How to Write up Your Literature Review

Literature reviews can either be stand-alone articles, or more usually, are found near the beginning of an essay or dissertation. In both cases, their main aims are to organise, re-synthesise and analyse the available literature on a particular subject.

Initially, the most important thing to do is narrow down your research question, before starting to search for articles. If your subject area is too vague, a literature review will seem like an impossible task, and you will find yourself trawling through completely irrelevant articles. Google Scholar is a good place to start, but for more detailed searches, it is worthwhile obtaining an account with Athens, an access management system which holds thousands of journal articles from different databases. Using Athens, you can set up alerts for when new articles are published in your subject area.

Once you have read and analysed your articles, you need to think about how to organise your write-up.  A common mistake with literature reviews is to just list the articles you have read and what they say, with no thought to organisation. In order to provide some structure, you may want to consider working in chronological order, to show how ideas on the subject have evolved over the years. Alternatively, you may want to group articles with similar themes, for example, those which argue for a certain viewpoint versus those that argue against.

In a literature review, it is not enough to just organise articles into themes and re-state their content. A review needs to critically evaluate the research which has already been carried out and place your own research into context. It is important to explain why you have included certain articles and excluded others, and your reasons for both. A review should help to identify gaps in the research, thereby showing why your research is needed.  It is also important to give emphasis to more recent publications and developments, as these are likely to be more relevant to the reader and to your own research.

Remember to include a summary at the end of your literature review, which should include the main themes from the research so far and how these link to your current research question. Ultimately, a literature review needs to explain the available research to the reader in a condensed, critiqued fashion, so that the reader has a full understanding of the problem. It also needs to provide a rationale for your study and clear links between what has come before and what is yet to come in this area of research.