What is a literature review?

“If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Isaac Newton

A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. Your review should provide clear justification for why you are researching your topic, and should demonstrate that you have investigated the current literature.  A literature review is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a summary of your search results.

Besides enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a literature review demonstrates your skills in two areas:
  1. information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using print or electronic sources in order to identify a set of useful materials.
  2. critical appraisal: the ability to make judgements on the appropriateness and validity of material.
A literature review should:
  • be organised around, and related directly to, the thesis or research question you are developing
  • synthesise results into a summary of what is and is not known
  • identify areas of controversy in the literature
  • formulate questions that need further research
To develop your search strategy, you should ask yourself:
  • What is the specific thesis, problem, or research question that my literature review helps to define?
  • What type of literature review am I conducting? Am I looking at issues of theory? methodology? policy? quantitative research (e.g. on the effectiveness of a new procedure)? qualitative research (e.g., studies )?
  • What is the scope of my literature review? What types of publications am I using (e.g., journals, books, government publications and reports?
  • You should identify keywords, concepts, alternative spellings, related terms, wider and narrower terms relating to your topic.
Gathering information
Choose relevant databases and electronic journals. Use the Library’s webpages to help with resources for your subject.

Carry out your search on the various databases for your subject. Remember to use specific search techniques, e.g. truncation, wildcards, use of Boolean logic (AND, NOT, OR) to combine concepts.

Evaluate your results
  • Are the results relevant?
  • Are the authors well known?
  • Is the source well known?
  • Is the information up to date?
  • Have you found too many, or too few references?
Modifying your search – too many results
  • Increase your search terms
  • Use AND to group search terms
  • Limit your search (e.g. by year, language or publication type).
Modifying your search – too few results
  • Think of alternative keywords, synonyms.
  • Combine keywords with OR (e.g. ocean OR sea)
  • Use truncation/wildcards to expand your search
  • Try other databases
Tracking down your results
  • Check the Library’s catalogue to see which journals we have (this will give you both print and electronic journals)
  • Use the Inter-Library Loans service to obtain material which is not available in this Library.
  • CAUTION: if hardly any of the results are available in this Library you may want to consider the appropriateness of your topic. Inter-library loans can be costly and take time to arrive.
Writing the review
Once you have your references, read and evaluate them. Make notes on each, and make sure you keep a record (e.g. journal title, paper title, author, date, volume, part and page numbers. The bibliographic software package, EndNote can help you keep track of your references. See here for information on EndNote.

Once you start writing your review:
  • Write an introduction which sets the scene, and puts forward the main ideas and concepts of your topic.
  • Group your material by concept or theme, not by date or publication type.
  • Only include references which are relevant to your topic.
  • Be critical rather than simply descriptive.
  • Use direct quotations to make a specific point.
  • Make sure you have read and fully understand the references you are using.
  • Your bibliography should be consistent in style throughout, and should allow anyone reading it to trace your references quickly and easily. Use EndNote to help you with this.
To find examples of literature reviews click here.

Useful links
Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (University of York) – provides assistance for medical reviews.
Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials - Writing Research Theses or Dissertations. Pages written by Ming Tham.
Cochrane Database of Reviews – health care reviews
How to do a literature review - Queensland University
Finding review articles in Chemistry
IoP Physics Reviews