What's a Lit Review?: Home

Stage 1: Reading

The first and most important step in writing a literature review is to read as much of the literature relevant to your topic as you can. During this stage, the priority should be on finding and evaluating as many high-quality sources on your topic as possible.

Take careful notes about each source as you go. Feel free to pull out occasional quotes, but most of your time and attention should be devoted to summarizing the research in your own words. Not only does this help you to understand the key ideas better, but it also helps to prevent plagiarism--later, when you review your notes to draft your literature review, you may not be able to remember which phrases or ideas you borrowed directly from the author, and which are your own. It's better to take care to correctly attribute and paraphrase early on, so you don't run into problems down the road.

In this stage, you should be attempting to answer the following questions about each source:

1. What are its primary conclusions?
2. What are the key findings, research methodologies, and assumptions the authors draw upon to support these conclusions?
3. What other authorities and research do the authors interact with? With whom do they argue? With whom do they agree? This can be an excellent way of finding more sources, and for determining the state of the overall scholarly conversation.
4. How do you plan to use this source to support your own argument and research?

This is also the stage during which you should question your own approach to your topic, so remain flexible and curious. It is a natural and necessary part of the process to change your own ideas and priorities in response to reading experts on your topic. Do not be afraid to pursue new lines of inquiry suggested by your reading and notetaking, while always keeping an eye out for gaps or deficiencies in the research that your own work could address.

By the end of the first stage, you should have something that looks similar to an annotated bibliography (link), with a citation, quotes, and summary for each source, along with a sense of its role in your overall argument. This seems like a lot of work up front, but remember that you are laying the foundation here on which you will build the rest of your paper.

The introduction of your lit review should be short and focused on identifying broad trends in the scholarship around your topic. This is your opportunity to carefully define the scope of the research problem, as well as the key ideas  which you have encountered in your review of the scholarly literature. Be sure to discuss your own methodologies for deciding which studies to include--out of all the available literature on your topic, why did you choose these studies for your review? Did you choose them because you found their conclusions particularly convincing, or because of their broad influence, or because they were flawed or incomplete in some way you found interesting?

Keep your introduction relatively short. Your audience only needs to have an idea of what kind of sources you are reviewing, why you chose them, and what are the principle conclusions. Your introduction should serve as something of a sketch or blueprint for the rest of the literature review, preparing your readers for what they will encounter in the pages ahead.

Stage 2: Bringing It Together

Now your job is to bring all the sources together for a conversation.

First, you will need to decide how to structure your literature review. There are two different structural approaches you can employ:

1. Thematic: In the thematic approach, you provide an overview of the research by theme, identifying key ideas and arguments that recur in the literature. Make sure that you have multiple sources for each theme so that you can compare and contrast their different approaches and conclusions at every stage.

2. Historical: In the historical approach, you follow a topic through time, beginning with the seminal figures and ideas and showing how they have developed. Such an approach seems simple but it requires a deep knowledge of the history of the field, as well as familiarity with its most important thinkers and research.

Whatever structure you choose, you should make sure to incorporate multiple sources per paragraph, and provide a healthy mixture of paraphrased material and direct quotation for each source. Make your sources talk to each other, and bring them together in combinations which highlight their differences thoughtful ways. It is especially useful to draw out the contrasts and controversies in the research. By highlighting areas where your sources disagree, you make room for your own interpretation.

As always, if you find you still need more sources, do not be afraid to go back and do more research. Remember that this is an iterative process—the more you learn about your topic, the more aware you’ll become of gaps in your own thinking.

Stage 3: Conclusion

A good literature review establishes your credibility as a researcher by proving to your audience that you have read and thought about the most important work in your field. It also gives you the opportunity to prove that you have something unique to add to the conversation. After pages of telling your audience what your sources do say, it’s time to move on to what they don’t.

The conclusion of the literature review establishes a place for your own contribution. Think of writing a literature review as painting a landscape: you spend all this time painting the sky, trees, and mountains in the background in order to prepare for the main figures in the foreground. In the final paragraph of your literature review, you should highlight areas of unresolved difficulties and needs for future research, and you should explain briefly how you think your own research works to address these needs.

By doing the hard work of research and synthesis, you have earned the write to speak with authority. It’s now time to present your own contributions to the world.

Here's a few examples to get you started:

Methodological Literature Review

This literature review pays special attention to the methodologies employed by studies examining the effects of patient spirituality on the clinical outcomes of patients with bipolar disorder. This paper identifies six scholarly sources and parses their experimental approaches, attempting to reach conclusions about the studies' overall effectiveness, as well as identifying certain blind-spots and discrepancies. The literature review concludes with a call for more research, as well as clear suggestions for how this research should be conducted.

Religion and spirituality in the context of bipolar disorder: a literature review

Evaluative Literature Review

Here is a good example of a journal article that is really just one big literature review. This paper sifts through dozens of studies conducted over the course of decades to identify the best and most relevant sources. While you will probably never have to write a literature review of this length and complexity, this article serves as a great example of scholarly synthesis. Note well that this article doesn't simply summarize the literature, but attempts to evaluate them, identifying the most trustworthy and effective ideas in the field.

Do therapists' subjective variables impact on psychodynamic psychotherapy outcomes? A systematic literature review.