Skip to Main Content

Literature Review

The Literature Review

What it Is:

  • A literature review is a survey of the scholarly literature published on a topic.
  • The documents to review will depend on the field of study/subject, but, in general, include books, journal articles, theses, and dissertations.
  • You may be asked to dig deeper into the literature and search for "gray literature." Gray literature is difficult to find information such as technical reports, government publications, and working papers.
  • Usually, before you do a literature review you write an annotated bibliography so that you can compare notes among the sources you found.

The purpose is to:

  • Find out what has been researched and determine a gap, a new approach, identify new methodologies, and explain how your research fits within the existing literature.
  • The literature review lays the foundations for the research.
  • Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic. 

It  is not:

  • A list of everything that has been written on that topic.
  • The sources you will be looking for usually follow an inclusion and exclusion criterion, which you explain in the paper. 

What is the Difference

  • All follow a specific citation style (MLA, APA, etc..) which determines what information is included and in what format it should be written.
  • All are defined by a research question.

The Bibliography

  • It is a list of citations (the information  you used in your research) on a specific topic
  • Use the bibliography to gather information about your topic

The Annotated Bibliography

  • Adds a paragraph to a citation to describes, summarizes, and evaluates each work. 
  • The annotation is not a summary but provides both descriptive and critical analysis of the source. 
  • There are four types of Annotated Bibliographies
  • Use the annotated bibliography to find information to use in your research.

The Literature Review

  • Combines the information you wrote in the annotated bibliography
  • The annotations are not merely listed, but they are organized, compared and contrasted to demonstrate what knowledge already exists, or not, about a topic