Writing a Literature Review: Tips & Tricks

The literature review is a fundamental asset in your writing arsenal — when using your sources appropriately, it can mark you as a capable and effective analyzer, and set you up for scholarly success.

Outline of The Literature Review

There are two primary sectors of scholastic and academic journals — reports (these include studies, evaluations, investigations, etc.) and literature reviews. This means that if a study was conducted on the researcher’s behalf, it is not a literature review. Let me repeat that one more time. A literature review is exactly what its title implies — you are reviewing other scholarly works in order to form a unified conclusion. So it is not an argument.

Unlike reports, however, which follow a fairly standard format in most journals, literature reviews can have different organization schemes, depending on the subject, your personal objectives as the writer, and the editorial guidelines of the journal. In general, the outline for a literature review includes:

• An introduction
• Body (including headings and sub-headings, we’ll get to that in a moment)
• A conclusion, summary, or discussion
• Works Cited (opt. but highly suggested annotated bibliography)

Often included are an abstract and/or table of contents at the beginning. Ideally, and most generally, your review should include the following sections in the order listed:

Introduction: In this section, you should orient the readers so that they know what topic will be addressed and why it is important for them to know about it. You should define the topic and inform the reader about the approach you are taking.

• What aspects will be covered, and what aspects will not be covered?
• How are you approaching your literary review?
• What areas of your field are you focusing on, and why?
• What will you subdivide (e.g. diseases, causes, mechanics — etc.)

Methods: Remember that methods vary by discipline and project and that there is a distinction between methods for field research (scientific studies, survey research, focus groups, interviews, observations, labs, and so forth) and secondary research/“desk work” (searching through databases). For a literature review, your methods should correspond with the the qualitative, secondary-research method because a literature review offers an overview about what others are saying about a given topic.

As such, for your methods section, you will want to include the process you undertook to conduct your research, including the names of databases and keywords you searched and topics you were interested in.

You will also want to justify your methods (this is very important!), so you will want to discuss why you chose specific topics and/or articles over others, which may even include some discussion about others’ methods and your preference of some articles over others based on researchers’ methods.

In other words, you can offer evaluation (in the discussion section) — but base your evaluation and implications off of your evidence!

Results: Here you should offer us an overview about what researchers have found or stated on your topic — often this section is subdivided to further identify difference links of your topic. Each of these different links should be identified by a unique sub-heading, under which you will describe, in detail, the different trends, themes, or approaches relevant to your topic.

In each section, do not simply summarize research — build a focused discussion of that topic. Rather than moving through each source one at a time, develop comparisons, contrasts, or similarities between articles or studies. If you want to hit the sweet spot, use approximately 3 to 5 section headings that refer to specific themes, trends, or concepts — any less will not make it appear like your subheadings are subheadings, and any more (if you don’t thoroughly lay out your methodology) will make your review appear overly-broad. Narrow it down if so!

Discussion/Conclusion: Summarize the major points of the literature review, and add a final perspective or conclusion. Here, you should refer back to the question or objective set out in the introduction and to the relationships or patterns you developed in the body section.

• What is the significance of the research you have reviewed?
• What problems still need to be solved?
• What research is still needed?

You could discuss concerns with previous methods here.

References: Prepare a list of the sources you have cited in your article. Use the APA Citation Style, or whatever citation style your professor prefers (it varies by discipline — that’s why there are so many).

If you want to include an annotated bibliography (which I highly recommend because it shows that

a) you actually digested the sources,

b) you can evaluate the sources, and

c) you know the relevance of these sources to your literature review.

An annotated bibliography should be composed of different parts — a short one-sentence summary of the article or study, their findings and methodology, their evaluations, why their work relates to your other sources, and why their work is relevant to your literature review. Missing any of these parts will show you didn’t do thorough research.

That’s it! Good luck on your scholarly journey!