Writing A Literature Review: General Guidelines, how to write literature review for research paper.

This is where you will provide detailed analysis and highlight research findings to offer more information to readers.

• List all the sources used in the research paper.
• Start with the most relevant ones that contributed most to the understanding of your research problem.
• Explain the relationship between various references used to compose your research paper.
• Highlight the knowledge of each source and how it contributed to your task.
• Analyze sources, and highlight any areas for further research or errors made by other researchers.

Your lit review will be made of 3 parts, the introduction, main body, and conclusion. In the introduction, you should highlight the importance of your research topic and mention any controversies, in addition to background knowledge. The body of your literature review should have subheadings for subtopics or subcategories. It will include topics and current knowledge, in addition to areas for further research. In the end, you will write the conclusion where you summarize evidence and mention how they relate to your findings.

Now you’re probably wondering: What is literature review in research? How can I write one?

Work on the Sources

Most students wonder how to format a literature review in a way that would eventually improve the quality of their academic writing. As a matter of fact, it’s not as difficult as it may sound, but it requires paying attention to several important details.

If you’re merely stating names of researchers and what they’ve done, then you’re doing your literature review wrong. The literature review of a research paper is different from a bibliography. You won’t list sources and explain each one of them in details. Analyze and highlight ideas or topics and draw relationships between references. Summarize conclusions about the latest trends in the subject. Include subheadings and organize sources and findings under relevant subheadings. Every section or subheading should logically connect to the previous and next ones.

This standard format will help you finish the literature review for any research paper, regardless of its type. It’s all about following some simple rules that help you submit your task with the best quality.

A literature review shows readers how much effort you’ve put into your task. It also gives them a chance to look back at these sources if they have any questions. This part of your task will take time, so some students prefer to hire a reputable literature review writers to do this task on their behalf. However, others will decide to do it on their own. Here is how to write literature reviews for all research papers:

Your lit review will be made of 3 parts, the introduction, main body, and conclusion. In the introduction, you should highlight the importance of your research topic and mention any controversies, in addition to background knowledge. The body of your literature review should have subheadings for subtopics or subcategories. It will include topics and current knowledge, in addition to areas for further research. In the end, you will write the conclusion where you summarize evidence and mention how they relate to your findings.

Literature reviews should involve several pieces of information like the reason for writing a review, a brief discussion of the topic, an organized list of all academic sources used, in addition to a comprehensive evaluation of each one.

1. Include lots of primary data sources. Most students will make a mistake of relying on secondary data sources which might be easier to find but don’t provide value to interested readers.
2. Avoid relying on sources that don’t directly relate to your topic. This requires spending enough time to research and understand the nature of the assignment.
3. Examine and analyze opposing opinions. This shows that you’ve done a great job to reach a relevant conclusion.
4. Describe procedures used in identifying sources to include in your literature review.
5. Stick to an academic style. Avoid descriptive and narrative writing in your assignment. However, students should always try to be consistent and use their own voice to convey their messages and ideas.
6. Make sure that all sources are properly cited to avoid plagiarism.
7. Check your writing and fix any grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes.

Quick Navigation

Evaluate and compare sources from an analytical point of view. The literature review structure should be able to inform readers about trends, knowledge, and problems solved in the task or areas where you’d faced challenges. Write a critical analysis by highlighting relationships between sources in the body of your review. Read what you’ve written, and see if you have a clear central idea around which the research revolves. If this is not clear, rewrite the outline of your assignment, and make sure that it delivers relevant information.

Follow the right literature review format by listing references according to relevance and how much data obtained from each source adds weight to your literature review. Start with the ones that contributed most to your research paper knowledge. Highlight the most important findings and mention several critical trends in the topic of your research paper by referring to these academic references. It’s important to mention the most important theories and trends in your area of studies.

Writing a literature review for a research paper is a daunting task because it takes lots of time and effort. It involves listing, analyzing, concluding, and summarizing all useful academic sources used to write a research paper. These will include books, journals, case studies, magazines, online sources, and any other approved academic sources to get information for your assignment. This might sound confusing, but learning how to write a literature review for a research paper can help you finish your task on time.

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic.

Writing a literature review involves finding relevant publications (such as books and journal articles), critically analyzing them, and explaining what you found. There are five key steps:

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

Dissertation literature review If the literature review is part of your thesis or dissertation, show how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. Stand-alone literature review If you are writing a stand-alone paper, you can discuss the overall implications of the literature or make suggestions for future research based on the gaps you have identified.

Step 1: Search for relevant literature

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24].

define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the review to help define its scope), and

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules apply:

keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10]),

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11], but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8]. The topic must at least be:

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice to keep it focused 16,17. Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [18]. If you are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

In order to carry out self-regulation, patients must be able and encouraged to exert their autonomy, and be supported in such a way that they develop internalised motivations to do so, as suggested by SDT. Gourlan et al. (2014) supports this, demonstrating that amongst obese adolescents, incidence of physical activity was increased when individuals experienced a supervised exercise session that supported their autonomous needs. Patients were assumed to have performed such self-regulation due to the intrinsic origin of motivation to complete such tasks (Gourlan et al., 2014). However not all literature supports this conclusion. Sripada et al. (2016) presents contrary evidence, demonstrating that no aspects of SDT needs (i.e. autonomy, competence, relatedness and intrinsic motivation) are related to treatment adherence, which requires an element of self-regulation. This paragraph describes some discrepancy between different findings related to Self-Determination Theory needs (including motivation and autonomy) and the maintenance of healthy behaviours such as exercise and treatment adherence.

Once you have selected your research question or aim, you can identify keywords to assist you in finding the relevant literature. The Researching for your literature review library guide is a comprehensive guide to finding relevant information sources for your topic.

• Start with a broad introduction to the topic. Include relevant background information and definitions or explanations of the relevant terms and concepts.
• Provide information that is relevant for your specific topic, and explain the importance of your topic (e.g. why it’s worth reading your literature review).
• Tell the reader what the scope of your review is, e.g. what key points you will include in the body of your review.
• Tell your reader what the aim or purpose of your review is. This is often included at the end of the introduction.

Aim: This review aims to directly assess how global wheat crops will react to a rise in environmental CO₂ and guide research of mitigation of any challenges wheat may face.

Example introduction

There are several conventions to note when you are writing your conclusion:

In the body of your literature review, it is important to analyse the literature rather than to merely describe the findings of a number of different literature sources. Some description of the key findings is important to give the reader context, however your review should also include an analysis of the key themes, gaps in understanding, and points of disagreement between the different literature sources.

• You may be asked to choose from a list of specific research questions.
• You may be asked to create a research question from a list of broad topics, or from any topic that interests you.
• You might be asked to include only a research question, or to include a research question and an aim.

One method of organising your reviewed literature is to group similar findings together. The assignment excerpt below is an example of how this can be done.