You can simply put the word “review” in your search engine along with your other topic terms to find articles of this type on the Internet or in an electronic database. Look for other literature reviews in your area of interest or in the discipline and read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or ways to organize your final review. Should you provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history?.Should you summarize, synthesize, or critique your sources by discussing a common theme or issue?.What types of sources (books, journal articles, websites)?.Roughly how many sources should you include?.If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your instructor: Let’s get to it! What should I do before writing the literature review? Clarify Sometimes a literature review is written as a paper in itself. Literature reviews are written occasionally in the humanities, but mostly in the sciences and social sciences in experiment and lab reports, they constitute a section of the paper. Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers.

Literature reviews also provide a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. For scholars, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the writer in his or her field. For professionals, they are useful reports that keep them up to date with what is current in the field. If you have limited time to conduct research, literature reviews can give you an overview or act as a stepping stone. Literature reviews provide you with a handy guide to a particular topic. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions. In a research paper, you use the literature as a foundation and as support for a new insight that you contribute. The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, and a research paper is likely to contain a literature review as one of its parts. But how is a literature review different from an academic research paper? And depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. What is a literature review, then?Ī literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a certain time period.Ī literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. And a review does not necessarily mean that your reader wants you to give your personal opinion on whether or not you liked these sources. “Literature” could be anything from a set of government pamphlets on British colonial methods in Africa to scholarly articles on the treatment of a torn ACL. Wrong! The “literature” of a literature review refers to any collection of materials on a topic, not necessarily the great literary texts of the world. You dust off a novel and a book of poetry, settle down in your chair, and get ready to issue a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” as you leaf through the pages. This handout will explain what literature reviews are and offer insights into the form and construction of literature reviews in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Literature Reviews What this handout is about

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