Literature Reviews: An Overview

Literature Reviews: An Overview

So what does a literature review do?

According to Dena Taylor's guide, "The Literature Review; A Few Tips on Conducting It Links to an external site.:"

Besides enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a literature review lets you gain and demonstrate skills in 2 areas:

1. information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of useful articles and books
2. critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies.
   
   

A literature review must:

1. be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing
2. synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known
3. identify areas of controversy in the literature
4. formulate questions that need further research

Watch this great video tutorial "Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students," created by the University of North Carolina for an overview of the process:

  Links to an external site.

This module comes from the Canvas Commons Course, “Conducting a Literature Review” by Erin Davis and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Links to an external site.