childhood too, the country a place that grew more fractured. I didn’t recognize the images of my country just as I didn’t recognize the images of myself. The television showed children in cages and women crying for their lost families, soldiers on the Capitol steps and Nazi flags. The news reported storms ravaging the coastlines, leaving countries in the dark, washing away cities, tornadoes snaking through the South, hurricanes hovering over the East, the West Coast black and burning each year. Online, friends and family argued over two seemingly-different worlds, each inhabiting their own side of the mirror, unable or unwilling to turn on the light to see the other. It was as though the image of the world and those within it had been smashed, the country’s reflection reduced to jagged shards.

What was reality and what was perception melted before me, politicians reporting everything was fine just as I reported the same to those who asked how I was doing, though I could no longer look in the mirror without weeping or seizing up in panic. Once, I caught sight of myself in a restaurant mirror and lost my appetite, so sad I was for that lonely, lost woman.

It was unsettling to see the images of my reality reflected back at me—a country that seemed to be, like the climate itself, on the verge of extinction, each home I’d known under attack, fires threatening to burn my childhood California to rubble, tornadoes winding themselves like a noose around Nebraska, snow threatening to bury Massachusetts, leaving us as dark and dead as I felt most days. The forward momentum of my childhood proved incorrect—I’d driven forward, but now there was nowhere else to go, only ocean at this other end of the continent. And the danger in the rearview mirror was much closer than it appeared. So I simply stopped looking.

To be clear, I didn’t disdain my appearance as much as mourn for the woman trapped as if behind glass in a place and position she never wanted to claim. Though I loved my childhood in the golden light of small-town California, from my vantage point many miles and years away, I realized it had written a narrative of sameness on me—one that defined my gender, sexuality, and speaking in a way that sought to silence.

Though I loved my husband, our marriage after nearly a decade seemed stifling and prescriptive and felt, the longer I was in the role of wife, like it was closing in all around. Though I loved my work, I took a job I did not particularly want because there are few in my field and we are told to be grateful, and after I arrived, the photo filters were removed one by one until all that remained was the grainy image of my new reality. I’d sought movement for many years, thrilled by the images whirring out the window, my face reflected over them in the glass, but I realized now it was the other way around, that my image was the one upon which the world had been superimposed.

The longer time went on, the more blurred and faint the image of myself, my home, my country seemed. Everything felt lost, disappeared by a power beyond our control. It pained me to see what I had become without my permission so I simply stopped looking at myself at all, stopped taking photos so as not to mark this passage of time.

I spent so much time longing for the past that at a certain point I felt nearly dead, as though I were a ghost haunting my own life. Nostalgia and haunting are not so very different, after all—we are only nostalgic for things that are gone, we are only haunted by the things we once loved.

I used to read beside my reflection, my child body curled up with a book on the bathroom counter. Mirrors seemed to be everywhere—the bathroom, the car, the vanity in my bedroom, the walls of ballet class where we were told to be strong but also small enough to disappear. They were in the glint of a knife and the windows of buildings where I saw myself pulled forward by the hand, my feet moving by duty rather than desire. The city skylines of every place I visited were lined with mirrors as if to reflect the world back onto itself, but the older I got, the more I saw confusion, the way a mirror faced against a mirror created reflections to infinity, no sense of logic or place. The way a bird flew into a window believing it sky.

I read books about ghosts because, like time or gravity or the certainty that my body would remember to breathe or beat, it filled me with wonder and a bit of fright. I read the one where a boy finds a mirror in the attic that can make him invisible. He likes disappearing and makes a little game of it, the way I liked to look at myself in the mirror to be both image and abstraction. Eventually the boy disappears for too long, struggling to find his way home. I thought about how one day my angry grandfather was alive and then he was dead and my grandmother seemed like she could finally breathe.

I thought about how my friend down the road with the best climbing trees moved away and then her trees were forbidden even though I knew all the footholds and how to reach one hand around the branch to the knot at the back, hoisting myself up and into the pine, sap glistening across my thighs as I looked across the riverbed to my house on the other side, the river disappearing, the bed full of cracks where the water vanished, birds pecking at the dry ground.

I thought about how every spring the eucalyptus groves where the monarchs wintered were emptied and the flutter of gold vanished and though this was the way it should be, it was hard not to wonder if the butterflies would ever return. And I thought about how the historic mission in my town had stood for centuries but then it rained too much and the wall around the graveyard—the one my parents said kept the spirits in—collapsed and what would keep them in now or would they wander lonely through the town, confused why it seemed familiar though everything was different?

There is a delay between seeing and perceiving. It takes our brains a moment to process what we are looking at, so the image of my girlhood I saw in the mirror was from the past. At the mirror, I was both there and then. I was present and past, living and memory, girl and ghost. The longer I thought about time, how fast it goes—the first reflection I saw in the mirror long gone just as the one I was currently seeing was suspect, a version of myself I could no longer get back—the more I felt the sad sweet swell of nostalgia. I was only five, then six, then eight and ten, twenty and thirty, but already I was longing for and missing what was right in front of me.

One of my favorite books told the story of a young girl named Jane who visits her family in New England one summer and becomes intrigued by a garden reflecting ball. She spends long hours gazing at the reflection in the mirrors, the way they refract reality, until she begins, like me when I look in the mirror for too long, to see things that aren’t real.

Then, one day, Jane sees the ghost of a wicked girl named Emily. She does not know where one girl ends and the other begins, what is present and what is past. The adults around her say it’s make-believe like my parents say when they pull me away from the mirror to play in the real world. Jane and Emily merge into one.

I read the book time and again for a fright, stopping to stare at my reflection like a moon in the darkness of my bedroom window or in the skylight high in the bathroom ceiling, my pale face looking up as if from the end of a long tunnel.

It is myth that a mirror inverts your image. You do not reflect in reverse. Instead, the left of your face is imposed on the left of the mirror, the right over the right. It is merely illusion—another trick of perception—that you exist altered. This is why photos and videos of ourselves seem so unnatural. We are more used to existing in the lag time between reflection and perception.

To view an accurate image, you must position two mirrors together at ninety degrees, stand at the split, straddle the images on either side. You must exist in multiples, view yourself from where the many selves join.

A true mirror is one that projects your image as others see you. Wave your right hand and the three-dimensional image will wave as if from the left. Lean to one side and see yourself lean away. The image is lifelike in a way that a traditional mirror is not and the experience disrupts our understanding of reflection, at once more human and intimate than our many years brushing our teeth or hair at the abstraction in front of us.

Some are startled, shaken, some shamed they have understood themselves incorrectly. And some weep at the rare chance to witness the self in as it truly exists in time and space.

Now, in my mid-thirties, I am trying to see myself as I exist rather than as I reflect. I am searching for the place where the two mirrors come together to reveal the truth.

The image of the woman and the world I have been avoiding is both reflection and abstraction, the images not quite accurate, but ones I have been mourning these past few years. I have been so distracted by perceived loss that I’ve missed things disappearing right before me, even my own sense of wonder.

I no longer want to hang a Victorian veil over the mirror as though I am dead, as though the looking glass might trap my soul, prevent me from moving on. I want to go back to that girl in the mirror, watching, searching, enthralled by the many versions of the self.

When I stare in the mirror now, as I am (re)learning to do, as our reliance on video chats requires these months and years we isolate, the woman before seems a stranger and a support. I marvel at the way memory and nostalgia compress time so that I am here and then, in mirror and memory, the me of now and also of a split second ago and also all those years ago when I first stared in the mirror, headband pushing hair from my face, teeth starting to jut through the gums, that slow smile of recognition.

Reflection is both the mirrored image and careful rumination. I’ve been avoiding the image because I’ve been avoiding the thinking—about the homes I’ve made and the ways they do not fit, about the country changing underfoot. But these images I’ve avoided are not true reflections, and each is already gone. The only thing to do is remember there is no mirror test to convince your restless animal self that existence is precious, to convince you to step away from the reflection and into reality.

This doesn’t mean we forget history or stop aching for it, mourning it if we must, but rather that living requires we keep some distance between our past and present, we keep our many selves in sight in the rearview mirror, as we determine which path to take and where to deviate.

The first images of Earth were captured in the 1940s, a 35mm camera snapping a shot each second from a rocket, the photos falling back to land in a steel canister. What was reflected was revolutionary—horizon curve backdropped by space—but scientists worried over whether or not to release the images.

Earth surrounded by the vast dark of space, they feared, would counter people’s self-perceptions. They thought people would feel insignificant, alone, fearful. They thought people might see human life as futile when faced with the vast isolation of space.

These first images fell to Earth from the future, but revealed a world already in the past. It is difficult to look at these photos without the complexity of time tugging comprehension in multiple directions. This image of the world is foreign and familiar, comfort and chaos. Astronauts tasked with leaving in order to move humankind forward to the edge of the galaxy, to live where the darkness was so deep there was no light to reflect, were compelled to turn back, nostalgic for what they’d abandoned.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Halfway from Home by Sarah Fawn Montgomery, available via Split/Lip Press.

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PLoS Comput Biol
v.9(7); 2013 Jul

Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Marco pautasso.

1 Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), CNRS, Montpellier, France

2 Centre for Biodiversity Synthesis and Analysis (CESAB), FRB, Aix-en-Provence, France

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1] . For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2] . Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3] . Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read [4] . For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [5] .

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6] . However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7] . In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8] . The topic must at least be:

interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9] , but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10] ),
keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
use a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the review to help define its scope), and
do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a literature review ( Figure 1 ), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is pcbi.1003149.g001.jpg

The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33] .

discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules apply:

be thorough,
use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11] , but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12] . A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13] , [14] . When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15] .

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice to keep it focused 16 , 17 . Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [18] . If you are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19] . After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

the major achievements in the reviewed field,
the main areas of debate, and
the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20] .

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21] . This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22] .

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers, and rightly so [23] . As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24] .

Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25] ? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies (“sleeping beauties” [26] )). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27] – [32] . I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to M. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, M. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Funding Statement

This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

Jeneen Abdelrahim Writing Portfolio

Literature review reflection.

I have never written a literature review prior to this assignment so it was interesting to say the least. The two examples we were given to use as references helped a bit, but I did not really know where to start. Finding three sources to use were the easiest part of this assignment because the CUNY databases automatically gives us access to the full academic articles without having to pay for it. All I had to do was type in “nutrition advertising” into the search bar and multiple scholarly articles popped up that I could use and all I had to do was choose one.

When it came to composing the actual literature review, to be quite frank, I am unsure on if I did it right or not. I used the two examples we were given to the best of my ability but for some reason it did not help me therefore I wrote more of an essay rather than a review of the articles, comparing them. I tried my best, so I am hoping I did it correctly. Next time for the next essay, I hope we can have more time for peer review. There was one designated day for peer review so hopefully with the next essay, there could possibly be another one, but I am not quite sure how that would work since classes are online now.

The hardest part was just trying to figure out if I was doing it correctly with very little assistance because there were no in person classes. It was also due during a hectic time with the current situation of the world so that made it a little bit harder.

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Reflection literature

This section contains a review of literature on reflection and a list of helpful literature to explore the area further.

The Reflection Toolkit is intended to be used and to be easy to navigate. Therefore, we have tried to streamline it by removing large theoretical discussions and constant references to literature. However, these are important so from here you can access information on the historical development of the concept of reflection, the evidence behind whether it actually works, the literature used in developing the Reflection Toolkit and references to other relevant literature and materials.

Literature review

Below is a PDF that contains a review of literature on reflection. The review explores the development of the theoretical concept of reflection, deals with associated challenges, and highlights the empirical evidence behind the benefits of reflection. It also explains how we chose the definition of reflection that is used across the Reflection Toolkit.

Reflection bibliography

The page below contains the literature that contributed to the development of the Reflection Toolkit and other relevant literature in the area. The literature is divided into broad topics to make it easy to find relevant content and to see how literature has informed the Reflection Toolkit.

Literature reviews / reading lists

Reflection in workplace learning: a literature review.

This document reviews the literature on encouraging reflection in work based learning. It is based primarily on literature generated in the areas of Education healthcare and management. It looks at the purpose of reflection the varying levels of reflection that students achieve and the support and structure required to encourage reflection in students. It looks specifically at how E-Portfolios can be used to encourage reflection and categorises the different types of portfolio commonly developed by students.

The materials published on this page were originally created by the Higher Education Academy.

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Life’s Work: An Interview with Hernan Diaz

Alison Beard

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author reflects on how literature shapes us and more.

In his novel Trust, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, Diaz offered four contrasting perspectives on early-20th-century U.S. capitalism—a treatment that modern-day readers found deeply resonant. The author, who was born in Argentina, raised in Sweden, and now lives in the United States, says he likes to experiment with different voices and “mess with” American mythology. A longtime professor and academic editor, he published his first novel, In the Distance , a Pulitzer finalist, at age 44. Trust was his second.

Alison Beard is an executive editor at Harvard Business Review and previously worked as a reporter and editor at the Financial Times. A mom of two, she tries—and sometimes succeeds—to apply management best practices to her household. alisonwbeard

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How to Write a Literature Review
Examples of literature reviews. Step 1 - Search for relevant literature. Step 2 - Evaluate and select sources. Step 3 - Identify themes, debates, and gaps. Step 4 - Outline your literature review's structure. Step 5 - Write your literature review.
17 strong academic phrases to write your literature review (+ real
A well-written academic literature review not only builds upon existing knowledge and publications but also involves critical reflection, comparison, contrast, and identifying research gaps. The following 17 strong academic key phrases can assist you in writing a critical and reflective literature review. Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a
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 ...
PDF Literature review
In adult education literature the benefit of learning from experience rather than passively through knowledge transfer has long been recognised and Kolb's work formalised the modern conception of experiential learning (e.g. 1984), which has seen a lot of attention in the reflection literature (Boud, Koegh & Walker, 1985; Gibbs, 1988).
Writing a Literature Review
Writing a Literature Review. 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 ...
Literature review as a research methodology: An ...
Literature reviews can also be useful if the aim is to engage in theory development (Baumeister & Leary, 1997; Torraco, 2005). In these cases, a literature review provides the basis for building a new conceptual model or theory, and it can be valuable when aiming to map the development of a particular research field over time. However, it is ...
PDF Teaching the Literature Review: A Practical Approach for College ...
a literature review—the nemesis of novice writers—and how students can use the dis-ciplinary literacy (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008) within their particular content areas ... modified it on the basis of my reflections and feedback from students to whom I taught the lesson in my university writing center. 44 TeaChIng & LearnIng InquIry, VOL. 2. ...
How To Write A Literature Review (+ Free Template)
As mentioned above, writing your literature review is a process, which I'll break down into three steps: Finding the most suitable literature. Understanding, distilling and organising the literature. Planning and writing up your literature review chapter. Importantly, you must complete steps one and two before you start writing up your chapter.
Writing an effective literature review
Nothing irritates me more than seeing my stance mispresented in someone else's literature review. For example, if I wrote a paragraph offering tentative reflections on a new idea, I don't want to see that summarized in someone's literature review as 'Lingard argues', when more accurate would be 'Lingard suggests' or 'Lingard ...
Conducting a Literature Review: Research Question
As you begin to investigate and evaluate scholarly literature on your topic, you may find it necessary to revise your original research question based on what you learn. Be sure to expand your literature search to include any new concepts you may identify along the way.
Reflection on Studying Literature
Reflection on Studying Literature. My last English teacher in high school did a great job in making sure I would be able to read and write at a college level. He essentially taught me two things: how to understand a story thoroughly and the way in which a proper essay is constructed. He explained that in order to fully grasp something ...
A practical guide to data analysis in general literature reviews
This article is a practical guide to conducting data analysis in general literature reviews. The general literature review is a synthesis and analysis of published research on a relevant clinical issue, and is a common format for academic theses at the bachelor's and master's levels in nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, public health and other related fields.
Your Literature Review
Your Literature Review. A literature review identifies, summarizes and synthesizes the previously published work on your subject of interest. Your synthesis is key in providing new interpretations of the studies, demonstrating gaps, or discussing flaws in the existing studies. The literature review can be organized by categories or in the order ...
Reflection In Literature Review
Reflection. During the beginning assignments, my organization and flow were extremely lacking. This made the logic and thought process of the papers difficult to follow at times. I feel that this is one area where I have …show more content…. The literature review required the understanding of writing for peers versus writing for the public.
On Self-Reflection, Stories, and and What Mirrors Really Tell Us
It is myth that a mirror inverts your image. You do not reflect in reverse. Instead, the left of your face is imposed on the left of the mirror, the right over the right. It is merely illusion—another trick of perception—that you exist altered. This is why photos and videos of ourselves seem so unnatural.
Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review
Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications .For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively .Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every ...
Reflection literacy: A multilevel perspective on the challenges of
This literature review aims to provide an overview of the challenges of encouraging reflection in higher education through a multilevel perspective. Based on the analysis of 66 selected empirical and non-empirical articles, the results show that there is a reciprocal relationship between barriers that occur at the macro and micro levels ...
Literature Review Reflection
I have never written a literature review prior to this assignment so it was interesting to say the least. The two examples we were given to use as references helped a bit, but I did not really know where to start. Finding three sources to use were the easiest part of this assignment because the CUNY databases automatically gives us access to ...
Across the Great Divide: A Systematic Literature Review to Address the
The use of a systematic literature review method complemented by a narrative analysis provided the tools to identify information scattered across different fields of study and analyze their content. ... and reflection (Collin, 1996). For this review, the concept of "Practice" is understood as everything done in the professional role ...
Reflective Journals: A Review of the Literature
The use of reflective journals has been identified as an effective tool to promote reflection in preservice teachers. This review of literature provides the reader with an understanding of the various ways journals are used and assessed in teacher education programs. The findings of this review outline the use of reflective journals on topics ...
Reflection literature
The review explores the development of the theoretical concept of reflection, deals with associated challenges, and highlights the empirical evidence behind the benefits of reflection. It also explains how we chose the definition of reflection that is used across the Reflection Toolkit. Reflection literature review (488.55 KB PDF)
Reflective Journals: A Review of the Literature
Abstract. The use of reflective journals has been identified as an effective tool to promote reflection in preservice teachers. This review of literature provides the reader with an understanding ...
Reflection in Workplace Learning: A Literature Review
This document reviews the literature on encouraging reflection in work based learning. It is based primarily on literature generated in the areas of Education healthcare and management. It looks at the purpose of reflection the varying levels of reflection that students achieve and the support and structure required to encourage reflection in ...
My English Portfolio: Literature Review Reflection
Literature Review Reflection. To reflect on the literature review, let me first say, "Thank God it's over". I learned a lot of information pertaining to the Department of Justice. I think this helps me conduct better research for future assignments. I think I included graphics really well in this assignment.
Life's Work: An Interview with Hernan Diaz
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author reflects on how literature shapes us and more. In his novel Trust, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, Diaz offered four contrasting perspectives on early-20th ...
Opinion: 'Civil War' is more than a reflection on America's divisions
Alex Garland's new film, "Civil War," not only critiques the current American political landscape, but subverts a long Hollywood tradition that centralizes American suffering in war films ...