What is a literature review?
A literature review surveys books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by so doing, provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem being investigated. Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have explored while researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within a larger field of study.
The purpose of a literature review is to:
- Place each piece of previous research examined in the context of its contribution to understanding the current research problem being studied.
- Describe the relationship of each piece of previous research to the others being examined.
- Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
- Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature (e.g., what questions still exist about a topic after reviewing the research done to date).
- Resolve conflicts among seemingly contradictory previous studies.
- Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.
- Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research.
- Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important].
Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper. Fourth edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2014.
In other words, a literature review is a summary and synthesis of previous research related to your current topic that tells you what we ‘know’ about the topic from previous research. However, your literature review should not be written as a series of paragraphs summarizing individual research papers. Don’t simply take your annotated bibliography paragraphs and put them together as a paper. Instead, you should look over the information from each of the sources you have consulted, identify key themes from the ‘literature’ (the previous research on the topic) and summarize previous research that supports or contradicts those themes.
One way to think about the purpose of a literature review is that it helps you develop a theory (based on previous research) that will lead you to test that theory in your proposed study.
Since you are only conducting a very small review of the literature on your selected topic for this assignment, you will likely have only 1 or 2 ‘themes’ identified. If you have more, that’s ok. The goal here is to try to synthesize the findings from previous research into themes vs reporting each research study separately. This will help build the ‘theories’ you are planning to test in your proposed study. You might find themes in previous research that you disagree with, and propose a plan to test new ideas. Or, you may find themes in previous research that apply to one situation, population, etc and propose a plan to see if these themes apply to another.
Read over your annotated bibliography from Part I and your notes from any additional research studies that you have reviewed. What are the main ideas from previous research? How can you organize those ideas into themes/sub themes? What seems to be missing from the previous research? (HINT: the answer to this question should lead you to your research question)
The template below can help you organize your literature review (note: you may use heading titles, such as a short description of the themes you identify from previous research (an example might be “Bullying and Delinquent Behavior” if your review found that several studies identified a connection between being bullied and acting out in some way) and “Conclusion” if you like. However, the literature review should be written in paragraph form using complete sentences (do not write it in outline form—the outline below is simply provided to show you how to structure each section.
LITERATURE REVIEW:
- Introduction
- This is different from the introduction to your proposal—look to previous research studies to see how they begin the literature review section. It can be a brief paragraph, or even a couple sentences introducing this section.
- Theme A
- Overview of characteristics of the theme (commonalities, differences, nuances)
- Sub-theme – narrow but grouped findings related to the theme
- Study 1 (Research question(s), Methods/Participants, Related Findings)
- Study 2 (Research question(s), Methods/Participants, Related Findings)
- Study 3 (Research question(s), Methods/Participants, Related Findings)
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- Sub-theme – narrow but grouped findings related to the theme
- Study 4 (Research question(s), Methods/Participants, Related Findings)
- Study 5 (Research question(s), Methods/Participants, Related Findings)
- Study 6 (Research question(s), Methods/Participants, Related Findings)
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- Etc., etc., etc. with other findings that fit Theme A; studies can be repeated if there are multiple findings that fit under more than one theme. However, no need to re-write methods/participants in detail (just enough to remind the reader about the study).
- Theme B – follow a, b, c, and so on from above
- Keep repeating with themes (if applicable)
- Conclusion: An evaluation/critique of the existing literature leading to your
- What are the contributions of this literature to the field?
- What are the overall strengths? What are the overall weaknesses? What might be missing?
- What are the next steps for research on this topic? In other words, how will your proposed research address the weaknesses and/or gaps in previous research? Perhaps previous research relied heavily on a particular method of data collection and you are proposing a different data collection method. Perhaps previous research was done prior to a significant event or time period (for example, previous research on attitudes toward sexual harassment was likely conducted prior to the #metoo movement) and your research seeks to update knowledge on the topic. Your research doesn’t need to be groundbreaking, but it should in some way ‘add to’ the previous research in order to further knowledge on this topic.
