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• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

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

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

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.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

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

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

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

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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Literature Review: 3 Essential Ingredients

The theoretical framework, empirical research and research gap

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Reviewer: Eunice Rautenbach (DTech) | July 2023

Writing a comprehensive but concise literature review is no simple task. There’s a lot of ground to cover and it can be challenging to figure out what’s important and what’s not. In this post, we’ll unpack three essential ingredients that need to be woven into your literature review to lay a rock-solid foundation for your study.

This post is based on our popular online course, Literature Review Bootcamp . In the course, we walk you through the full process of developing a literature review, step by step. If it’s your first time writing a literature review, you definitely want to use this link to get 50% off the course (limited-time offer).

Overview: Essential Ingredients

• Ingredients vs structure
• The theoretical framework (foundation of theory)
• The empirical research
• The research gap
• Summary & key takeaways

Ingredients vs Structure

As a starting point, it’s important to clarify that the three ingredients we’ll cover in this video are things that need to feature within your literature review, as opposed to a set structure for your chapter . In other words, there are different ways you can weave these three ingredients into your literature review. Regardless of which structure you opt for, each of the three components will make an appearance in some shape or form. If you’re keen to learn more about structural options, we’ve got a dedicated post about that here .

1. The Theoretical Framework

Let’s kick off with the first essential ingredient – that is the theoretical framework , also called the foundation of theory . 

The foundation of theory, as the name suggests, is where you’ll lay down the foundational building blocks for your literature review so that your reader can get a clear idea of the core concepts, theories and assumptions (in relation to your research aims and questions) that will guide your study. Note that this is not the same as a conceptual framework .

Typically you’ll cover a few things within the theoretical framework:

Firstly, you’ll need to clearly define the key constructs and variables that will feature within your study. In many cases, any given term can have multiple different definitions or interpretations – for example, different people will define the concept of “integrity” in different ways. This variation in interpretation can, of course, wreak havoc on how your study is understood. So, this section is where you’ll pin down what exactly you mean when you refer to X, Y or Z in your study, as well as why you chose that specific definition. It’s also a good idea to state any assumptions that are inherent in these definitions and why these are acceptable, given the purpose of your study.

Related to this, the second thing you’ll need to cover in your theoretical framework is the relationships between these variables and/or constructs . For example, how does one variable potentially affect another variable – does A have an impact on B, B on A, and so on? In other words, you want to connect the dots between the different “things” of interest that you’ll be exploring in your study. Note that you only need to focus on the key items of interest here (i.e. those most central to your research aims and questions) – not every possible construct or variable.

Lastly, and very importantly, you need to discuss the existing theories that are relevant to your research aims and research questions . For example, if you’re investigating the uptake/adoption of a certain application or software, you might discuss Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model and unpack what it has to say about the factors that influence technology adoption. More importantly, though, you need to explain how this impacts your expectations about what you will find in your own study . In other words, your theoretical framework should reveal some insights about what answers you might expect to find to your research questions .

If this sounds a bit fluffy, don’t worry. We deep dive into the theoretical framework (as well as the conceptual framework) and look at practical examples in Literature Review Bootcamp . If you’d like to learn more, take advantage of the limited-time offer (60% off the standard price).

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2. The Empirical Research

Onto the second essential ingredient, which is  empirical research . This section is where you’ll present a critical discussion of the existing empirical research that is relevant to your research aims and questions.

But what exactly is empirical research?

Simply put, empirical research includes any study that involves actual data collection and analysis , whether that’s qualitative data, quantitative data, or a mix of both . This contrasts against purely theoretical literature (the previous ingredient), which draws its conclusions based exclusively on logic and reason , as opposed to an analysis of real-world data.

In other words, theoretical literature provides a prediction or expectation of what one might find based on reason and logic, whereas empirical research tests the accuracy of those predictions using actual real-world data . This reflects the broader process of knowledge creation – in other words, first developing a theory and then testing it out in the field.

Long story short, the second essential ingredient of a high-quality literature review is a critical discussion of the existing empirical research . Here, it’s important to go beyond description . You’ll need to present a critical analysis that addresses some (if not all) of the following questions:

• What have different studies found in relation to your research questions ?
• What contexts have (and haven’t been covered)? For example, certain countries, cities, cultures, etc.
• Are the findings across the studies similar or is there a lot of variation ? If so, why might this be the case?
• What sorts of research methodologies have been used and how could these help me develop my own methodology?
• What were the noteworthy limitations of these studies?

Simply put, your task here is to present a synthesis of what’s been done (and found) within the empirical research, so that you can clearly assess the current state of knowledge and identify potential research gaps , which leads us to our third essential ingredient.

The Research Gap

The third essential ingredient of a high-quality literature review is a discussion of the research gap (or gaps).

But what exactly is a research gap?

Simply put, a research gap is any unaddressed or inadequately explored area within the existing body of academic knowledge. In other words, a research gap emerges whenever there’s still some uncertainty regarding a certain topic or question.

For example, it might be the case that there are mixed findings regarding the relationship between two variables (e.g., job performance and work-from-home policies). Similarly, there might be a lack of research regarding the impact of a specific new technology on people’s mental health. On the other end of the spectrum, there might be a wealth of research regarding a certain topic within one country (say the US), but very little research on that same topic in a different social context (say, China).

These are just random examples, but as you can see, research gaps can emerge from many different places. What’s important to understand is that the research gap (or gaps) needs to emerge from your previous discussion of the theoretical and empirical literature . In other words, your discussion in those sections needs to start laying the foundation for the research gap.

For example, when discussing empirical research, you might mention that most studies have focused on a certain context , yet very few (or none) have focused on another context, and there’s reason to believe that findings may differ. Or you might highlight how there’s a fair deal of mixed findings and disagreement regarding a certain matter. In other words, you want to start laying a little breadcrumb trail in those sections so that your discussion of the research gap is firmly rooted in the rest of the literature review.

But why does all of this matter?

Well, the research gap should serve as the core justification for your study . Through your literature review, you’ll show what gaps exist in the current body of knowledge, and then your study will then attempt to fill (or contribute towards filling) one of those gaps. In other words, you’re first explaining what the problem is (some sort of gap) and then proposing how you’ll solve it.

Key Takeaways

To recap, the three ingredients that need to be mixed into your literature review are:

• The foundation of theory or theoretical framework
• The empirical or evidence-based research

As we mentioned earlier, these are components of a literature review and not (necessarily) a structure for your literature review chapter. Of course, you can structure your chapter in a way that reflects these three components (in fact, in some cases that works very well), but it’s certainly not the only option. The right structure will vary from study to study , depending on various factors.

If you’d like to get hands-on help developing your literature review, be sure to check out our private coaching service , where we hold your hand through the entire research journey, step by step. 

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling short course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

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What is a Literature Review? How to Write It (with Examples)

A literature review is a critical analysis and synthesis of existing research on a particular topic. It provides an overview of the current state of knowledge, identifies gaps, and highlights key findings in the literature. 1 The purpose of a literature review is to situate your own research within the context of existing scholarship, demonstrating your understanding of the topic and showing how your work contributes to the ongoing conversation in the field. Learning how to write a literature review is a critical tool for successful research. Your ability to summarize and synthesize prior research pertaining to a certain topic demonstrates your grasp on the topic of study, and assists in the learning process. 

Table of Contents

• What is the purpose of literature review? 
• a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction: 
• b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes: 
• c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs: 
• d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts: 

How to write a good literature review 

• Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question: 
• Decide on the Scope of Your Review: 
• Select Databases for Searches: 
• Conduct Searches and Keep Track: 
• Review the Literature: 
• Organize and Write Your Literature Review: 
• How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal? 
• Frequently asked questions 

What is a literature review?

A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with the existing literature, establishes the context for their own research, and contributes to scholarly conversations on the topic. One of the purposes of a literature review is also to help researchers avoid duplicating previous work and ensure that their research is informed by and builds upon the existing body of knowledge.

What is the purpose of literature review?

A literature review serves several important purposes within academic and research contexts. Here are some key objectives and functions of a literature review: 2  

1. Contextualizing the Research Problem: The literature review provides a background and context for the research problem under investigation. It helps to situate the study within the existing body of knowledge. 

2. Identifying Gaps in Knowledge: By identifying gaps, contradictions, or areas requiring further research, the researcher can shape the research question and justify the significance of the study. This is crucial for ensuring that the new research contributes something novel to the field. 

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3. Understanding Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks: Literature reviews help researchers gain an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in previous studies. This aids in the development of a theoretical framework for the current research. 

4. Providing Methodological Insights: Another purpose of literature reviews is that it allows researchers to learn about the methodologies employed in previous studies. This can help in choosing appropriate research methods for the current study and avoiding pitfalls that others may have encountered. 

5. Establishing Credibility: A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with existing scholarship, establishing their credibility and expertise in the field. It also helps in building a solid foundation for the new research. 

6. Informing Hypotheses or Research Questions: The literature review guides the formulation of hypotheses or research questions by highlighting relevant findings and areas of uncertainty in existing literature. 

Literature review example

Let’s delve deeper with a literature review example: Let’s say your literature review is about the impact of climate change on biodiversity. You might format your literature review into sections such as the effects of climate change on habitat loss and species extinction, phenological changes, and marine biodiversity. Each section would then summarize and analyze relevant studies in those areas, highlighting key findings and identifying gaps in the research. The review would conclude by emphasizing the need for further research on specific aspects of the relationship between climate change and biodiversity. The following literature review template provides a glimpse into the recommended literature review structure and content, demonstrating how research findings are organized around specific themes within a broader topic. 

Literature Review on Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity:

Climate change is a global phenomenon with far-reaching consequences, including significant impacts on biodiversity. This literature review synthesizes key findings from various studies: 

a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction:

Climate change-induced alterations in temperature and precipitation patterns contribute to habitat loss, affecting numerous species (Thomas et al., 2004). The review discusses how these changes increase the risk of extinction, particularly for species with specific habitat requirements. 

b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes:

Observations of range shifts and changes in the timing of biological events (phenology) are documented in response to changing climatic conditions (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003). These shifts affect ecosystems and may lead to mismatches between species and their resources. 

c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs:

The review explores the impact of climate change on marine biodiversity, emphasizing ocean acidification’s threat to coral reefs (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007). Changes in pH levels negatively affect coral calcification, disrupting the delicate balance of marine ecosystems. 

d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts:

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the literature review discusses various adaptive strategies adopted by species and conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change on biodiversity (Hannah et al., 2007). It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for effective conservation planning. 

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Writing a literature review involves summarizing and synthesizing existing research on a particular topic. A good literature review format should include the following elements. 

Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your literature review, providing context and introducing the main focus of your review. 

• Opening Statement: Begin with a general statement about the broader topic and its significance in the field. 
• Scope and Purpose: Clearly define the scope of your literature review. Explain the specific research question or objective you aim to address. 
• Organizational Framework: Briefly outline the structure of your literature review, indicating how you will categorize and discuss the existing research. 
• Significance of the Study: Highlight why your literature review is important and how it contributes to the understanding of the chosen topic. 
• Thesis Statement: Conclude the introduction with a concise thesis statement that outlines the main argument or perspective you will develop in the body of the literature review. 

Body: The body of the literature review is where you provide a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, grouping studies based on themes, methodologies, or other relevant criteria. 

• Organize by Theme or Concept: Group studies that share common themes, concepts, or methodologies. Discuss each theme or concept in detail, summarizing key findings and identifying gaps or areas of disagreement. 
• Critical Analysis: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each study. Discuss the methodologies used, the quality of evidence, and the overall contribution of each work to the understanding of the topic. 
• Synthesis of Findings: Synthesize the information from different studies to highlight trends, patterns, or areas of consensus in the literature. 
• Identification of Gaps: Discuss any gaps or limitations in the existing research and explain how your review contributes to filling these gaps. 
• Transition between Sections: Provide smooth transitions between different themes or concepts to maintain the flow of your literature review. 

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Conclusion: The conclusion of your literature review should summarize the main findings, highlight the contributions of the review, and suggest avenues for future research. 

• Summary of Key Findings: Recap the main findings from the literature and restate how they contribute to your research question or objective. 
• Contributions to the Field: Discuss the overall contribution of your literature review to the existing knowledge in the field. 
• Implications and Applications: Explore the practical implications of the findings and suggest how they might impact future research or practice. 
• Recommendations for Future Research: Identify areas that require further investigation and propose potential directions for future research in the field. 
• Final Thoughts: Conclude with a final reflection on the importance of your literature review and its relevance to the broader academic community. 

Conducting a literature review

Conducting a literature review is an essential step in research that involves reviewing and analyzing existing literature on a specific topic. It’s important to know how to do a literature review effectively, so here are the steps to follow: 1  

Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question:

• Select a topic that is relevant to your field of study. 
• Clearly define your research question or objective. Determine what specific aspect of the topic do you want to explore? 

Decide on the Scope of Your Review:

• Determine the timeframe for your literature review. Are you focusing on recent developments, or do you want a historical overview? 
• Consider the geographical scope. Is your review global, or are you focusing on a specific region? 
• Define the inclusion and exclusion criteria. What types of sources will you include? Are there specific types of studies or publications you will exclude? 

Select Databases for Searches:

• Identify relevant databases for your field. Examples include PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. 
• Consider searching in library catalogs, institutional repositories, and specialized databases related to your topic. 

Conduct Searches and Keep Track:

• Develop a systematic search strategy using keywords, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and other search techniques. 
• Record and document your search strategy for transparency and replicability. 
• Keep track of the articles, including publication details, abstracts, and links. Use citation management tools like EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley to organize your references. 

Review the Literature:

• Evaluate the relevance and quality of each source. Consider the methodology, sample size, and results of studies. 
• Organize the literature by themes or key concepts. Identify patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing research. 
• Summarize key findings and arguments from each source. Compare and contrast different perspectives. 
• Identify areas where there is a consensus in the literature and where there are conflicting opinions. 
• Provide critical analysis and synthesis of the literature. What are the strengths and weaknesses of existing research? 

Organize and Write Your Literature Review:

• Literature review outline should be based on themes, chronological order, or methodological approaches. 
• Write a clear and coherent narrative that synthesizes the information gathered. 
• Use proper citations for each source and ensure consistency in your citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). 
• Conclude your literature review by summarizing key findings, identifying gaps, and suggesting areas for future research. 

Whether you’re exploring a new research field or finding new angles to develop an existing topic, sifting through hundreds of papers can take more time than you have to spare. But what if you could find science-backed insights with verified citations in seconds? That’s the power of Paperpal’s new Research feature!  

How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal?

Paperpal, an AI writing assistant, integrates powerful academic search capabilities within its writing platform. With the Research feature, you get 100% factual insights, with citations backed by 250M+ verified research articles, directly within your writing interface with the option to save relevant references in your Citation Library. By eliminating the need to switch tabs to find answers to all your research questions, Paperpal saves time and helps you stay focused on your writing.   

Here’s how to use the Research feature:  

• Ask a question: Get started with a new document on paperpal.com. Click on the “Research” feature and type your question in plain English. Paperpal will scour over 250 million research articles, including conference papers and preprints, to provide you with accurate insights and citations. 
• Review and Save: Paperpal summarizes the information, while citing sources and listing relevant reads. You can quickly scan the results to identify relevant references and save these directly to your built-in citations library for later access. 
• Cite with Confidence: Paperpal makes it easy to incorporate relevant citations and references into your writing, ensuring your arguments are well-supported by credible sources. This translates to a polished, well-researched literature review. 

The literature review sample and detailed advice on writing and conducting a review will help you produce a well-structured report. But remember that a good literature review is an ongoing process, and it may be necessary to revisit and update it as your research progresses. By combining effortless research with an easy citation process, Paperpal Research streamlines the literature review process and empowers you to write faster and with more confidence. Try Paperpal Research now and see for yourself.  

Frequently asked questions

A literature review is a critical and comprehensive analysis of existing literature (published and unpublished works) on a specific topic or research question and provides a synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a particular field. A well-conducted literature review is crucial for researchers to build upon existing knowledge, avoid duplication of efforts, and contribute to the advancement of their field. It also helps researchers situate their work within a broader context and facilitates the development of a sound theoretical and conceptual framework for their studies.

Literature review is a crucial component of research writing, providing a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. The aim is to keep professionals up to date by providing an understanding of ongoing developments within a specific field, including research methods, and experimental techniques used in that field, and present that knowledge in the form of a written report. Also, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the scholar in his or her field.  

Before writing a literature review, it’s essential to undertake several preparatory steps to ensure that your review is well-researched, organized, and focused. This includes choosing a topic of general interest to you and doing exploratory research on that topic, writing an annotated bibliography, and noting major points, especially those that relate to the position you have taken on the topic. 

Literature reviews and academic research papers are essential components of scholarly work but serve different purposes within the academic realm. 3 A literature review aims to provide a foundation for understanding the current state of research on a particular topic, identify gaps or controversies, and lay the groundwork for future research. Therefore, it draws heavily from existing academic sources, including books, journal articles, and other scholarly publications. In contrast, an academic research paper aims to present new knowledge, contribute to the academic discourse, and advance the understanding of a specific research question. Therefore, it involves a mix of existing literature (in the introduction and literature review sections) and original data or findings obtained through research methods. 

Literature reviews are essential components of academic and research papers, and various strategies can be employed to conduct them effectively. If you want to know how to write a literature review for a research paper, here are four common approaches that are often used by researchers.  Chronological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the chronological order of publication. It helps to trace the development of a topic over time, showing how ideas, theories, and research have evolved.  Thematic Review: Thematic reviews focus on identifying and analyzing themes or topics that cut across different studies. Instead of organizing the literature chronologically, it is grouped by key themes or concepts, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of various aspects of the topic.  Methodological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the research methods employed in different studies. It helps to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies and allows the reader to evaluate the reliability and validity of the research findings.  Theoretical Review: A theoretical review examines the literature based on the theoretical frameworks used in different studies. This approach helps to identify the key theories that have been applied to the topic and assess their contributions to the understanding of the subject.  It’s important to note that these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and a literature review may combine elements of more than one approach. The choice of strategy depends on the research question, the nature of the literature available, and the goals of the review. Additionally, other strategies, such as integrative reviews or systematic reviews, may be employed depending on the specific requirements of the research.

The literature review format can vary depending on the specific publication guidelines. However, there are some common elements and structures that are often followed. Here is a general guideline for the format of a literature review:  Introduction:   Provide an overview of the topic.  Define the scope and purpose of the literature review.  State the research question or objective.  Body:   Organize the literature by themes, concepts, or chronology.  Critically analyze and evaluate each source.  Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the studies.  Highlight any methodological limitations or biases.  Identify patterns, connections, or contradictions in the existing research.  Conclusion:   Summarize the key points discussed in the literature review.  Highlight the research gap.  Address the research question or objective stated in the introduction.  Highlight the contributions of the review and suggest directions for future research.

Both annotated bibliographies and literature reviews involve the examination of scholarly sources. While annotated bibliographies focus on individual sources with brief annotations, literature reviews provide a more in-depth, integrated, and comprehensive analysis of existing literature on a specific topic. The key differences are as follows: 

References 

• Denney, A. S., & Tewksbury, R. (2013). How to write a literature review.  Journal of criminal justice education ,  24 (2), 218-234. 
• Pan, M. L. (2016).  Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches . Taylor & Francis. 
• Cantero, C. (2019). How to write a literature review.  San José State University Writing Center . 

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Writing a Literature Review

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A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

• An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
• A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
• Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
• Summarize and synthesize: Give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: Don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically Evaluate: Mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: Use transition words and topic sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

• Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
• Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

• Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
• Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
• Qualitative versus quantitative research
• Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
• Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

• It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
• Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
• Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
• Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

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• 5. The Literature Review
• Purpose of Guide
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• Qualitative Methods
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A literature review surveys prior research published in books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by so doing, provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem being investigated. Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have used in researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within existing scholarship about the topic.

Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . Fourth edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2014.

Importance of a Good Literature Review

A literature review may consist of simply a summary of key sources, but in the social sciences, a literature review usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis, often within specific conceptual categories . A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information in a way that informs how you are planning to investigate a research problem. The analytical features of a literature review might:

• Give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations,
• Trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates,
• Depending on the situation, evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant research, or
• Usually in the conclusion of a literature review, identify where gaps exist in how a problem has been researched to date.

Given this, the purpose of a literature review is to:

• Place each work in the context of its contribution to understanding the research problem being studied.
• Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration.
• Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
• Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature.
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies.
• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.
• Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research.
• Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important].

Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Jesson, Jill. Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2011; Knopf, Jeffrey W. "Doing a Literature Review." PS: Political Science and Politics 39 (January 2006): 127-132; Ridley, Diana. The Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide for Students . 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2012.

Types of Literature Reviews

It is important to think of knowledge in a given field as consisting of three layers. First, there are the primary studies that researchers conduct and publish. Second are the reviews of those studies that summarize and offer new interpretations built from and often extending beyond the primary studies. Third, there are the perceptions, conclusions, opinion, and interpretations that are shared informally among scholars that become part of the body of epistemological traditions within the field.

In composing a literature review, it is important to note that it is often this third layer of knowledge that is cited as "true" even though it often has only a loose relationship to the primary studies and secondary literature reviews. Given this, while literature reviews are designed to provide an overview and synthesis of pertinent sources you have explored, there are a number of approaches you could adopt depending upon the type of analysis underpinning your study.

Argumentative Review This form examines literature selectively in order to support or refute an argument, deeply embedded assumption, or philosophical problem already established in the literature. The purpose is to develop a body of literature that establishes a contrarian viewpoint. Given the value-laden nature of some social science research [e.g., educational reform; immigration control], argumentative approaches to analyzing the literature can be a legitimate and important form of discourse. However, note that they can also introduce problems of bias when they are used to make summary claims of the sort found in systematic reviews [see below].

Integrative Review Considered a form of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated. The body of literature includes all studies that address related or identical hypotheses or research problems. A well-done integrative review meets the same standards as primary research in regard to clarity, rigor, and replication. This is the most common form of review in the social sciences.

Historical Review Few things rest in isolation from historical precedent. Historical literature reviews focus on examining research throughout a period of time, often starting with the first time an issue, concept, theory, phenomena emerged in the literature, then tracing its evolution within the scholarship of a discipline. The purpose is to place research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the-art developments and to identify the likely directions for future research.

Methodological Review A review does not always focus on what someone said [findings], but how they came about saying what they say [method of analysis]. Reviewing methods of analysis provides a framework of understanding at different levels [i.e. those of theory, substantive fields, research approaches, and data collection and analysis techniques], how researchers draw upon a wide variety of knowledge ranging from the conceptual level to practical documents for use in fieldwork in the areas of ontological and epistemological consideration, quantitative and qualitative integration, sampling, interviewing, data collection, and data analysis. This approach helps highlight ethical issues which you should be aware of and consider as you go through your own study.

Systematic Review This form consists of an overview of existing evidence pertinent to a clearly formulated research question, which uses pre-specified and standardized methods to identify and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect, report, and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review. The goal is to deliberately document, critically evaluate, and summarize scientifically all of the research about a clearly defined research problem . Typically it focuses on a very specific empirical question, often posed in a cause-and-effect form, such as "To what extent does A contribute to B?" This type of literature review is primarily applied to examining prior research studies in clinical medicine and allied health fields, but it is increasingly being used in the social sciences.

Theoretical Review The purpose of this form is to examine the corpus of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue, concept, theory, phenomena. The theoretical literature review helps to establish what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what degree the existing theories have been investigated, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested. Often this form is used to help establish a lack of appropriate theories or reveal that current theories are inadequate for explaining new or emerging research problems. The unit of analysis can focus on a theoretical concept or a whole theory or framework.

NOTE: Most often the literature review will incorporate some combination of types. For example, a review that examines literature supporting or refuting an argument, assumption, or philosophical problem related to the research problem will also need to include writing supported by sources that establish the history of these arguments in the literature.

Baumeister, Roy F. and Mark R. Leary. "Writing Narrative Literature Reviews."  Review of General Psychology 1 (September 1997): 311-320; Mark R. Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Kennedy, Mary M. "Defining a Literature." Educational Researcher 36 (April 2007): 139-147; Petticrew, Mark and Helen Roberts. Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006; Torracro, Richard. "Writing Integrative Literature Reviews: Guidelines and Examples." Human Resource Development Review 4 (September 2005): 356-367; Rocco, Tonette S. and Maria S. Plakhotnik. "Literature Reviews, Conceptual Frameworks, and Theoretical Frameworks: Terms, Functions, and Distinctions." Human Ressource Development Review 8 (March 2008): 120-130; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016.

Structure and Writing Style

I.  Thinking About Your Literature Review

The structure of a literature review should include the following in support of understanding the research problem :

• An overview of the subject, issue, or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review,
• Division of works under review into themes or categories [e.g. works that support a particular position, those against, and those offering alternative approaches entirely],
• An explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others,
• Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research.

The critical evaluation of each work should consider :

• Provenance -- what are the author's credentials? Are the author's arguments supported by evidence [e.g. primary historical material, case studies, narratives, statistics, recent scientific findings]?
• Methodology -- were the techniques used to identify, gather, and analyze the data appropriate to addressing the research problem? Was the sample size appropriate? Were the results effectively interpreted and reported?
• Objectivity -- is the author's perspective even-handed or prejudicial? Is contrary data considered or is certain pertinent information ignored to prove the author's point?
• Persuasiveness -- which of the author's theses are most convincing or least convincing?
• Validity -- are the author's arguments and conclusions convincing? Does the work ultimately contribute in any significant way to an understanding of the subject?

II.  Development of the Literature Review

Four Basic Stages of Writing 1.  Problem formulation -- which topic or field is being examined and what are its component issues? 2.  Literature search -- finding materials relevant to the subject being explored. 3.  Data evaluation -- determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic. 4.  Analysis and interpretation -- discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature.

Consider the following issues before writing the literature review: Clarify If your assignment is not specific about what form your literature review should take, seek clarification from your professor by asking these questions: 1.  Roughly how many sources would be appropriate to include? 2.  What types of sources should I review (books, journal articles, websites; scholarly versus popular sources)? 3.  Should I summarize, synthesize, or critique sources by discussing a common theme or issue? 4.  Should I evaluate the sources in any way beyond evaluating how they relate to understanding the research problem? 5.  Should I provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history? Find Models Use the exercise of reviewing the literature to examine how authors in your discipline or area of interest have composed their literature review sections. Read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or to identify ways to organize your final review. The bibliography or reference section of sources you've already read, such as required readings in the course syllabus, are also excellent entry points into your own research. Narrow the Topic The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to obtain a good survey of relevant resources. Your professor will probably not expect you to read everything that's available about the topic, but you'll make the act of reviewing easier if you first limit scope of the research problem. A good strategy is to begin by searching the USC Libraries Catalog for recent books about the topic and review the table of contents for chapters that focuses on specific issues. You can also review the indexes of books to find references to specific issues that can serve as the focus of your research. For example, a book surveying the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may include a chapter on the role Egypt has played in mediating the conflict, or look in the index for the pages where Egypt is mentioned in the text. Consider Whether Your Sources are Current Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. This is particularly true in disciplines in medicine and the sciences where research conducted becomes obsolete very quickly as new discoveries are made. However, when writing a review in the social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be required. In other words, a complete understanding the research problem requires you to deliberately examine how knowledge and perspectives have changed over time. Sort through other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to explore what is considered by scholars to be a "hot topic" and what is not.

III.  Ways to Organize Your Literature Review

Chronology of Events If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials according to when they were published. This approach should only be followed if a clear path of research building on previous research can be identified and that these trends follow a clear chronological order of development. For example, a literature review that focuses on continuing research about the emergence of German economic power after the fall of the Soviet Union. By Publication Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend. For instance, you could order a review of literature on environmental studies of brown fields if the progression revealed, for example, a change in the soil collection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies. Thematic [“conceptual categories”] A thematic literature review is the most common approach to summarizing prior research in the social and behavioral sciences. Thematic reviews are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time, although the progression of time may still be incorporated into a thematic review. For example, a review of the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics could focus on the development of online political satire. While the study focuses on one topic, the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics, it would still be organized chronologically reflecting technological developments in media. The difference in this example between a "chronological" and a "thematic" approach is what is emphasized the most: themes related to the role of the Internet in presidential politics. Note that more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. A review organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point being made. Methodological A methodological approach focuses on the methods utilized by the researcher. For the Internet in American presidential politics project, one methodological approach would be to look at cultural differences between the portrayal of American presidents on American, British, and French websites. Or the review might focus on the fundraising impact of the Internet on a particular political party. A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed.

Other Sections of Your Literature Review Once you've decided on the organizational method for your literature review, the sections you need to include in the paper should be easy to figure out because they arise from your organizational strategy. In other words, a chronological review would have subsections for each vital time period; a thematic review would have subtopics based upon factors that relate to the theme or issue. However, sometimes you may need to add additional sections that are necessary for your study, but do not fit in the organizational strategy of the body. What other sections you include in the body is up to you. However, only include what is necessary for the reader to locate your study within the larger scholarship about the research problem.

Here are examples of other sections, usually in the form of a single paragraph, you may need to include depending on the type of review you write:

• Current Situation : Information necessary to understand the current topic or focus of the literature review.
• Sources Used : Describes the methods and resources [e.g., databases] you used to identify the literature you reviewed.
• History : The chronological progression of the field, the research literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
• Selection Methods : Criteria you used to select (and perhaps exclude) sources in your literature review. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed [i.e., scholarly] sources.
• Standards : Description of the way in which you present your information.
• Questions for Further Research : What questions about the field has the review sparked? How will you further your research as a result of the review?

IV.  Writing Your Literature Review

Once you've settled on how to organize your literature review, you're ready to write each section. When writing your review, keep in mind these issues.

Use Evidence A literature review section is, in this sense, just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence [citations] that demonstrates that what you are saying is valid. Be Selective Select only the most important points in each source to highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to mention should relate directly to the research problem, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological. Related items that provide additional information, but that are not key to understanding the research problem, can be included in a list of further readings . Use Quotes Sparingly Some short quotes are appropriate if you want to emphasize a point, or if what an author stated cannot be easily paraphrased. Sometimes you may need to quote certain terminology that was coined by the author, is not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. Do not use extensive quotes as a substitute for using your own words in reviewing the literature. Summarize and Synthesize Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each thematic paragraph as well as throughout the review. Recapitulate important features of a research study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study's significance and relating it to your own work and the work of others. Keep Your Own Voice While the literature review presents others' ideas, your voice [the writer's] should remain front and center. For example, weave references to other sources into what you are writing but maintain your own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with your own ideas and wording. Use Caution When Paraphrasing When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be sure to represent the author's information or opinions accurately and in your own words. Even when paraphrasing an author’s work, you still must provide a citation to that work.

V.  Common Mistakes to Avoid

These are the most common mistakes made in reviewing social science research literature.

• Sources in your literature review do not clearly relate to the research problem;
• You do not take sufficient time to define and identify the most relevant sources to use in the literature review related to the research problem;
• Relies exclusively on secondary analytical sources rather than including relevant primary research studies or data;
• Uncritically accepts another researcher's findings and interpretations as valid, rather than examining critically all aspects of the research design and analysis;
• Does not describe the search procedures that were used in identifying the literature to review;
• Reports isolated statistical results rather than synthesizing them in chi-squared or meta-analytic methods; and,
• Only includes research that validates assumptions and does not consider contrary findings and alternative interpretations found in the literature.

Cook, Kathleen E. and Elise Murowchick. “Do Literature Review Skills Transfer from One Course to Another?” Psychology Learning and Teaching 13 (March 2014): 3-11; Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Jesson, Jill. Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques . London: SAGE, 2011; Literature Review Handout. Online Writing Center. Liberty University; Literature Reviews. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J. and Rebecca Frels. Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2016; Ridley, Diana. The Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide for Students . 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2012; Randolph, Justus J. “A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review." Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation. vol. 14, June 2009; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016; Taylor, Dena. The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Writing a Literature Review. Academic Skills Centre. University of Canberra.

Writing Tip

Break Out of Your Disciplinary Box!

Thinking interdisciplinarily about a research problem can be a rewarding exercise in applying new ideas, theories, or concepts to an old problem. For example, what might cultural anthropologists say about the continuing conflict in the Middle East? In what ways might geographers view the need for better distribution of social service agencies in large cities than how social workers might study the issue? You don’t want to substitute a thorough review of core research literature in your discipline for studies conducted in other fields of study. However, particularly in the social sciences, thinking about research problems from multiple vectors is a key strategy for finding new solutions to a problem or gaining a new perspective. Consult with a librarian about identifying research databases in other disciplines; almost every field of study has at least one comprehensive database devoted to indexing its research literature.

Frodeman, Robert. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Another Writing Tip

Don't Just Review for Content!

While conducting a review of the literature, maximize the time you devote to writing this part of your paper by thinking broadly about what you should be looking for and evaluating. Review not just what scholars are saying, but how are they saying it. Some questions to ask:

• How are they organizing their ideas?
• What methods have they used to study the problem?
• What theories have been used to explain, predict, or understand their research problem?
• What sources have they cited to support their conclusions?
• How have they used non-textual elements [e.g., charts, graphs, figures, etc.] to illustrate key points?

When you begin to write your literature review section, you'll be glad you dug deeper into how the research was designed and constructed because it establishes a means for developing more substantial analysis and interpretation of the research problem.

Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1 998.

Yet Another Writing Tip

When Do I Know I Can Stop Looking and Move On?

Here are several strategies you can utilize to assess whether you've thoroughly reviewed the literature:

• Look for repeating patterns in the research findings . If the same thing is being said, just by different people, then this likely demonstrates that the research problem has hit a conceptual dead end. At this point consider: Does your study extend current research?  Does it forge a new path? Or, does is merely add more of the same thing being said?
• Look at sources the authors cite to in their work . If you begin to see the same researchers cited again and again, then this is often an indication that no new ideas have been generated to address the research problem.
• Search Google Scholar to identify who has subsequently cited leading scholars already identified in your literature review [see next sub-tab]. This is called citation tracking and there are a number of sources that can help you identify who has cited whom, particularly scholars from outside of your discipline. Here again, if the same authors are being cited again and again, this may indicate no new literature has been written on the topic.

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J. and Rebecca Frels. Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach . Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2016; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016.

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Literature Reviews

What this handout is about.

This handout will explain what literature reviews are and offer insights into the form and construction of literature reviews in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Introduction

OK. You’ve got to write a literature review. You dust off a novel and a book of poetry, settle down in your chair, and get ready to issue a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” as you leaf through the pages. “Literature review” done. Right?

Wrong! The “literature” of a literature review refers to any collection of materials on a topic, not necessarily the great literary texts of the world. “Literature” could be anything from a set of government pamphlets on British colonial methods in Africa to scholarly articles on the treatment of a torn ACL. And a review does not necessarily mean that your reader wants you to give your personal opinion on whether or not you liked these sources.

What is a literature review, then?

A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a certain time period.

A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. And depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

But how is a literature review different from an academic research paper?

The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, and a research paper is likely to contain a literature review as one of its parts. In a research paper, you use the literature as a foundation and as support for a new insight that you contribute. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.

Why do we write literature reviews?

Literature reviews provide you with a handy guide to a particular topic. If you have limited time to conduct research, literature reviews can give you an overview or act as a stepping stone. For professionals, they are useful reports that keep them up to date with what is current in the field. For scholars, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the writer in his or her field. Literature reviews also provide a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers.

Who writes these things, anyway?

Literature reviews are written occasionally in the humanities, but mostly in the sciences and social sciences; in experiment and lab reports, they constitute a section of the paper. Sometimes a literature review is written as a paper in itself.

Let’s get to it! What should I do before writing the literature review?

If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your instructor:

• Roughly how many sources should you include?
• What types of sources (books, journal articles, websites)?
• Should you summarize, synthesize, or critique your sources by discussing a common theme or issue?
• Should you evaluate your sources?
• Should you provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history?

Find models

Look for other literature reviews in your area of interest or in the discipline and read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or ways to organize your final review. You can simply put the word “review” in your search engine along with your other topic terms to find articles of this type on the Internet or in an electronic database. The bibliography or reference section of sources you’ve already read are also excellent entry points into your own research.

Narrow your topic

There are hundreds or even thousands of articles and books on most areas of study. The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to get a good survey of the material. Your instructor will probably not expect you to read everything that’s out there on the topic, but you’ll make your job easier if you first limit your scope.

Keep in mind that UNC Libraries have research guides and to databases relevant to many fields of study. You can reach out to the subject librarian for a consultation: https://library.unc.edu/support/consultations/ .

And don’t forget to tap into your professor’s (or other professors’) knowledge in the field. Ask your professor questions such as: “If you had to read only one book from the 90’s on topic X, what would it be?” Questions such as this help you to find and determine quickly the most seminal pieces in the field.

Consider whether your sources are current

Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. In the sciences, for instance, treatments for medical problems are constantly changing according to the latest studies. Information even two years old could be obsolete. However, if you are writing a review in the humanities, history, or social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be what is needed, because what is important is how perspectives have changed through the years or within a certain time period. Try sorting through some other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to consider what is currently of interest to scholars in this field and what is not.

Strategies for writing the literature review

Find a focus.

A literature review, like a term paper, is usually organized around ideas, not the sources themselves as an annotated bibliography would be organized. This means that you will not just simply list your sources and go into detail about each one of them, one at a time. No. As you read widely but selectively in your topic area, consider instead what themes or issues connect your sources together. Do they present one or different solutions? Is there an aspect of the field that is missing? How well do they present the material and do they portray it according to an appropriate theory? Do they reveal a trend in the field? A raging debate? Pick one of these themes to focus the organization of your review.

Convey it to your reader

A literature review may not have a traditional thesis statement (one that makes an argument), but you do need to tell readers what to expect. Try writing a simple statement that lets the reader know what is your main organizing principle. Here are a couple of examples:

The current trend in treatment for congestive heart failure combines surgery and medicine. More and more cultural studies scholars are accepting popular media as a subject worthy of academic consideration.

Consider organization

You’ve got a focus, and you’ve stated it clearly and directly. Now what is the most effective way of presenting the information? What are the most important topics, subtopics, etc., that your review needs to include? And in what order should you present them? Develop an organization for your review at both a global and local level:

First, cover the basic categories

Just like most academic papers, literature reviews also must contain at least three basic elements: an introduction or background information section; the body of the review containing the discussion of sources; and, finally, a conclusion and/or recommendations section to end the paper. The following provides a brief description of the content of each:

• Introduction: Gives a quick idea of the topic of the literature review, such as the central theme or organizational pattern.
• Body: Contains your discussion of sources and is organized either chronologically, thematically, or methodologically (see below for more information on each).
• Conclusions/Recommendations: Discuss what you have drawn from reviewing literature so far. Where might the discussion proceed?

Organizing the body

Once you have the basic categories in place, then you must consider how you will present the sources themselves within the body of your paper. Create an organizational method to focus this section even further.

To help you come up with an overall organizational framework for your review, consider the following scenario:

You’ve decided to focus your literature review on materials dealing with sperm whales. This is because you’ve just finished reading Moby Dick, and you wonder if that whale’s portrayal is really real. You start with some articles about the physiology of sperm whales in biology journals written in the 1980’s. But these articles refer to some British biological studies performed on whales in the early 18th century. So you check those out. Then you look up a book written in 1968 with information on how sperm whales have been portrayed in other forms of art, such as in Alaskan poetry, in French painting, or on whale bone, as the whale hunters in the late 19th century used to do. This makes you wonder about American whaling methods during the time portrayed in Moby Dick, so you find some academic articles published in the last five years on how accurately Herman Melville portrayed the whaling scene in his novel.

Now consider some typical ways of organizing the sources into a review:

• Chronological: If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials above according to when they were published. For instance, first you would talk about the British biological studies of the 18th century, then about Moby Dick, published in 1851, then the book on sperm whales in other art (1968), and finally the biology articles (1980s) and the recent articles on American whaling of the 19th century. But there is relatively no continuity among subjects here. And notice that even though the sources on sperm whales in other art and on American whaling are written recently, they are about other subjects/objects that were created much earlier. Thus, the review loses its chronological focus.
• By publication: Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend. For instance, you could order a review of literature on biological studies of sperm whales if the progression revealed a change in dissection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies.
• By trend: A better way to organize the above sources chronologically is to examine the sources under another trend, such as the history of whaling. Then your review would have subsections according to eras within this period. For instance, the review might examine whaling from pre-1600-1699, 1700-1799, and 1800-1899. Under this method, you would combine the recent studies on American whaling in the 19th century with Moby Dick itself in the 1800-1899 category, even though the authors wrote a century apart.
• Thematic: Thematic reviews of literature are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time. However, progression of time may still be an important factor in a thematic review. For instance, the sperm whale review could focus on the development of the harpoon for whale hunting. While the study focuses on one topic, harpoon technology, it will still be organized chronologically. The only difference here between a “chronological” and a “thematic” approach is what is emphasized the most: the development of the harpoon or the harpoon technology.But more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. For instance, a thematic review of material on sperm whales might examine how they are portrayed as “evil” in cultural documents. The subsections might include how they are personified, how their proportions are exaggerated, and their behaviors misunderstood. A review organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point made.
• Methodological: A methodological approach differs from the two above in that the focusing factor usually does not have to do with the content of the material. Instead, it focuses on the “methods” of the researcher or writer. For the sperm whale project, one methodological approach would be to look at cultural differences between the portrayal of whales in American, British, and French art work. Or the review might focus on the economic impact of whaling on a community. A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed. Once you’ve decided on the organizational method for the body of the review, the sections you need to include in the paper should be easy to figure out. They should arise out of your organizational strategy. In other words, a chronological review would have subsections for each vital time period. A thematic review would have subtopics based upon factors that relate to the theme or issue.

Sometimes, though, you might need to add additional sections that are necessary for your study, but do not fit in the organizational strategy of the body. What other sections you include in the body is up to you. Put in only what is necessary. Here are a few other sections you might want to consider:

• Current Situation: Information necessary to understand the topic or focus of the literature review.
• History: The chronological progression of the field, the literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
• Methods and/or Standards: The criteria you used to select the sources in your literature review or the way in which you present your information. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed articles and journals.

Questions for Further Research: What questions about the field has the review sparked? How will you further your research as a result of the review?

Begin composing

Once you’ve settled on a general pattern of organization, you’re ready to write each section. There are a few guidelines you should follow during the writing stage as well. Here is a sample paragraph from a literature review about sexism and language to illuminate the following discussion:

However, other studies have shown that even gender-neutral antecedents are more likely to produce masculine images than feminine ones (Gastil, 1990). Hamilton (1988) asked students to complete sentences that required them to fill in pronouns that agreed with gender-neutral antecedents such as “writer,” “pedestrian,” and “persons.” The students were asked to describe any image they had when writing the sentence. Hamilton found that people imagined 3.3 men to each woman in the masculine “generic” condition and 1.5 men per woman in the unbiased condition. Thus, while ambient sexism accounted for some of the masculine bias, sexist language amplified the effect. (Source: Erika Falk and Jordan Mills, “Why Sexist Language Affects Persuasion: The Role of Homophily, Intended Audience, and Offense,” Women and Language19:2).

Use evidence

In the example above, the writers refer to several other sources when making their point. A literature review in this sense is just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence to show that what you are saying is valid.

Be selective

Select only the most important points in each source to highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to mention should relate directly to the review’s focus, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological.

Use quotes sparingly

Falk and Mills do not use any direct quotes. That is because the survey nature of the literature review does not allow for in-depth discussion or detailed quotes from the text. Some short quotes here and there are okay, though, if you want to emphasize a point, or if what the author said just cannot be rewritten in your own words. Notice that Falk and Mills do quote certain terms that were coined by the author, not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. But if you find yourself wanting to put in more quotes, check with your instructor.

Summarize and synthesize

Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each paragraph as well as throughout the review. The authors here recapitulate important features of Hamilton’s study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study’s significance and relating it to their own work.

Keep your own voice

While the literature review presents others’ ideas, your voice (the writer’s) should remain front and center. Notice that Falk and Mills weave references to other sources into their own text, but they still maintain their own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with their own ideas and their own words. The sources support what Falk and Mills are saying.

Use caution when paraphrasing

When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be sure to represent the author’s information or opinions accurately and in your own words. In the preceding example, Falk and Mills either directly refer in the text to the author of their source, such as Hamilton, or they provide ample notation in the text when the ideas they are mentioning are not their own, for example, Gastil’s. For more information, please see our handout on plagiarism .

Revise, revise, revise

Draft in hand? Now you’re ready to revise. Spending a lot of time revising is a wise idea, because your main objective is to present the material, not the argument. So check over your review again to make sure it follows the assignment and/or your outline. Then, just as you would for most other academic forms of writing, rewrite or rework the language of your review so that you’ve presented your information in the most concise manner possible. Be sure to use terminology familiar to your audience; get rid of unnecessary jargon or slang. Finally, double check that you’ve documented your sources and formatted the review appropriately for your discipline. For tips on the revising and editing process, see our handout on revising drafts .

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Jones, Robert, Patrick Bizzaro, and Cynthia Selfe. 1997. The Harcourt Brace Guide to Writing in the Disciplines . New York: Harcourt Brace.

Lamb, Sandra E. 1998. How to Write It: A Complete Guide to Everything You’ll Ever Write . Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

Rosen, Leonard J., and Laurence Behrens. 2003. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook , 5th ed. New York: Longman.

Troyka, Lynn Quittman, and Doug Hesse. 2016. Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers , 11th ed. London: Pearson.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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• UConn Library
• Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide
• Introduction

Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide — Introduction

• Getting Started
• How to Pick a Topic
• Strategies to Find Sources
• Evaluating Sources & Lit. Reviews
• Tips for Writing Literature Reviews
• Writing Literature Review: Useful Sites
• Citation Resources
• Other Academic Writings

What are Literature Reviews?

So, what is a literature review? "A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries." Taylor, D.  The literature review: A few tips on conducting it . University of Toronto Health Sciences Writing Centre.

Goals of Literature Reviews

What are the goals of creating a Literature Review?  A literature could be written to accomplish different aims:

• To develop a theory or evaluate an existing theory
• To summarize the historical or existing state of a research topic
• Identify a problem in a field of research 

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1997). Writing narrative literature reviews .  Review of General Psychology , 1 (3), 311-320.

What kinds of sources require a Literature Review?

• A research paper assigned in a course
• A thesis or dissertation
• A grant proposal
• An article intended for publication in a journal

All these instances require you to collect what has been written about your research topic so that you can demonstrate how your own research sheds new light on the topic.

Types of Literature Reviews

What kinds of literature reviews are written?

Narrative review: The purpose of this type of review is to describe the current state of the research on a specific topic/research and to offer a critical analysis of the literature reviewed. Studies are grouped by research/theoretical categories, and themes and trends, strengths and weakness, and gaps are identified. The review ends with a conclusion section which summarizes the findings regarding the state of the research of the specific study, the gaps identify and if applicable, explains how the author's research will address gaps identify in the review and expand the knowledge on the topic reviewed.

• Example : Predictors and Outcomes of U.S. Quality Maternity Leave: A Review and Conceptual Framework:  10.1177/08948453211037398  

Systematic review : "The authors of a systematic review use a specific procedure to search the research literature, select the studies to include in their review, and critically evaluate the studies they find." (p. 139). Nelson, L. K. (2013). Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders . Plural Publishing.

• Example : The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review:  10.1057/s41599-022-01270-w

Meta-analysis : "Meta-analysis is a method of reviewing research findings in a quantitative fashion by transforming the data from individual studies into what is called an effect size and then pooling and analyzing this information. The basic goal in meta-analysis is to explain why different outcomes have occurred in different studies." (p. 197). Roberts, M. C., & Ilardi, S. S. (2003). Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology . Blackwell Publishing.

• Example : Employment Instability and Fertility in Europe: A Meta-Analysis:  10.1215/00703370-9164737

Meta-synthesis : "Qualitative meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative study that uses as data the findings from other qualitative studies linked by the same or related topic." (p.312). Zimmer, L. (2006). Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts .  Journal of Advanced Nursing , 53 (3), 311-318.

• Example : Women’s perspectives on career successes and barriers: A qualitative meta-synthesis:  10.1177/05390184221113735

Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences

• UConn Health subject guide on systematic reviews Explanation of the different review types used in health sciences literature as well as tools to help you find the right review type
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• Last Updated: Sep 21, 2022 2:16 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.uconn.edu/literaturereview

Literature Reviews

• Overview of Literature Reviews and Systematic Reviews
• How to Get Started and Developing a Research Question
• Finding and Evaluating Sources
• Citations This link opens in a new window
• Synthesizing Sources
• Writing the Literature Review
• Systematic Reviews This link opens in a new window
• Suggested Readings
• Elements of a Literature Review
• Introduction
• Reference List

All literature reviews contain the following elements:

See the tabs to right for further explanation of each of these elements.

The introduction to a literature review should include the following:

• Define the topic to provide context for the review
• Identify trends in previous publications
• Give your reasoning for reviewing the literature (Why is it necessary? What is your point of view?)
• Explain the criteria that was used to conduct the search
• Indicate how the review is organized

The body of the literature review will discuss each source. Find patterns and ways to tie the main points together. This can be organized thematically, chronologically, or methodologically.

Thematic-organized around a topic or issue

Chronological-organized according to when the articles were published or according to when trends took place

Methodological-organized by the methods used by the researchers

The conclusion should summarize the literature review. Discuss any implications drawn from the literature and what further research is needed.

A reference list at the end of a literature review is essential. Citing all sources gives credit to the authors of the literature, allows others to find the literature for evaluation or their own research, and helps to avoid plagiarism. For more information on creating a reference list, see our Citation Styles guide.

Adding Content & Organizing the Review

The literature review is about both content and form.  In terms of content, keep in mind that your literature review is intended to:

• Set up a theoretical framework for your own research
• Show a clear understanding of the key concepts/ideas/studies/models related to your topic
• Demonstrate knowledge about the history of your research area and any related controversies
• Illustrate that you are able to evaluate and synthesize the work of others
• Clarify significant definitions and terminology
• Develop a space in your discipline for your research

Some questions to ask yourself when you begin to write your first draft include:

• How will my literature review be organized: Chronologically, thematically, conceptually, methodologically or a combination?
• What section headings will I be using?
• How do the various studies relate to each other?
• What contributions do they make to the field?
• What are the limitations of a study/where are the gaps in the research?
• And finally but most importantly, how does my own research fit into what has already been done?

Some questions to ask after the first draft:

• Is there a logical flow from section to section, paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence?
• Does the content proceed from topic to topic?
• Does your conclusion match your introduction?
• Were you consistent in documenting and using the correct citation style?

Attribution

The content of this page was developed from Chapter 8, "Writing a Literature Review" in:

Frederiksen, L., & Phelps, S. F. (2017). Literature reviews for education and nursing graduate students. Rebus Community.  https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/literature-reviews-for-education-and-nursing-graduate-students

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• Last Updated: Nov 30, 2023 1:07 PM
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The Research Proposal

83 Components of the Literature Review

Krathwohl (2005) suggests and describes a variety of components to include in a research proposal.  The following sections present these components in a suggested template for you to follow in the preparation of your research proposal.

Introduction

The introduction sets the tone for what follows in your research proposal – treat it as the initial pitch of your idea.  After reading the introduction your reader should:

• Understand what it is you want to do;
• Have a sense of your passion for the topic;
• Be excited about the study´s possible outcomes.

As you begin writing your research proposal it is helpful to think of the introduction as a narrative of what it is you want to do, written in one to three paragraphs.  Within those one to three paragraphs, it is important to briefly answer the following questions:

• What is the central research problem?
• How is the topic of your research proposal related to the problem?
• What methods will you utilize to analyze the research problem?
• Why is it important to undertake this research? What is the significance of your proposed research?  Why are the outcomes of your proposed research important, and to whom or to what are they important?

Note : You may be asked by your instructor to include an abstract with your research proposal.  In such cases, an abstract should provide an overview of what it is you plan to study, your main research question, a brief explanation of your methods to answer the research question, and your expected findings. All of this information must be carefully crafted in 150 to 250 words.  A word of advice is to save the writing of your abstract until the very end of your research proposal preparation.  If you are asked to provide an abstract, you should include 5-7 key words that are of most relevance to your study. List these in order of relevance.

Background and significance

The purpose of this section is to explain the context of your proposal and to describe, in detail, why it is important to undertake this research. Assume that the person or people who will read your research proposal know nothing or very little about the research problem.  While you do not need to include all knowledge you have learned about your topic in this section, it is important to ensure that you include the most relevant material that will help to explain the goals of your research.

While there are no hard and fast rules, you should attempt to address some or all of the following key points:

• State the research problem and provide a more thorough explanation about the purpose of the study than what you stated in the introduction.
• Present the rationale for the proposed research study. Clearly indicate why this research is worth doing.  Answer the “so what?” question.
• Describe the major issues or problems to be addressed by your research. Do not forget to explain how and in what ways your proposed research builds upon previous related research.
• Explain how you plan to go about conducting your research.
• Clearly identify the key or most relevant sources of research you intend to use and explain how they will contribute to your analysis of the topic.
• Set the boundaries of your proposed research, in order to provide a clear focus. Where appropriate, state not only what you will study, but what will be excluded from your study.
• Provide clear definitions of key concepts and terms. As key concepts and terms often have numerous definitions, make sure you state which definition you will be utilizing in your research.

Literature Review

This is the most time-consuming aspect in the preparation of your research proposal and it is a key component of the research proposal. As described in Chapter 5 , the literature review provides the background to your study and demonstrates the significance of the proposed research. Specifically, it is a review and synthesis of prior research that is related to the problem you are setting forth to investigate.  Essentially, your goal in the literature review is to place your research study within the larger whole of what has been studied in the past, while demonstrating to your reader that your work is original, innovative, and adds to the larger whole.

As the literature review is information dense, it is essential that this section be intelligently structured to enable your reader to grasp the key arguments underpinning your study. However, this can be easier to state and harder to do, simply due to the fact there is usually a plethora of related research to sift through. Consequently, a good strategy for writing the literature review is to break the literature into conceptual categories or themes, rather than attempting to describe various groups of literature you reviewed.  Chapter V, “ The Literature Review ,” describes a variety of methods to help you organize the themes.

Here are some suggestions on how to approach the writing of your literature review:

• Think about what questions other researchers have asked, what methods they used, what they found, and what they recommended based upon their findings.
• Do not be afraid to challenge previous related research findings and/or conclusions.
• Assess what you believe to be missing from previous research and explain how your research fills in this gap and/or extends previous research

It is important to note that a significant challenge related to undertaking a literature review is knowing when to stop.  As such, it is important to know how to know when you have uncovered the key conceptual categories underlying your research topic.  Generally, when you start to see repetition in the conclusions or recommendations, you can have confidence that you have covered all of the significant conceptual categories in your literature review.  However, it is also important to acknowledge that researchers often find themselves returning to the literature as they collect and analyze their data.  For example, an unexpected finding may develop as one collects and/or analyzes the data and it is important to take the time to step back and review the literature again, to ensure that no other researchers have found a similar finding.  This may include looking to research outside your field.

This situation occurred with one of the authors of this textbook´s research related to community resilience.  During the interviews, the researchers heard many participants discuss individual resilience factors and how they believed these individual factors helped make the community more resilient, overall.  Sheppard and Williams (2016) had not discovered these individual factors in their original literature review on community and environmental resilience. However, when they returned to the literature to search for individual resilience factors, they discovered a small body of literature in the child and youth psychology field. Consequently, Sheppard and Williams had to go back and add a new section to their literature review on individual resilience factors. Interestingly, their research appeared to be the first research to link individual resilience factors with community resilience factors.

Research design and methods

The objective of this section of the research proposal is to convince the reader that your overall research design and methods of analysis will enable you to solve the research problem you have identified and also enable you to accurately and effectively interpret the results of your research. Consequently, it is critical that the research design and methods section is well-written, clear, and logically organized.  This demonstrates to your reader that you know what you are going to do and how you are going to do it.  Overall, you want to leave your reader feeling confident that you have what it takes to get this research study completed in a timely fashion.

Essentially, this section of the research proposal should be clearly tied to the specific objectives of your study; however, it is also important to draw upon and include examples from the literature review that relate to your design and intended methods.  In other words, you must clearly demonstrate how your study utilizes and builds upon past studies, as it relates to the research design and intended methods.  For example, what methods have been used by other researchers in similar studies?

While it is important to consider the methods that other researchers have employed, it is equally important, if not more so, to consider what methods have not been employed but could be.  Remember, the methods section is not simply a list of tasks to be undertaken. It is also an argument as to why and how the tasks you have outlined will help you investigate the research problem and answer your research question(s).

Tips for writing the research design and methods section:

• Specify the methodological approaches you intend to employ to obtain information and the techniques you will use to analyze the data.
• Specify the research operations you will undertake and he way you will interpret the results of those operations in relation to the research problem.
• Go beyond stating what you hope to achieve through the methods you have chosen. State how you will actually do the methods (i.e. coding interview text, running regression analysis, etc.).
• Anticipate and acknowledge any potential barriers you may encounter when undertaking your research and describe how you will address these barriers.
• Explain where you believe you will find challenges related to data collection, including access to participants and information.

Preliminary suppositions and implications

The purpose of this section is to argue how and in what ways you anticipate that your research will refine, revise, or extend existing knowledge in the area of your study. Depending upon the aims and objectives of your study, you should also discuss how your anticipated findings may impact future research.  For example, is it possible that your research may lead to a new policy, new theoretical understanding, or a new method for analyzing data?  How might your study influence future studies?  What might your study mean for future practitioners working in the field?  Who or what may benefit from your study?  How might your study contribute to social, economic, environmental issues?  While it is important to think about and discuss possibilities such as these, it is equally important to be realistic in stating your anticipated findings.  In other words, you do not want to delve into idle speculation.  Rather, the purpose here is to reflect upon gaps in the current body of literature and to describe how and in what ways you anticipate your research will begin to fill in some or all of those gaps.

The conclusion reiterates the importance and significance of your research proposal and it provides a brief summary of the entire proposed study.  Essentially, this section should only be one or two paragraphs in length. Here is a potential outline for your conclusion:

• Discuss why the study should be done. Specifically discuss how you expect your study will advance existing knowledge and how your study is unique.
• Explain the specific purpose of the study and the research questions that the study will answer.
• Explain why the research design and methods chosen for this study are appropriate, and why other design and methods were not chosen.
• State the potential implications you expect to emerge from your proposed study,
• Provide a sense of how your study fits within the broader scholarship currently in existence related to the research problem.

As with any scholarly research paper, you must cite the sources you used in composing your research proposal.  In a research proposal, this can take two forms: a reference list or a bibliography.  A reference list does what the name suggests, it lists the literature you referenced in the body of your research proposal.  All references in the reference list, must appear in the body of the research proposal.  Remember, it is not acceptable to say “as cited in …”  As a researcher you must always go to the original source and check it for yourself.  Many errors are made in referencing, even by top researchers, and so it is important not to perpetuate an error made by someone else. While this can be time consuming, it is the proper way to undertake a literature review.

In contrast, a bibliography , is a list of everything you used or cited in your research proposal, with additional citations to any key sources relevant to understanding the research problem.  In other words, sources cited in your bibliography may not necessarily appear in the body of your research proposal.  Make sure you check with your instructor to see which of the two you are expected to produce.

Overall, your list of citations should be a testament to the fact that you have done a sufficient level of preliminary research to ensure that your project will complement, but not duplicate, previous research efforts. For social sciences, the reference list or bibliography should be prepared in American Psychological Association (APA) referencing format. Usually, the reference list (or bibliography) is not included in the word count of the research proposal. Again, make sure you check with your instructor to confirm.

An Introduction to Research Methods in Sociology Copyright © 2019 by Valerie A. Sheppard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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3 Literature Review

Charitianne Williams

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

• Understand the purpose and function of a literature review.
• Structure a literature review according to basic genre expectations.
• Synthesize ideas from multiple sources using a synthesis matrix.
• Choose between narrative or parenthetical citation and direct quoting, or paraphrase with intent and purpose.

I. Introduction

The purpose of a literature review is just that—it reviews. This means that literature reviews examine a text after it was produced, with all the benefits that hindsight allows a reader. In popular culture, we commonly review movies, restaurants, vacation spots, products, etc. In those reviews, you look back at the single thing you are reviewing and your experience with it. You focus on the strengths and weaknesses of your experience and judge the experience as positive or negative while recommending or not recommending the place or product and explaining why.

An academic literature review does something different, although some of the skills and strategies you use remain the same. The job of a literature review is to examine a collection of research or scholarship (not a single thing or text) on a given topic and show how that scholarship fits together. Literature reviews summarize, describe, evaluate, and synthesize the work of other authors and researchers while looking for common trends/patterns, themes, inconsistencies, and gaps in this previous research. The main strategy writers of a literature review use is synthesis.

SYNTHESIS: the combination of ideas and elements to form a complete system or theory.

A good metaphor for synthesis is cooking! Imagine the ingredients for a loaf of bread laid out on a kitchen cabinet. Each ingredient—eggs, milk, flour, sugar, salt, yeast—have their own purpose and can be combined in different ways to form food other than bread. Knowing all of those individual attributes that make an egg an egg, or the difference between yeast and flour, is what makes you a chef. When you combine all these ingredients according to the recipe, you get something different than all the ingredients on their own: and most of us would rather eat a slice of bread than a spoonful of flour. The product of synthesis is like bread. Synthesis takes a list of ingredients and makes them into something more than the ingredients alone.

Usually, the writers of a literature review will start with a question that they want to answer through informed and research-based evidence gathered while reading others’ work on related topics. The “thesis” or controlling idea of a literature review may be that same question ( “This review seeks to answer…” ) or it may be a statement describing the reviewed research. The thesis reflects the purpose of the literature review as a genre and is different from the thesis you will write for the research paper that argues a claim or asserts a new idea.

Example 3.1: Look at this thesis statement taken from the introduction of a literature review in environmental psychology on the relationship between “nature sounds” and restorative environments:

From this example, we can learn many things about literature reviews:

• They are explicit and focused on their topic. The opening states an observable truth about the current research ( emphasizes nature ), is followed by a general condition ( positive psychological experiences) within that research, and then finally focuses on describing how a particular outcome is achieved (listening to nature sounds is restorative).
• They seek to pre vent or eliminate misunderstanding. Note the use of specialized key terms, exacting transitional phrases, and meaningful verbs in the thesis such as “ restorative environments,” “in particular,” and “ generate .”
• They seek to forward understanding. In other words, literature reviews examine and link together evidence described and validated in the research of others so a reader can learn how a field is developing. ( Research seems to agree that nature sounds can relieve stress and fatigue–this review will examine that conclusion so readers can understand/ build on how and why.)

Moving from the beginning to the very end of the literature review, we can also learn many things about literature reviews from the sources used. Think of each text listed in the References section of a literature review as contributing pieces to a gigantic puzzle.

Example 3.2: Look at the first three articles listed in the References for the article excerpted above:

Abbott, L. C., Taff, D., Newman, P., Benfield, J. A., and Mowen, A. J. (2016). The influence of natural sounds on attention restoration. J. Park Recreation Adm. 34, 5–15. doi: 10.18666/JPRA-2016-V34-I3-6893

Aletta, F., and Kang, J. (2019). Promoting healthy and supportive acoustic environments: going beyond the quietness. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 16:4988. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16244988

Aletta, F., Oberman, T., and Kang, J. (2018). Associations between positive health-related effects and soundscapes perceptual constructs: a systematic review. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 15:2392. doi: 10.3390/ijerph15112392

None of these sources are exactly the same. One focuses on sound and attention, the next two on sound and health, and none of them are quite the same as sound and restoration —but they are all pieces of the puzzle that give a full understanding of how sound and restorative environments relate.

As the author of the literature review, it is your job to join the pieces together, giving your reader a complete picture of what researchers know about your topic.

Literature reviews are an indispensable tool for researchers. Instead of having to read dozens of articles on a topic, a researcher could instead read a literature review that synthesizes what is known and puts each piece of scholarship into conversation with the others. This could be not only quicker, but also more valuable.

Have you heard the saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts? The knowledge constructed by a well-written literature review often outweighs the knowledge constructed by simply reading each article in the References section on its own because the author of a literature review processes and analyzes the information for the reader.

Literature reviews occur in two general forms—as a background section in a scholarly work or as a stand-alone genre in and of itself. In both situations, the basic purpose and structure of the literature review is similar: it is the length and the scope that varies. For example, consider the previous chapter, the Proposal. In most proposals, you will want to convince your audience that you are informed on the background of your topic—a literature review is how you would do that. Since a proposal is commonly a short text, you do not have the space to summarize every piece of research. You must select an important set and synthesize that information into a small section signaling your expertise.

On the other hand, consider a professional journal intended to keep its readers up to date on new technologies and findings in a specific field or career. New ideas and discoveries are emerging every day, and it can be difficult to stay on top of all of these new findings, understand how they fit together, and also keep track of your own career responsibilities! A magazine might hire an author to read all the new research on a specific topic and synthesize it into a single article, a state-of-the-art review, so that practitioners in a field can read a single 25-page article instead of 100 25-page articles.

More Resources 3.1: Literature Reviews

II. Rhetorical Considerations: Voice

Using the scholarship of other writers and researchers is one of the things that differentiates academic writing from other types of writing. Using others’ scholarship in a meaningful way that creates new knowledge without mischaracterizing the original findings takes effort, attention, and usually several rounds of revision and rewriting. One of the issues is voice , which refers to the attitude and tone of a text—think of it as what the text “sounds like” in your head as you read it. Voice is an important element of cohesion , or what some people think of as “flow.” Creating a consistent voice in the mind of your reader helps them fit all the information in a text together in the way the author intends. Check out this advice from APAstyle.org about academic style and voice.

Think back to your annotated bibliography and how you created your summaries. You probably used key terms from the original authors’ texts, but because you had to take whole articles and restate the meaning in a short paragraph, there wasn’t room to just repeat the words of the original author. So you had to write the summaries in your voice . If you used those key terms correctly and in ways similar to original authors, those key terms probably did not interfere with cohesiveness and voice. However, in the literature review, you have many more voices to synthesize than you did to summarize in the annotated bibliography. Maintaining a consistent and cohesive voice will be challenging. An important way to maintain voice is through paraphrasing, discussed later in this chapter.

More Resources 3.2: Transitions

Another important way to maintain cohesion is through the use of metadiscourse (see Chapter 2) and transitional phrases. See this link for the use and meaning of transitional phrases, sometimes called signposts .

III. The Literature Review Across the Disciplines

Example 3.3: Academic and Professional Examples

Structure of Literature Reviews

While the details vary across disciplines, all literature reviews tend to have similar basic structure. The introduction of a literature review informs the reader on the topic by defining key terms, citing key researchers or research periods in the field, and introducing the main focus of the review in a descriptive thesis statement. The introduction also explains the organization of the review. In a literature review, you organize your discussion of the research by topic or theme— not article or author. This is in direct contrast to the annotated bibliography, which is often the first step in the writing process for a literature review.

In the annotated bibliography, you organize your entries in alphabetical order by authors’ last names. Each annotation is directly connected to a single text. A literature review is connected to a collection of texts, and therefore must be organized in a way that reflects this.

Example 3.4: Let’s examine the full paragraph that the thesis statement we analyzed earlier came from:

A systematic review by Aletta et al. (2018) has identified links between positive urban soundscapes (which may also include nature sounds) and health and well-being, including stress recovery. Given the emphasis on nature w ithin restorative environments (see Hartig et al., 2014 ), the present narrative literature review focuses on evidence for positive psychological experiences of nature sounds and soundscapes specifically, and in particular how listening to these can generate perceptions and outcomes of restoration from stress and fatigue. This review has five key objectives, summarized in Figure 1 [in the article] . First, it explores literature regarding the impact of nature sounds on perceptions and experiences of wider natural environments. Second, it examines evidence regarding cognitive and affective appraisals of nature sounds and their contributions to overall perceptions of restorative environments. Third, literature regarding restorative outcomes in response to nature sounds is assessed. Fourth, the relevance of key restoration theories to this top ic is examined and areas where these theories are limited are identified. Fifth, a possible new theoretical area of interest—semantic associations with nature—is discussed and exemplified by recent acoustics research (Ratcliffe, 2021, emphasis added).

Notice how the thesis statement (in bold ) is followed by an explicit description of the five key objectives—which correspond to the titles (usually called headings ) of the five major sections of the body of the literature review. The introduction basically outlines the body of the literature review to make it easier for a researcher to find the specific information they are looking for. What follows each of these headings is an analysis and synthesis of the topic described in the heading—which is what we mean when we say a literature review is organized by topic.

Example 3.5: See how the body sections of a literature review synthesize research and evidence in relation to a focused topic. Read this example taken from a literature review in another discipline, nursing.

The introduction states that the review’s purpose is to understand the issues facing nurses in situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found several themes in the research that all contributed to nurses’ experiences. This paragraph describes one of those themes which the authors label “Professional collegiality”:

3.2.2. Professional collegiality

Professional camaraderie amongst nursing colleagues working during a pandemic was high (Ives et al., 2009, Kim, 2018, Liu a nd Liehr , 2009). Nurses acknowledged the importance of caring for their co-workers and in sharing the load. Some nurses associated the experience with working on a battlefield, whereby they worked together as a team protecting one another (Chung et al., 20 05, Kang et al., 2018, Liu and Liehr , 2009). Appreciation of their nursing colleagues was demonstrated through sharing their experiences, willingness to work together and encouraging a team spirit (Shih et al., 2007, Chung et al., 2005, Chiang et al., 2007 ). (Ratcliffe, 2021, p.4)

In this single paragraph, there are seven different research articles cited, and some of them are cited twice. There is no way to write a coherent paragraph summarizing seven different research articles at once—instead, the authors of this paragraph reviewed what the researchers said about collegiality, found where their findings pointed in the same direction, and put those connections into their own words. This is the importance of the review’s body section: it is here where you really dig into the content, meaning, and implications of the scholarship you are discussing.

The end of a literature review looks different from the one- or two-paragraph conclusion we are used to in other texts. The end is often made up of multiple sections, each with a slightly different purpose, although all are probably recognizable to you. A “Discussion” section is almost always present, where the author summarizes the most important findings of each section. In most cases, the “Discussion” section does not contain new information, but ties the different body sections together in ways that provide a deeper analysis.

The end of a literature review may also contain an “Implications for Future Research” or “Resolution” after the Discussion—sometimes this final section is even called “Conclusion.” What this last section looks like is often dependent upon the type of review you are writing, and whether the review is standing alone as a complete text or part of a larger project.

In any situation, across all disciplines, it is important to understand how your literature review is meant to inform the reader and what kind of review is appropriate for the context, in order to decide how you should structure the beginning and end of your review.

Types of Literature Reviews

There are different types of literature reviews, although in undergraduate study the Traditional or Narrative Review is most common. Narrative reviews are somewhat exploratory in their content—in a narrative review you are synthesizing the results of specific texts selected for their connection to your topic. Narrative reviews almost always end with a section describing areas for future research if they are a stand-alone text, or a section describing why the author’s research is so needed if part of a larger research article. The chart below outlines the key differences between three major literature review types. Notice that each type has a slightly different purpose. You might think about which type best fits your project as you read.

Table 3.1: Types of Literature Reviews

More Resources 3.3: Literature Review Structures

IV. Research Strategies: Developing a Methodology

Systematic and scoping reviews should always contain a Research Methodology that explains to your reader exactly how you found the research you are reviewing. Often Narrative Reviews will also contain a research methodology, although it will be slightly different since they are not comprehensive reviews, meaning, they do not attempt to find all the research on a topic—by design, they cover only a specific portion. Even if you are not required to write up your methodology, you need clear research strategies to find the appropriate scholarship for your literature review.

Example 3.6: Check out this excerpt from the methods sections from a psychology literature review. Note how the authors clearly describe what types of sources they’ll be using as well as their steps throughout the research process.

Drawing on individual case studies, archival reports, correlational studies, and laboratory and field experiments, this monograph scrutinizes a sequence of events during which confessions may be obtained from criminal suspects and used as evidence. First, we examine the pre-interrogation interview, a process by which police …( Kassin and Gudjonsson , 2004, p.33)

Example 3.7: Here is another example from the field of education. In it the authors describe two separate searches they performed to gather the literature—the first search used key terms they decided upon before reading any scholarship, and the second search used the terms that they found were common to that first set of texts (see more about key terms here and in the Annotated Bibliography chapter).

We conducted two rounds of literature searches, utilizing the following databases: World CAT (general search), EB SCO Academic Search Complete, EBSCO Education Source, and Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (ProQuest). In the first round, we searched using every possible combination of the following terms: ‘race,’ ‘language teaching,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘language p edagogy,’ ‘Whiteness,’ ‘racialized,’ ‘antiracism,’ and ‘ nativeness .’ For the second round of our literature search, we searched using terms that we saw emerging from the literature such as ‘racial identities of language learners,’ ‘racial identities of lan guage teachers,’ ‘language varieties and language teaching,’ ‘race and language teacher education,’ ‘race and educational policy,’ ‘race and language programs,’ and ‘race and language curriculum’ and also repeated our earlier searches in order to keep the literature updated. (Von Esch et al., 2020, p. 392)

No matter the type of research (see a description of qualitative vs. quantitative research ), the specific genres (see descriptions of academic research genres ), or the time frame (see a discussion on the importance of publication date ) you use for your review, it is important to think through the options, make a decision, and incorporate all your research knowledge—use of key terms, use of subject filters, use of specialized databases, etc.—into a coherent and meaningful process that results in the best scholarship for your inquiry and review.

Here’s a video to help you get started on using databases for research:

Library Referral: Connecting the Conversation with Scholarly Sources and Beyond​

(by Annie R. Armstrong)

Research involves drawing from numerous voices from a range of source types. The sources you choose to include in your conversation are context-specific and might vary depending on your topic or the parameters of your assignment. Review your assignment description and talk to your instructor about guidelines. While most research papers emphasize scholarly sources, expertise isn’t always equated with scholarliness and you might want to branch out. For example, a research paper focusing on exploitation of Native American land and communities by the mining industry should make some attempt to include sources generated by the communities under discussion, especially if their point of view is not represented in the peer-reviewed, scholarly sources you’ve found. Think about who the stakeholders are as related to various aspects of your topic and how you can tap into their voices through available resources. You may want to consult a librarian about this.

The chart below summarizes the breadth of source types available through library websites versus the open web:

Table 3.2: Scholarly Sources and Beyond

V. Reading Strategies: Intertextuality and Graphic Organizers

Typically we think of reading as something we do to learn the content of a text—and this is absolutely true! But true understanding means knowing the relationships between and impact of separate but related topics, which might mean understanding how different texts—generally focused on one topic—overlap or differ.

Intertextuality refers to the connections that exist between texts. Intertextuality as a reading strategy means looking for the connections between the text you are reading and others you have already read; anticipating connections with other texts that you have not yet read, but plan to; as well as connections to whole disciplines, fields, and social phenomena. Reading for intertextuality means looking for opportunities to connect texts with each other, and keeping track of those connections in a productive way.

This means note-taking is essential to intertextual reading. Once you have thought carefully about why you are reading a text, what types of information to look for, and what you will do with that information, you can better decide how to keep track of that information. In regards to literature reviews, one type of graphic organizer dominates: the Synthesis Matrix.

The synthesis matrix is a way to keep track of the themes, concepts, and patterns that are emerging from your reading—NOT all the individual content of each article. This is important, yes, and you will need the citations, but literature reviews move one step further into the topic than simply identifying the pieces. You will need to synthesize.

If you have an annotated bibliography of sources already, it is the perfect way to start your synthesis matrix. An annotated bibliography is often the first step in preparing for a literature review, and is quite similar to an ingredient list, if we are using the metaphor from the introduction. (For a detailed description of how to write an annotated bibliography, see Chapter 1 ).

In your annotations, you will have selected the most important information that text supplies in relation to your topic. For an example, let’s take the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s statement “ Students’ Right to Their Own Language ,” which contains two annotated bibliographies. The second uses more recent sources and looks most like the annotated bibliographies you will write as a student, so let’s start there.

Example 3.8: Here are three annotations from that bibliography. As you read, take notice of the different highlighted colors. Phrases italicized and highlighted green identify ideas related to linguistic identity , phrases bolded and highlighted in blue identify concepts related to grammar analysis , and phrases underlined and highlighted orange identify groups and ideas related to educational objectives :

Fought, Carmen. Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Based primarily on data collected from adolescent and young adult native speakers in Los Angeles , this book is a comprehensive sociolinguistic study of language and language change in Latino/a communities. It provides the basics of Chicano English (CE) structure (phonology, syntax, and semantics) and its connection to the social and cultural identity of its speakers, along with detailed analyses of particular sociolinguistic variables. Emphasis is given to the historical, social, and linguistic contexts of CE. In addition, the differences between native and non-native CE speakers are covered. A final chapter discusses the future of research on CE.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States . London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

The author examines linguistic facts about the structure and function of language , explores commonly held myths about language, and develops a model of “the language subordination process.” Then, using a case-study approach, she applies the model to specific institutional practices (e.g., in education, news media, business) to show how false assumptions about language lead to language subordination. The author analyzes specific groups and individuals (speakers of African American English, Southern U.S. English, and the foreign-language accent of Latinos and Asian Americans) and discusses why and how some embrace linguistic assimilation while others resist it.

Nero, Shondel J. Englishes in Contact: Anglophone Caribbean Students in an Urban College. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001.

This qualitative study of four anglophone Caribbean students at a New York City college offers an in-depth examination of the students’ written and spoken language and the challenges faced by both students and teachers as such students acquire academic literacy. Case studies of the four participants include excerpts from tape-recorded interviews, which reflect their linguistic self-perception, and sociolinguistic and educational experiences in their home countries and in New York City. Samples of their college writing over four semesters are represented and analyzed on morphosyntactic and discourse levels to determine the patterns that emerge when Creole English speakers attempt to write Standard Written English. Related issues such as language and identity , language attitudes, and educational responses to ethnolinguistic diversity are also discussed.

Once you have identified a concept like “language and identity” for your literature review, you can start getting “intertextual”! Review your other annotated sources and your new sources for their discussion of language and identity, as well as parallel concepts—what else do researchers address when they discuss language and identity? What do they discuss instead? Go back to the methods you used to come up with key terms for your literature search—the same strategies now apply to your reading. Also look for “umbrella” concepts, patterns in methodologies—anything that emerges while you read intertextually, focusing on the text in front of you while also remembering all the others you read before. Look for the themes in your annotated bibliography and keep track of the page numbers where these themes appear—plan to go back to those pages several times as you write your literature review.

This is a different type of reading than you did for the annotated bibliography, and might mean you go back and reread your sources several times in this new way—don’t think of this as just repeating labor you have already performed. This is new work, designed to uncover new things in the research. Re-reading articles multiple times is something all serious writers do, and something you should do, too. It isn’t redundant, it is recur sive .

Table 3.3: Synthesis Matrix for Individuals’ Choices in Linguistic Identity

Put your sources into conversations around your themes, as shown in the table above. Notice that the top row names the themes covered in that column, put into original wording similar, but not identical, to the wording in the annotated bibliographies. Not every source will address every topic—not every article is the same. The last row starts to describe what is happening in each column across the whole collection of texts. In this way, your synthesis matrix takes the ingredient list provided by the annotated bibliography and makes it into a recipe for your final product—the literature review.

More Resources 3.4: Synthesis Matrix

VI. Writing Strategies: Citation, Quotation, and Paraphrase

Citation is when you use the work of other authors in your writing and mark that portion of your writing so your reader understands what idea is being “borrowed.” Citation also tells your reader where they could find that original idea in the original text, and how your text fits together with the web of other texts related to your topic: in other words, citations help create intertextuality. A citation placed in your sentences should refer directly to the full bibliographic information in your Works Cited or References page.

As you read in Chapter 1, there are different styles of citation including AMA, APA, CMS, and MLA. You can refer back to that chapter for a more detailed explanation of each. In this section, we’ll cover the basics that are common to citation practices. Most academic styles use the original author’s last name as the central part of the in-text citation, since References pages usually list cited works alphabetically by last name, but some use footnotes or endnotes instead, listing works in the order they were cited. It is important to know which academic style you are using for your literature review so that you can make the right choice.

In-text citation takes one of two forms: parenthetical or narrative. In a narrative citation the author of the original work is mentioned in the sentence.

Example 3.9: Here’s an example taken from the introduction of the same literature review discussed in the Research Strategies: Developing a Methodology section of this chapter.

Several pieces offered a comprehensive review of the historical literature on the formation of Black English as a construct in the context of slavery and Jim Crow, and the historical teaching of Black English within the U .S. context, including Wheeler ( 2016 ) and Alim and Baugh (2007). Wheeler (2016) equated Standard English with ‘White’ English and challenged its hegemony in dialectically diverse classrooms. She named the “racism inherent in [fostering] bidialectalism [th rough teaching]” (p. 380), arguing that we are acknowledging that the only way for African-Americans to be upwardly mobile was to learn how to speak ‘White’ English. Alim (2010) , explained, “By uncritically presenting language varieties as ‘equal’ but diff ering in levels of ‘appropriateness,’ language and Dialect Awareness programs run the risk of silently legitimizing ‘Standard English’” (p. 215)…. Current work addressing AAVE studies has been shifting focus to translingualism and to promoting such pedag ogies as code-meshing (Young, Barrett, Young Rivera and Lovejoy, 2014) and translanguaging (García & Wei, García and Wei, 2014) , embedded in a critical analysis of the racial logics underpinning the denigration of some languages. This work, combined with e xtensive examinations of the connections between race, language, teaching, and identity ( e.g. Flores & Rosa, 2015; Alim et al., 2016 ), has laid a foundation for a raciolinguistics approach to teaching, which we return to later in this article. (Von Esch et al., 2020, p. 399, emphasis added .)

In the first sentence, we see two narrative citations just before the period. These citations state the authors’ names as a part of the sentence, and put the publication date of the articles in parenthesis. It makes sense to use a narrative citation in the topic sentence, since most of the paragraph is a synthesis of Wheeler and Alim’s research. The second sentence starts with Wheeler’s name in the subject position, and the fourth sentence starts with Alim’s name in the subject position—both are narrative citations, a form chosen by the author to emphasize the importance and similarities in the two articles.

In the last two sentences, we see parenthetical citations. The citation information is in parenthesis within the sentences, which focuses the reader on the ideas, not the research itself. Imagine you were reading this article out loud—you would most certainly say the narrative citations “Wheeler” and “Alim”; you might choose not to say “Young, Barrett, Young-Rivera, & Lovejoy, 2014,” though, and no one listening to you would notice the omission. This is the most important difference between narrative and parenthetical citation—narrative draws attention to the researchers, while parenthetical allows a focus on ideas. In academic writing, you often have reason to use both, but it is important to note that using parenthetical citation is less disruptive to your voice—it keeps a reader focused on the ideas you are explaining.

Usually you are citing a type of quotation in your text (although different disciplines have other situations that they cite). Direct quotation and paraphrase are usually what we talk about when we talk about using resources in your writing, although summary is cited as well.

Direct quotation is when you take the original words of one author and place them in your own text. When you quote in your own writing, you mark the copied text—usually with quotation marks “” around the text and a citation afterwards. Quoting is useful when the original author is an important authority on a topic or if you want to define/describe another’s point of view in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation.

In a literature review, a direct quote will almost always be accompanied by a narrative citation. But direct quoting can cause some issues in your own text, such as a sudden shift in voice and a loss of cohesion; the potential for misunderstanding and misrepresentation, since the quote has been separated from its original context; and wordiness —quotes can take up too much space both in terms of the quote itself, and of the explanation and context you must provide for the introduced idea. For these reasons, literature reviews do not contain much direct quoting.

Paraphrasing is a way to accomplish similar goals to direct quoting without causing the same problems. Paraphrasing is when you use only the original author’s key terms and ideas, but your own words. Paraphrasing still contains a citation afterwards that directs the reader to the full bibliographic information in your Works Cited, but does not require quotation marks since the language is yours. Paraphrase may be longer or shorter than the original author’s text, and uses both narrative and parenthetical citation. Paraphrase also allows you to cite more than one piece of research containing the same idea in a single sentence, such as the last sentence in the example paragraph above. This kind of citation string is important to literature reviews because it clearly identifies patterns and trends in research findings.

Key Takeaways

• Literature reviews are a synthesis of what other researchers have discovered on your topic. Think of reviews as “the big picture.”
• Taking so much information from other sources can get confusing–use section headings to keep your review organized and clear.
• Diverse citation, quotation, and paraphrasing techniques are necessary to help your reader understand where the ideas are coming from, AND to help make the ideas “stick together.”
• Keeping all the new knowledge you are learning from your sources organized is hard! Take notes using citations and use a graphic organizer to keep yourself on track.

Fernandez, Lord, H., Halcomb, E., Moxham, L., Middleton, R., Alananzeh, I., & Ellwood, L. (2020). Implications for COVID-19: A systematic review of nurses’ experiences of working in acute care hospital settings during a respiratory pandemic. International Journal of Nursing Studies , 111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2020.103637

Kassin, S. M., & Gudjonsson, G. H. (2004). The psychology of confessions. Psychological Science in the Public Interest , 5 (2), 33–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00016.x

National Council of Teachers of English. (2018, June 16). Students’ right to their own language (with bibliography) . Conference on College Composition and Communication. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/srtolsummary

NEIU Libraries. (2020). “How should I search in a database?”  YouTube . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fgBF0EuH_o

Ratcliffe, E. (2021). Summary Flowchart [Image]. Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563/full#B3

Ratcliffe, E. (2021). Sound and soundscape in restorative natural environments: A narrative literature review. Frontiers in Psychology , 12 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563

Sasaki. K. (2022). Synthesis and Recipes [Image].

Von Esch, K., Motha, S., & Kubota, R. (2020). Race and language teaching. Language Teaching, 53 (4), 391-421. doi:10.1017/S0261444820000269

Writing for Inquiry and Research Copyright © 2023 by Charitianne Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Write a literature review.

• Examples and Further Information

1. Introduction

Not to be confused with a book review, a literature review surveys scholarly articles, books and other sources (e.g. dissertations, conference proceedings) relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, providing a description, summary, and critical evaluation of each work. The purpose is to offer an overview of significant literature published on a topic.

2. Components

Similar to primary research, development of the literature review requires four stages:

• Problem formulation—which topic or field is being examined and what are its component issues?
• Literature search—finding materials relevant to the subject being explored
• Data evaluation—determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic
• Analysis and interpretation—discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature

Literature reviews should comprise the following elements:

• An overview of the subject, issue or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review
• Division of works under review into categories (e.g. those in support of a particular position, those against, and those offering alternative theses entirely)
• Explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others
• Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research

In assessing each piece, consideration should be given to:

• Provenance—What are the author's credentials? Are the author's arguments supported by evidence (e.g. primary historical material, case studies, narratives, statistics, recent scientific findings)?
• Objectivity—Is the author's perspective even-handed or prejudicial? Is contrary data considered or is certain pertinent information ignored to prove the author's point?
• Persuasiveness—Which of the author's theses are most/least convincing?
• Value—Are the author's arguments and conclusions convincing? Does the work ultimately contribute in any significant way to an understanding of the subject?

3. Definition and Use/Purpose

A literature review may constitute an essential chapter of a thesis or dissertation, or may be a self-contained review of writings on a subject. In either case, its purpose is to:

• Place each work in the context of its contribution to the understanding of the subject under review
• Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration
• Identify new ways to interpret, and shed light on any gaps in, previous research
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies
• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort
• Point the way forward for further research
• Place one's original work (in the case of theses or dissertations) in the context of existing literature

The literature review itself, however, does not present new primary scholarship.

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Land Acknowledgement

The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.

The land acknowledgement used at UC Santa Cruz was developed in partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band Chairman and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program at the UCSC Arboretum .

Libraries | Research Guides

Literature reviews, what is a literature review, learning more about how to do a literature review.

• Planning the Review
• The Research Question
• Choosing Where to Search
• Organizing the Review
• Writing the Review

A literature review is a review and synthesis of existing research on a topic or research question. A literature review is meant to analyze the scholarly literature, make connections across writings and identify strengths, weaknesses, trends, and missing conversations. A literature review should address different aspects of a topic as it relates to your research question. A literature review goes beyond a description or summary of the literature you have read. 

• Sage Research Methods Core Collection This link opens in a new window SAGE Research Methods supports research at all levels by providing material to guide users through every step of the research process. SAGE Research Methods is the ultimate methods library with more than 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, and instructional videos by world-leading academics from across the social sciences, including the largest collection of qualitative methods books available online from any scholarly publisher. – Publisher

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Key Elements to Include in Your Literature Review: A Comprehensive Guide

A literature review is a critical component of academic research, providing a comprehensive survey of existing literature relevant to a particular topic or field of study. This guide outlines the essential elements to include in your literature review, ensuring it is thorough, methodical, and impactful. By incorporating these key elements, researchers can establish a strong foundation for their work, methodically analyze and synthesize scholarly works, effectively structure their review, and present their findings with clarity and rigor.

Key Takeaways

• A well-structured literature review should begin by identifying core themes and concepts, assessing the scope and boundaries of the research, and synthesizing prior findings to establish a solid foundation.
• Methodological rigor is crucial; researchers must select appropriate methods, evaluate the quality and relevance of research, and address biases and limitations in their literature review.
• To maximize impact, the literature review should be organized thematically, maintain a coherent narrative flow, and highlight gaps in the research that offer directions for future studies.
• Critical analysis and synthesis involve applying critical thinking to assess arguments, integrating diverse perspectives, and developing a conceptual framework that ties the literature together.
• The presentation and documentation of the literature review must adhere to academic writing conventions, utilize effective citation practices, and ensure the review is clear and comprehensive.

Establishing a Foundation for Your Literature Review

Identifying core themes and concepts.

As you embark on your literature review, it's crucial to identify core themes and concepts that are prevalent across your sources. These themes serve as the pillars of your review, providing a structured way to organize and present your findings. For instance, in a review of treatment options for OCD, cognitive-behavioral therapy and drug therapy might emerge as significant themes.

While reading and analyzing literature, take meticulous notes and consider organizing them around these emerging themes . Tools such as a Synthesis Matrix can be instrumental in tracking your observations and insights. Here's a simple way to structure your notes:

• Theme or Concept
• Key Authors
• Methodologies Used
• Major Findings
• Gaps in Research

By categorizing information in this manner, you can create a clear map of the literature landscape , which will guide you in synthesizing prior research findings. Remember, the goal is not just to summarize existing knowledge, but to critically engage with it, identifying patterns, debates, and gaps that your research could address.

Assessing the Scope and Boundaries

When embarking on your literature review, it is crucial to define the scope of your inquiry . This involves determining which literature to include and which to exclude, thus setting clear boundaries for your research. Begin by identifying the core themes and concepts that are central to your study. This exercise will help categorize the existing literature , allowing you to group resources by their nature, features, and volume.

Consider the following points to effectively assess the scope and boundaries of your literature review:

• Place each resource in the context of its contributions to the field.
• Describe the relationship between resources, noting which authors built upon others' work.
• Identify new interpretations or gaps in previous research.
• Resolve conflicts among contradictory resources and prevent duplication of efforts.

By conducting a preliminary assessment of the available research literature, you aim to identify the nature and extent of research within your field. This scoping review is a valuable step in synthesizing prior research findings and ensuring data validity . Remember, establishing clear boundaries is not only about what you include but also about what you deliberately leave out to maintain a focused and coherent review.

Synthesizing Prior Research Findings

Synthesizing the findings from prior research is a pivotal step in your literature review. It involves more than just summarizing existing studies; it requires a deep analysis to uncover the underlying themes and patterns across different works. Identify the relationships between studies, noting which concepts are recurrent and which findings diverge. This process will help you to construct a comprehensive picture of the scholarly conversation on your topic.

Consider creating a synthesis matrix to organize your findings. This tool can help you compare and contrast the contributions of each source, resolve conflicts among studies, and pinpoint areas where research is lacking. Here's an example of how you might structure your matrix:

By integrating these insights, you can highlight the progression of knowledge within the field and suggest directions for future research. Remember, your goal is to contribute new insights and not merely reiterate what has been done before. As you synthesize, be mindful of the scope and boundaries of your review to maintain a clear focus.

Methodological Considerations in Literature Reviews

Selecting appropriate research methods.

When embarking on your literature review, the selection of research methods is pivotal to the integrity and validity of your work. Choose a research topic that aligns with your academic interests and provides a fertile ground for inquiry. As you delve into the literature, develop a robust search strategy to streamline the process and ensure you are gathering the most relevant studies. This strategy should be informed by your research topic and the core themes you aim to explore.

It is essential to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the methods used in the literature you review. This evaluation will not only enrich your understanding of the field but also guide you in choosing the most suitable methods for your own research. Remember to revisit your initial assumptions and be prepared to refine your methodology if the data challenges your hypothesis. This reflective practice underscores the importance of flexibility and critical thinking in scholarly research.

To aid in the organization of your search results, consider using a search strategy table . This tool can help you keep track of various search terms and their corresponding literature, providing a clear overview of your research landscape. Below is an example of how you might structure such a table:

By systematically organizing your thoughts and the collected data, you lay a solid foundation for a successful thesis journey. This approach not only enhances the quality of your literature review but also prepares you for the subsequent stages of your research.

Evaluating Research Quality and Relevance

When you embark on a literature review, it is crucial to critically evaluate the quality and relevance of the sources you intend to include. Assessing the credibility of your sources is foundational to constructing a robust literature review. Consider the authority of the authors, the accuracy of the information presented, and whether the work has been peer-reviewed.

To ensure that your review is comprehensive and up-to-date, pay attention to the currency of the research. This involves checking the publication date and evaluating the relevance of the research in the context of current knowledge in the field. Additionally, consider the objectivity of the source , looking for potential biases that may affect the interpretation of the results .

Here is a simple checklist to guide you through the evaluation process:

• Authority: Who is the author? Is there contact information?
• Accuracy: Are there working links? Are the references/sources reliable?
• Objectivity: Does the source show any signs of bias?
• Currency: When was the research conducted or published?
• Coverage: Does the research address all aspects of the topic comprehensively?

By systematically applying these criteria, you can filter out less reliable sources and focus on those that will provide the most significant contribution to your literature review.

Addressing Biases and Limitations

In your literature review, it is crucial to acknowledge and address any biases and limitations that may influence the validity of your research. All studies have limitations , but focusing on those pertinent to your research problem is essential. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of the methods used and provide direction for future research to address these gaps.

When evaluating research quality, scrutinize the provenance and objectivity of the sources. Ask yourself if the author's perspective is balanced and whether all relevant data is considered. This critical assessment helps ensure that your literature review does not misrepresent the results of published research.

Lastly, ensure that your review is not just a summary of existing literature but also provides a sufficiently focused research question. This should lead you to testable hypotheses and a clear identification of variables and relationships, ultimately contributing to the field's body of knowledge.

Structuring Your Literature Review for Maximum Impact

Organizing literature thematically.

When you embark on the task of organizing your literature review, consider the power of a thematic structure. This approach involves grouping your sources based on common themes, trends, or theoretical approaches, rather than chronologically or by methodology. It allows you to craft a narrative that highlights the evolution of thought within your field of study. For instance, if your review is on the treatment of OCD, you might organize literature around themes such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and drug therapy.

A thematic organization not only aids in demonstrating the depth of your understanding but also in identifying patterns and relationships between studies. It's essential to synthesize the findings rather than merely summarizing them. Below is an example of how you might categorize themes within your literature review:

• Cognitive Approaches
• Pharmacological Treatments
• Alternative Therapies
• Socio-Cultural Perspectives

Remember to adhere to your institution's guidelines when structuring your review, as the Master's thesis structure typically includes distinct sections such as the Literature Review. By organizing literature thematically, you ensure that your review is not just a list of summaries, but a coherent and insightful discussion that adds value to your field.

Creating a Coherent Narrative Flow

To ensure your literature review tells a compelling story, you must weave individual studies into a cohesive narrative. Start by clearly defining terms and terminologies , as this sets the stage for a deeper understanding of the themes you'll discuss. Next, articulate the features of the research you're reviewing, providing examples to illustrate key points. This approach not only clarifies your argument but also guides the reader through the complex landscape of scholarly work.

Organize your review in a logical sequence that reflects the progression of the field or the unfolding of the research question. Consider using tools like the PRISMA Flow Diagram to visually represent your selection process and the path you took to arrive at your core sources. This can be particularly helpful in demonstrating the rigor of your methodology. Below is an example of how to structure this information in a table format:

Remember, your literature review should not only summarize existing research but also highlight research gaps to guide future studies. By presenting your findings in a narrative that is both analytical and accessible, you bridge the gap between academic jargon and the reader's understanding, ultimately enhancing the impact of your work.

Highlighting Gaps and Future Research Directions

In your literature review, it is crucial to not only synthesize existing research but also to identify areas where further study is needed . This involves pinpointing the limitations of current knowledge and suggesting how future research can fill these gaps. For instance, you may find that certain populations have not been adequately studied or that certain methodologies have not been applied to your research area.

Consider creating a list of questions that remain unanswered or areas that warrant deeper investigation. This can serve as a roadmap for future researchers and also demonstrate the significance of your own research proposal. Here are some examples:

• What are the long-term effects of the phenomenon under study?
• How does the issue vary across different cultural contexts?
• Are there alternative theories or models that have not been explored?

By highlighting these gaps, you not only provide a valuable service to the academic community but also establish a strong foundation for your own research scope , as it defines the study boundaries and limitations. Remember, a well-justified research proposal includes an introduction, background, objectives, and a literature review that collectively establish significance and justify the need for further investigation.

Critical Analysis and Synthesis of Scholarly Works

Applying critical thinking to assess arguments.

When you delve into the literature, it's crucial to apply critical thinking to evaluate the strength and validity of the arguments presented. Assess the author's credentials and the reputation of the publication to ensure that you're drawing from authoritative sources. Consider the objectivity of the work: is the author's perspective balanced, or does it show signs of bias by omitting pertinent information?

The persuasiveness of an argument is not solely based on the author's expertise but also on the evidence provided and the logic of the conclusions drawn. Here's a simple checklist to guide your critical reading :

• Evaluate search results based on author expertise and publication reputation.
• Note key points and conclusions for each study.
• Use a matrix to analyze findings and relevance.
• Organize references and citations with tools like Zotero or EndNote.

Remember, a robust literature review is not just a summary of existing research but a critical analysis that integrates diverse perspectives. The Literature Navigator can be a valuable tool in this process, helping you to navigate literature confidently, save research time, and access quality sources. By choosing keywords wisely and organizing your research efficiently, you can enhance the overall quality and impact of your literature review.

Integrating Diverse Perspectives

In your literature review, it is crucial to integrate diverse perspectives to present a comprehensive understanding of the research topic. Identify new ways to interpret the resources or shed light on any gaps in the previous research. This not only enriches your review but also ensures that multiple viewpoints are considered, which can resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory resources.

Consider the following steps to effectively integrate diverse perspectives :

• Place each resource in the context of its contributions to the field of study under review.
• Describe the relationship of each resource to the others, noting which authors gained knowledge from other works.
• Point out what research still needs to be completed to provide a clear direction for future studies.

By embracing a holistic approach , you can create a literature review that is not only informative but also reflective of the multifaceted nature of academic inquiry. Remember to consult resources like 'Research Strategies - Finding Diverse Voices in Academic Research' to advocate for counter narratives and enrich your review with varied scholarly voices.

Developing a Conceptual Framework

After thoroughly reviewing the literature and identifying key theories and findings, you are now poised to develop a conceptual framework . This framework serves as a map for your study, clarifying concepts and pinpointing how they interrelate within your research. Constructing a conceptual framework is a critical step in providing direction and understanding to your literature review .

To begin, consider the following steps:

• Define the central concepts and variables derived from your literature review.
• Establish the relationships between these concepts based on your synthesis of the literature.
• Formulate hypotheses or research questions that arise from these connections.
• Ensure that your framework aligns with the scope and aims of your study.

Remember, the conceptual framework is not just a theoretical construct; it is a tool that guides your research methodology and analysis. It should evolve as you delve deeper into your topic and uncover new insights.

Presenting and Documenting Your Literature Review

Adhering to academic writing conventions.

In your quest to master the literature review , understanding and adhering to academic writing conventions is crucial. These conventions set standards that ensure your ideas are presented coherently, reflecting the structured approach integral to academic rigor . Your literature review is not a mere listing of sources, but a critical discussion that demonstrates your thorough investigation and acquaintance with the relevant literature.

To effectively present your literature review, consider the following points:

• Ensure consistency in style and format throughout your document.
• Use clear and precise language to articulate your analysis and synthesis of the research.
• Maintain an objective tone, avoiding personal biases and unsubstantiated claims.

Remember, a well-structured literature review is a testament to your ability to engage with scholarly works critically. It showcases your capacity for independent research and contributes significantly to your field of study. By adhering to these conventions, you set a foundation for a compelling and credible academic narrative.

Utilizing Effective Citation Practices

In the academic realm, the practice of citing sources is not merely a formality but a cornerstone of scholarly integrity. By citing sources properly , you acknowledge the original authors and contribute to the traceability of ideas , which is essential for the advancement of knowledge. When you engage with literature reviews, it is crucial to capture current understandings, including well-supported and controversial topics , to provide a comprehensive perspective on your subject matter.

Effective citation practices involve more than just listing references; they require a systematic approach to documenting the breadth and depth of your research. Consider the following steps to ensure your citations are impeccable:

• Identify all sources of articles, databases, and grey literature you have consulted.
• Distinguish between direct quotes and paraphrased ideas, attributing each correctly.
• Utilize citation management tools like Zotero or Endnote to organize your references efficiently.
• Place each resource in the context of its contribution to the field, noting the relationships among various works.

Remember, a well-cited literature review not only demonstrates your diligent research but also situates your work within the larger academic conversation.

Ensuring Clarity and Comprehensiveness

To ensure that your literature review is both comprehensive and clear, start by defining the scope of your review . This involves deciding on the comprehensiveness of your literature review and how it will contextualize your study. It is crucial to characterize the state of the art, point out gaps and limitations in existing studies, and provide a theoretical framework.

A literature review should survey scholarly articles , books, and other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory. By doing so, it provides a critical analysis of the literature and identifies areas where further research is needed. To achieve this, consider the following steps:

• Develop a focused research question that justifies your research.
• Search the literature comprehensively.
• Narrow the scope to pertinent information while considering diverse perspectives.
• Synthesize findings to develop a conceptual framework.

Remember, a well-structured literature review not only summarizes the existing body of knowledge but also evaluates the quality of the research and addresses any biases or limitations. It should resolve conflicts amongst contradictory resources and identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.

Embarking on a literature review can be daunting, but with the right tools and guidance, it can become a rewarding part of your academic journey. At Research Rebels , we understand the challenges you face and have developed a step-by-step Thesis Action Plan to streamline the process. Our resources are designed to alleviate anxiety, clarify each step, and translate academic instructions into everyday language. Don't let stress and uncertainty hinder your progress. Visit our website now to claim your special offer and take the first step towards a successful literature review with confidence.

In conclusion, a well-structured literature review is a critical component of any academic research, serving not only to contextualize your study within the existing body of knowledge but also to highlight gaps and pave the way for future inquiries. This comprehensive guide has outlined the key elements that should be included in your literature review, from organizing the content to providing critical analysis and synthesis of the literature. By adhering to these guidelines, researchers can ensure that their literature reviews are thorough, methodologically sound, and contribute meaningfully to their field of study. Remember, the literature review is not merely a summary of past research but a scholarly conversation in which you actively engage with and contribute to the ongoing academic discourse.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key elements to include in a literature review.

Key elements include identifying core themes and concepts, assessing the scope and boundaries of the research, synthesizing prior research findings, selecting appropriate research methods, evaluating research quality and relevance, addressing biases and limitations, organizing literature thematically, creating a coherent narrative flow, and highlighting gaps and future research directions.

How do I determine the scope of my literature review?

Determine the scope by defining your research questions and objectives, considering the breadth and depth of the subject area, and setting clear inclusion and exclusion criteria for the literature to be reviewed.

What methodological considerations should I keep in mind when conducting a literature review?

Consider the research methods used in the primary studies, the relevance and quality of the research, potential biases in study design or publication, and the appropriateness of the methods to your own research questions.

How can I structure my literature review effectively?

Structure your review by organizing literature thematically, maintaining a coherent narrative flow, and systematically discussing each theme or concept. Ensure that you logically transition between sections and clearly outline the progression of research over time.

What is the importance of critical analysis in a literature review?

Critical analysis is crucial for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of existing research, integrating diverse perspectives, and developing a conceptual framework that supports your research. It helps to establish the significance of your study within the context of existing literature.

How should I present and document my literature review?

Present your literature review with clarity and comprehensiveness, adhering to academic writing conventions. Use effective citation practices to acknowledge sources and provide a bibliography that allows readers to locate the original research.

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Literature Review

• What is a Literature Review?
• What is a good literature review?
• Types of Literature Reviews
• What are the parts of a Literature Review?
• What is the difference between a Systematic Review and a Literature Review?

Parts of a Literature Review

Introduction      .

• To explain the focus and establish the importance of the subject
• provide the framework, selection criteria, or parameters of your literature review
• provide background or history
• outline what kind of work has been done on the topic
• briefly identify any controversies within the field or any recent research that has raised questions about earlier assumptions
• In a stand-alone literature review, this statement will sum up and evaluate the current state of this field of research
• In a review that is an introduction or preparatory to a thesis or research report, it will suggest how the review findings will lead to the research the writer proposes to undertake.
• To summarize and evaluate the current state of knowledge in the field
• To note major themes or topics, the most important trends, and any findings about which researchers agree or disagree
• Often divided by headings/subheadings
• If the review is preliminary to your own thesis or research project, its purpose is to make an argument that will justify your proposed research. Therefore, the literature review will discuss only that research which leads directly to your own project.
• To summarize the evidence presented and show its significance
• Rather than restating your thesis or purpose statement, explain what your review tells you about the current state of the field
• If the review is an introduction to your own research, the conclusion highlights gaps and indicates how previous research leads to your own research project and chosen methodology. 
• If the review is a stand-alone assignment for a course, the conclusion should suggest any practical applications of the research as well as the implications and possibilities for future research.
• Find out what style guide you are required to follow (e.g., APA, MLA, ASA)
• Follow the guidelines to format citations and create a reference list or bibliography
• Cite Your Sources

This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0  International License. adapted from UofG,McLaughlin Library

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Literature review.

• What is a Literature Review?
• What is Its Purpose?
• 1. Select a Topic
• 2. Set the Topic in Context
• 3. Types of Information Sources
• 4. Use Information Sources
• 5. Get the Information
• 6. Organize / Manage the Information
• 7. Position the Literature Review
• 8. Write the Literature Review

A literature review is a comprehensive summary of previous research on a topic. The literature review surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources relevant to a particular area of research.  The review should enumerate, describe, summarize, objectively evaluate and clarify this previous research.  It should give a theoretical base for the research and help you (the author) determine the nature of your research.  The literature review acknowledges the work of previous researchers, and in so doing, assures the reader that your work has been well conceived.  It is assumed that by mentioning a previous work in the field of study, that the author has read, evaluated, and assimiliated that work into the work at hand.

A literature review creates a "landscape" for the reader, giving her or him a full understanding of the developments in the field.  This landscape informs the reader that the author has indeed assimilated all (or the vast majority of) previous, significant works in the field into her or his research. 

 "In writing the literature review, the purpose is to convey to the reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (eg. your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries.( http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/specific-types-of-writing/literature-review )

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• Steps in Conducting a Literature Review

What is a literature review?

A literature review is an integrated analysis -- not just a summary-- of scholarly writings and other relevant evidence related directly to your research question.  That is, it represents a synthesis of the evidence that provides background information on your topic and shows a association between the evidence and your research question.

A literature review may be a stand alone work or the introduction to a larger research paper, depending on the assignment.  Rely heavily on the guidelines your instructor has given you.

Why is it important?

A literature review is important because it:

• Explains the background of research on a topic.
• Demonstrates why a topic is significant to a subject area.
• Discovers relationships between research studies/ideas.
• Identifies major themes, concepts, and researchers on a topic.
• Identifies critical gaps and points of disagreement.
• Discusses further research questions that logically come out of the previous studies.

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APA Style Blog - for those harder to find answers

1. Choose a topic. Define your research question.

Your literature review should be guided by your central research question.  The literature represents background and research developments related to a specific research question, interpreted and analyzed by you in a synthesized way.

• Make sure your research question is not too broad or too narrow.  Is it manageable?
• Begin writing down terms that are related to your question. These will be useful for searches later.
• If you have the opportunity, discuss your topic with your professor and your class mates.

2. Decide on the scope of your review

How many studies do you need to look at? How comprehensive should it be? How many years should it cover? 

• This may depend on your assignment.  How many sources does the assignment require?

3. Select the databases you will use to conduct your searches.

Make a list of the databases you will search. 

Where to find databases:

• use the tabs on this guide
• Find other databases in the Nursing Information Resources web page
• More on the Medical Library web page
• ... and more on the Yale University Library web page

4. Conduct your searches to find the evidence. Keep track of your searches.

• Use the key words in your question, as well as synonyms for those words, as terms in your search. Use the database tutorials for help.
• Save the searches in the databases. This saves time when you want to redo, or modify, the searches. It is also helpful to use as a guide is the searches are not finding any useful results.
• Review the abstracts of research studies carefully. This will save you time.
• Use the bibliographies and references of research studies you find to locate others.
• Check with your professor, or a subject expert in the field, if you are missing any key works in the field.
• Ask your librarian for help at any time.
• Use a citation manager, such as EndNote as the repository for your citations. See the EndNote tutorials for help.

Review the literature

Some questions to help you analyze the research:

• What was the research question of the study you are reviewing? What were the authors trying to discover?
• Was the research funded by a source that could influence the findings?
• What were the research methodologies? Analyze its literature review, the samples and variables used, the results, and the conclusions.
• Does the research seem to be complete? Could it have been conducted more soundly? What further questions does it raise?
• If there are conflicting studies, why do you think that is?
• How are the authors viewed in the field? Has this study been cited? If so, how has it been analyzed?

Tips: 

• Review the abstracts carefully.  
• Keep careful notes so that you may track your thought processes during the research process.
• Create a matrix of the studies for easy analysis, and synthesis, across all of the studies.
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Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Marco pautasso.

1 Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), CNRS, Montpellier, France

2 Centre for Biodiversity Synthesis and Analysis (CESAB), FRB, Aix-en-Provence, France

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1] . For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2] . Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3] . Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read [4] . For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [5] .

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6] . However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7] . In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

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:

• interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
• an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
• a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9] , but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

• keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10] ),
• keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
• use a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
• 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
• do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a literature review ( Figure 1 ), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33] .

• discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
• trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
• incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

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

• be thorough,
• use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
• look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of the review.

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.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12] . A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13] , [14] . When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15] .

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

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.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19] . After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

• the major achievements in the reviewed field,
• the main areas of debate, and
• the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20] .

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21] . This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22] .

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers, and rightly so [23] . As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

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] .

Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25] ? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

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.

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

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies (“sleeping beauties” [26] )). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27] – [32] . I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to M. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, M. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Funding Statement

This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

Ten elements of a good literature review

• A good literature review is a critical synthesis of the literature on a specific topic e.g. the relationship between class size and student achievement. Too many students engage in “telling” (what X or Y said about the topic) rather than also “synthesizing” (what is said, how well it is said, what is missing etc.)
• A good literature review works with published research literature rather than opinion pieces, advocacy material or professional viewpoints on the topic. This means that the principal resource for information on the topic is journal articles that publish current research.
• A good literature review works mainly with recent research on the topic given the growth in knowledge on any subject. The only exception is where a classic text is referred to or in the case of historical research which of course requires a long-term view of the literature e.g. the history of corporal punishment in South African education.
• A good literature review, having described what is known about the topic, brings in the voice of the researcher in the assessment of that literature. This is difficult for novice researchers but something that should and can be learnt, for example, by reading how others do book reviews or literature reviews in journals that specialize in that particular craft e.g. The Review of Educational Research or The Review of Research in Education.
• A good literature review is able to give a competent account of what is known about the topic as a first step. This means being able to give a cogent and concise account in one paragraph, in your own words, what a body of research says about the topic.
• A good literature review then is able to say what it not well known about the topic as a second step. This means being able to identify silences, gaps or contradictions in the body of literature on the specific topic. This is the critical in a critical synthesis of the literature.
• A good literature review then is able to say how your research addresses the weakness(es) in the literature reviewed as a third step.
• A good literature review is therefore able to acknowledge the research done on the topic (we stand on the shoulders of giants) and then demonstrate how the research proposed on the topic adds value or new knowledge on the topic (we step on the toes of giants).
• A good literature review has a competent grasp of all the major published research on the topic . This means, as a rule of thumb, at least 100 solid research articles on the topic should be reviewed.
• A good literature review is written in a fluent, academic voice from beginning to end, almost like a spy novel, so that reader is captured in the story until it reaches its climax—“and this is how my research hopes to fill the gap/address the silence/resolve the contradiction/add new knowledge on the topic under review. This means that the final copy of the literature review would have undergone MANY revisions and, done well, could be a standalone chapter in the thesis or dissertation.

PS. Always useful to do an annotated bibliography of all your literature references before starting to write the literature review

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• Open access
• Published: 26 June 2024

Climate change and heat stress resilient outdoor workers: findings from systematic literature review

• Peymaneh Habibi 1 ,
• Jaleh Razmjouei 2 ,
• Amirhossein Moradi 3 ,
• Farank Mahdavi 1 ,
• Saeed Fallah-Aliabadi 4 , 5 &
• Ahad Heydari 6  

BMC Public Health volume  24 , Article number:  1711 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Global warming has led to an increase in the number and intensity of extreme heat events, posing a significant threat to the health and safety of workers, especially those working outdoors, as they often have limited access to cooling strategies. The present systematic literature review (a) summarizes the current knowledge on the impacts of climate change on outdoor workers, (b) provides historical background on this issue, (c) explores factors that reduce and increase thermal stress resilience, (d) discusses the heat mitigation strategies, and (e) provides an overview of existing policy and legal frameworks on occupational heat exposure among outdoor workers.

Materials and methods

In this systematic review, we searched scientific databases including Scopus ( N  = 855), Web of Science ( N  = 828), and PubMed ( N  = 202). Additionally, we identified relevant studies on climate change and heat-stress control measures through Google Scholar ( N  = 116) using specific search terms. In total, we monitored 2001 articles pertaining to worker populations (men = 2921; women = 627) in various outdoor climate conditions across 14 countries. After full-text assessment, 55 studies were selected for inclusion, and finally, 29 eligible papers were included for data extraction.

Failure to implement effective control strategies for outdoor workers will result in decreased resilience to thermal stress. The findings underscore a lack of awareness regarding certain adaptation strategies and interventions aimed at preventing and enhancing resilience to the impact of climate change on heat stress prevalence among workers in outdoor tropical and subtropical environments. However, attractive alternative solutions from the aspects of economic and ecological sustainability in the overall assessment of heat stress resilience can be referred to acclimatization, shading, optimized clothing properties and planned breaks.

The integration of climate change adaptation strategies into occupational health programs can enhance occupational heat resilience among outdoor workers. Conducting cost-benefit evaluations of health and safety measures for thermal stress adaptation strategies among outdoor workers is crucial for professionals and policymakers in low- and middle-income tropical and subtropical countries. In this respect, complementary measures targeting hydration, work-rest regimes, ventilated garments, self-pacing, and mechanization can be adopted to protect outdoor workers. Risk management strategies, adaptive measures, heat risk awareness, practical interventions, training programs, and protective policies should be implemented in hot-dry and hot-humid climates to boost the tolerance and resilience of outdoor workers.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

Extreme weather events and severe heat pose significant hazards to the safety and health of workers, leading to increased accidents, mortality, and morbidity during hot climate conditions [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Global warming presents a new and formidable challenge for most countries [ 4 , 5 ]. Global climate change substantially affects physiological and perceptual responses through both direct and indirect effects on core body temperature [ 6 ], heart rate, skin temperature, and thermal comfort [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]. Working in hot and humid environments during long shifts with high physical activity can jeopardize the safety and health of worker populations [ 7 , 10 ]. Increased exposure to thermal stress among workers in outdoor environments has been documented in tropical and subtropical countries with hot seasons [ 11 ]. Exposure to hot working environments, and the resulting elevated physiological and perceptual responses, can lead to occupational heat stress, reducing safety, health, and work capacity [ 12 ], and increasing the risk of heat-related illnesses (HRI) [ 13 ]. The increment in the levels of ambient temperature, radiation and shifts in the distribution of daily peak temperature can cause indirect and direct effects on outdoor workers [ 14 , 15 ]. High temperatures and high humidity can exacerbate the effects of physical workload on individuals working outdoors during long shifts in developing and tropical countries [ 16 ]. Working in high-temperature and high-humidity environments can have adverse health effects on workers, particularly agricultural workers, construction workers, drivers, sellers, brick-making workers, and daily wage workers [ 17 , 18 ]. High hot-humid and hot-dry temperatures can lead to occupational heat strain when core body temperature rises above 38 °C [ 19 ]. Exposure to heat radiation, either when working outdoors with exposure to the sun or around hot machinery, can greatly increase physiological pressure and lead to reduced work capacity [ 20 ].These physiological mechanisms worsen under high climate conditions and climate change, emphasizing the need to identify strategies to increase occupational heat stress resilience and develop solutions and policies to protect the health and safety of outdoor workers [ 21 , 22 ]. Projected future global warming conditions will dangerously affect the anticipated occupational heat stress resilience of outdoor workers worldwide. There is insufficient knowledge regarding strategies to increase occupational heat stress resilience, necessitating protective measures against heat stress and climate change to reduce health risks and fatalities for future outdoor workers in hot and humid work environments. The findings of this study can inform planning for increasing occupational heat stress resilience, developing heat acclimation strategies, and identifying risk factors to mitigate heat stress caused by global warming, particularly in middle- and low-income communities.

Search strategy

This systematic literature review was conducted following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines [ 23 ]. We searched scientific databases, including PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, and identified additional records through Google Scholar. We used Mesh terms in PubMed to identify synonyms for ‘climate change’ and ‘thermal resistance.’ We also consulted specialists to identify relevant keywords. Our search syntax was developed and applied to title, abstract, or keyword queries in selected databases. To ensure the specificity and accuracy of our search strategy, we tested the number needed to read (NNR) in the Web of Science database. We also investigated the references of included studies and searched key journals via Scopus to identify potentially relevant articles. The full search strategy in three main databases has been mentioned in Appendix 1. Our search syntax was as follows:

PubMed: (“heat wave”[tiab] OR “heat stress”[tiab] OR “climate change*”[tiab] OR (climate[tiab] AND change[tiab]) OR “extreme weather”[tiab] OR “extreme heat”[tiab] OR “global warming”[tiab] OR “hot day*”[tiab] OR “warm day*”[tiab]) AND (“heat tolerance“[tiab] OR “heat resilien*“[tiab] OR (heat[tiab] AND resilien*[tiab]) OR (heat[tiab] AND tolera*[tiab]) OR “Heat resistan*”[tiab] OR thermotolerance[tiab] OR “heat endurance”[tiab] OR (heat[tiab] AND endur*[tiab])) AND (worker*[tiab] OR Firefighter*[tiab] OR “fire fighter*”[tiab] OR firem*[tiab] OR “fire m*”[tiab] OR nurs*[tiab] OR operator*[tiab] OR driver*[tiab] OR farmer[tiab]* OR welder*[tiab] OR miner*[tiab] OR employee[tiab] OR laborer*[tiab] OR labour*[tiab]).

Inclusion criteria

The research question components (PECO) were as follows: P (workers), E (Exposure), C (heat stress), and O (increase occupational heat stress resilience). We included studies that (a) measured physiological and perceptual responses in workplaces and resting environments of workers; (b) studied working populations, including both males and females (healthy and unhealthy populations); (c) assessed the impact of climate change on occupational heat strain, as well as the health, safety, and well-being of workers including work-related variables (income, work type, time), environmental variables (wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), relative humidity), physiological variables (heart rate, respiratory, rate of perceived exertion (RPE)), and demographic variables (age, sex, body mass index (kg/m 2 ); (d) focused on air temperature, relative humidity (RH), heat waves, solar radiation, climate change, UV radiation, and thermal stress; (e) considered local and international contexts, countries, and workplaces; and (f) investigated workers’ perceptions of climate change, occupational heat strain, and their knowledge and attitudes toward adaptation strategies.

Exclusion criteria

Studies were excluded if they (a) studied climate change-related phenomena such as storms, cyclones, rainfall, rising sea levels, and drought; (b) evaluated the impact of climate change on plants, crop yields, pest dynamics, soil processes, water availability, and animals; (c) had inaccessible full-texts; or (d) focused on indoor workplaces.

Screening and selection

We entered all identified studies into EndNote and removed duplicates. One team member (PH) screened studies based on their titles and abstracts, and two members of the research team (AH and PH) independently selected relevant studies by reviewing the full texts. Disagreements regarding study inclusion were resolved through team discussion. We also conducted searches in three key journals: environmental research, urban climate, and global environmental change, but did not identify any additional studies.

Data extraction and quality assessment

Two team members (AH and PH) independently assessed the eligibility of included studies based on our inclusion and exclusion criteria. They also evaluated the methodological quality of selected studies using the quality assessment tool for studies with diverse designs (QATSDD), which consists of 16 items and is a reliable and valid tool for assessing the methodological quality of various types of studies [ 24 ]. Any disagreements regarding study inclusion were resolved through team discussion.

Search results

The numbers of identified studies and the studies reviewed during the screening and selection stages are presented in Fig.  1 . The initial search yielded 2001 articles including the additional articles sourced from Scholar Google. After full-text assessment, 55 studies were selected for inclusion, and finally, 29 eligible papers were included for data extraction. No additional studies meeting our eligibility criteria were identified after the full-text investigation. Similarly, no studies were identified through searches of key journals and the references of included studies. Table  1 provides details on the selected studies, including author/year, study location, document type, population/sample size, climate conditions, assessment of physical, perceptual, and physiological factors, authors’ conclusions, and quality ratings. Table  2 presents suggestions for increasing and decreasing occupational heat stress resilience among outdoor workers.

Flow diagram of the screening process of included studies the strategies to increase occupational heat stress resilience among outdoor workers

Descriptive analysis

Out of the 29 selected studies, 18 addressed global warming’s impact on occupational heat stress resilience, risk management strategies, and adaptation strategies for warming conditions. Most of these studies emphasized that climate change will exacerbate the health impacts of extreme heat. The prevalence of negative effects due to climate change will intensify workers’ health risks in future work scenarios, particularly in regions with hot and humid climates and poor economic conditions. As of our selection period until 2023, 20 studies (68.96%) were published between 2016 and 2023. Of the 29 assessed papers, 18 (62.06%) directly investigated the effects of climate change and adaptation strategies for outdoor workers in various countries, including Australia, the USA, China, Japan, Africa, Korea, Slovenia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Ghana, Korea, India, Iran, and Pakistan. The predominant themes identified in these papers revolved around strategies to increase occupational heat stress resilience. In conclusion, the study’s findings were categorized into main themes, including risk factors that decrease occupational heat stress resilience and suggestions for increasing occupational heat stress resilience among outdoor workers.

Thematic content analysis

This systematic review provides a summary of evidence published to date regarding strategies to enhance occupational heat stress resilience, especially in hot outdoor workplaces. Despite variations in study design and analytical approaches, the evidence presented in this systematic review consistently highlights a strong association between thermal stress resulting from global warming and occupational heat stress. Broad findings from these studies indicate that exposure to heatwaves and global warming is linked to adverse health impacts on workers.

Furthermore, several studies underscore the need for sentinel effects and leading indicators to facilitate surveillance of climate-related occupational heat stress effects, as well as strategies and interventions for preventing the impact of climate change on outdoor workers. Finally, the review identifies interventions and adaptation strategies for outdoor workers, including the provision of accessible cool drinking water [ 13 , 26 , 41 , 44 , 47 ], optimized work-rest schedules [ 12 , 13 , 16 , 26 , 36 , 43 , 44 , 47 ], the availability of proper resting shade [ 16 , 47 , 49 ], training and awareness programs [ 20 , 38 , 40 ], self-paced work [ 13 , 38 , 40 , 44 , 47 ], and the use of supportive protective equipment [ 41 ].

Factors that reduce resilience to climate change among outdoor workers

Resilience to climate change among outdoor workers can be reduced by various factors, categorized into personal risk factors, environmental risk factors, and occupational-related heat exposure risk factors during work.

Individual-related heat exposure risk factors

Personal factors associated with reduced resilience to climate change, identifiable from outdoor workers’ data, include dehydration [ 20 , 25 , 28 , 32 , 34 , 37 , 40 , 46 , 47 , 48 ], unique medical characteristics [ 41 , 47 ], pregnancy [ 38 , 40 , 47 ], BMI [ 29 , 30 , 37 , 40 , 47 , 49 ], obesity and body fat [ 29 , 30 , 32 , 34 , 47 ], overall health status [ 33 , 34 , 37 , 47 ], lack of sleep [ 33 , 34 , 40 , 47 ], experience of a previous HRI [ 32 , 34 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ], presence of certain concurrent diseases and chronic disease [ 35 , 47 ], kidney disease [ 20 , 26 , 38 , 43 , 46 , 47 ], consumption of caffeine and alcohol [ 26 , 28 , 30 , 34 , 37 , 40 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], smoking [ 30 ], use of drugs [ 26 , 37 , 40 , 41 , 47 ], age [ 16 , 33 , 35 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], older workers with low education [ 38 , 40 , 43 , 44 , 46 , 47 ], physical fitness [ 26 , 32 , 40 , 47 ], metabolism rate [ 40 , 47 ], type of clothing [ 40 , 47 ], prior heat injury [ 40 , 46 , 47 ], physical activity and heavy workload [ 16 , 27 , 31 , 34 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 46 , 47 , 48 ], gender [ 16 , 33 , 35 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], education level [ 16 , 39 , 41 , 44 , 46 , 47 ], wearing PPE [ 16 , 26 , 27 , 31 , 38 , 39 , 44 , 46 , 47 ], and non-acclimatization [ 29 , 32 , 37 , 40 , 41 , 43 , 44 , 47 ]. Physiological risk factors most frequently expressed by outdoor workers included excessive heart rate [ 30 , 45 , 47 , 49 ], oral [ 47 , 49 ], skin [ 45 , 46 , 47 , 49 ], core temperature [ 26 , 27 , 29 , 31 , 32 , 34 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 ], sweating [ 39 , 47 ], and blood pressure [ 45 , 46 , 47 , 49 ]. This is often followed by heat exhaustion [ 47 , 48 ] or tiredness [ 47 ], headaches [ 47 ], heat rash [ 47 ], and fainting [ 47 ]. Older adults are more vulnerable to chronic dehydration [ 28 , 45 ], especially those living with multiple chronic diseases [ 43 , 47 ]. Aging is also associated with reductions in sweat production [ 8 ]. Consequently, studies have generally reported greater elevations in body heat storage and core temperature in older compared to younger adults during environmental heat exposure [ 26 , 37 , 46 , 47 ]. Additionally, personal factors correlated with occupational heat strain include the adequacy of water intake [ 41 , 47 ].

Environmental-related heat exposure risk factors

The environmental factors contributing to thermal stress include high air temperature [ 12 , 16 , 26 , 27 , 31 , 34 , 40 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 ], heat wave [ 43 , 47 , 48 ], airspeed and movement around the workplace [ 16 , 43 , 45 , 47 , 48 , 49 ], high levels of heat exposure (WBGT = 37.5–49 ℃) [ 38 , 46 , 47 ], tropical nights [ 48 ], working in sun- exposed conditions [ 16 , 38 , 39 , 47 ], solar radiation [ 26 , 40 , 43 , 46 , 47 , 48 ], high humidity [ 16 , 27 , 31 , 34 , 40 , 43 , 45 , 47 , 48 , 49 ], UV radiation [ 26 , 47 , 48 , 49 ], the moisture content of the outdoor settings or workplaces [ 16 , 39 ], radiant heat [ 16 , 26 , 31 , 36 , 45 , 47 , 48 ], and the air-pollution index [ 30 ].

Occupational-related heat exposure risk factors

However, workers encounter various barriers, such as inadequate cool housing designs for rest [ 38 ], a lack of management and engineering commitment [ 41 , 42 , 47 ], heavy physical workloads for long hours [ 16 , 47 ] or physically demanding jobs [ 44 , 46 ], insufficient awareness and prevention training [ 38 , 40 , 41 , 43 , 47 ], a lack of knowledge regarding adaptive behavior [ 41 , 43 ], the absence of occupational heat stress guidelines and adaptation strategies [ 38 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], a lack of regular training on adaptation measures [ 41 ], limited management commitment [ 41 ], the nature of the physical workload [ 16 , 40 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], the absence of specific thermal stress-related policy regulations [ 41 ], working in proximity to heat sources [ 16 , 44 , 47 ], the type of protective clothing [ 16 , 40 , 47 ], limited access to innovative technology and equipment [ 41 ], the nature of the work [ 40 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], inadequate management commitment, work-break regimes [ 43 , 47 ] and cooling systems [ 26 , 28 , 40 , 41 , 47 , 48 ]. Additionally, workers face challenges such as inadequate knowledge of adaptive behavior [ 41 , 46 ], a lack of regular training on thermal stress risk, adaptation, and safety measures [ 41 , 47 ], a deficiency in specific heat-related policies and regulations [ 41 ], limited management commitment to heat-related health and safety measures [ 41 ], restricted access to innovative equipment and technology [ 41 ], insufficient regular breaks and work-rest time [ 35 , 39 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], limited access to shade [ 38 , 43 , 47 ], inadequate financial resources [ 38 , 41 ], the absence of an acclimatization program [ 41 , 43 , 47 ], suboptimal water management [ 47 ], and insufficient medical attention when implementing adaptation strategies for climate change and occupational heat stress.

Factors that enhance resilience to climate change among outdoor workers

Enhanced resilience to climate change can be achieved through various means, including personal, managerial, and engineering protective factors.

Personal protective factors

Outdoor workers can take several measures to protect themselves. They should consider adjusting their work schedule [ 35 , 47 ], maintaining adequate hydration [ 28 , 33 , 35 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 47 ], adjusting their clothing [ 31 , 35 , 47 ], drinking more water [ 35 ] or drinking plenty of cool water frequently before feeling thirsty [ 13 , 26 , 41 , 44 , 47 ]. It’s important to take more frequent planned breaks [ 35 , 38 , 44 ], wear broad-brimmed hats [ 35 , 39 , 41 , 47 ] and ventilated helmets [ 28 ], understand how to self-pace [ 13 , 38 , 40 , 44 , 47 ], wear sun-protective gear [ 38 , 49 ], including sunglasses and gloves during hot weather conditions [ 41 ], and take work breaks and rest in cooler or shaded areas [ 13 , 28 , 33 , 35 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 43 , 44 , 47 ]. Using sunblock [ 38 , 39 , 44 ], and having a higher education level [ 39 , 44 , 47 ], are also beneficial. Workers should consider wearing loose and light-colored clothing [ 28 , 34 , 35 , 38 , 39 , 41 , 44 ] and opting for short-sleeved shirts and shorts when possible [ 13 ]. Using cooling vests [ 27 , 47 ], implementing a ‘Buddy system’ [ 47 ], acclimatization [ 26 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 36 , 37 , 40 , 47 ], maintaining normal anthropometric measures [ 29 ], and changing clothing ensembles to more breathable single-layer garments [ 43 ] can further enhance personal protection.

Managerial protective factors

Maintaining good quality working conditions and a suitable climate can significantly improve worker performance, productivity, and company profits [ 37 ]. Workplace management and training programs [ 16 , 35 , 38 , 40 , 41 , 47 , 49 ] are crucial for worker well-being. Developing prevention strategies [ 12 , 13 , 38 , 48 ], improving guidelines for worker safety, health, and productivity, and adhering to occupational health standards [ 12 , 38 , 47 ] are essential. Scheduling heavy routine outdoor work during the early morning [ 47 ] or evening hours or in shaded areas [ 13 , 41 , 44 , 49 ] can help mitigate heat stress. Providing access to cooling systems, such as air conditioning and fans [ 13 , 16 , 26 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 44 , 47 ], and offering climate change adaptation strategies [ 13 , 48 , 49 ] are beneficial. Adjusting the duration of breaks/rest periods [ 12 , 13 , 16 , 26 , 36 , 43 , 44 , 47 ], ensuring access to shade [ 16 , 47 , 49 ], and providing access to drinking water or implementing programs to improve hydration status [ 13 , 16 , 20 , 25 , 44 , 47 , 49 ] are important managerial measures. Training workers in heat-related illness prevention [ 20 , 38 , 40 ], providing access to medical attention [ 20 ], sharing heavier jobs and rotating job assignments on shift schedules [ 13 , 41 , 47 , 49 ], offering air-conditioned vehicles [ 13 , 38 , 47 ], promoting climate change awareness to support healthy lives and decent jobs [ 39 ], implementing work stoppages if the daily maximum temperature exceeds 40 °C [ 13 , 44 , 47 ], raising worker awareness about heat risks [ 47 ] modifying work habits [ 49 ], considering the TWL [ 30 ], and promoting the understanding of the need for workers to self-pace during hot weather [ 13 , 38 , 47 ] are all valuable managerial protective factors.

Engineering protective factors

Providing and designing regular breaks in shaded areas [ 38 , 47 ], implementing strategies to eliminate or replace thermal stress risks [ 37 , 44 ], installing a central cooling system [ 13 , 44 , 47 ], halting work during periods of high thermal stress and supplying mechanical equipment [ 41 , 47 ], initiating heat-shield projects [ 47 ], and enhancing ventilation [ 38 , 39 , 44 , 47 ].

Our systematic review’s outcomes help us understand strategies for increasing occupational heat stress resilience and assessing the effects of global warming on outdoor workers’ adaptation strategies. This is particularly crucial in numerous warm workplaces, especially in low- and middle-income countries. The implementation of strategies to ensure adequate hydration, including access to drinking water and programs to improve hydration status [ 13 , 16 , 20 , 25 , 44 , 47 , 49 ], is one of the most critical interventions for managing warm workplaces. Hydrated workers [ 28 , 33 , 35 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 47 ] are more likely to maintain an acceptable work rate and physical activity without health risks in various hot-dry and hot-humid weather conditions [ 25 ]. Employers bear the responsibility of providing a safe work environment, conducting training and awareness programs [ 16 , 35 , 38 , 40 , 41 , 47 , 49 ], supervision [ 50 ], and providing suitable protective equipment to mitigate the negative effects of thermal stress due to global warming on safety and health [ 26 , 49 ]. Cooling the core body temperature through wearable liquid cooling garments (SCG) [ 27 ], evaporative cooling garments (ECGs) [ 15 ], fluid cooling garments (FCGs) [ 51 ], hybrid cooling (HBCGs) [ 52 ], and phase change materials (PCMs) [ 53 ] worn by individuals who require personal protective equipment [ 47 , 54 ], including firefighters and construction workers, significantly reduces occupational heat strain and enhances thermal comfort and performance [ 32 ]. Chan et al. recommend implementing appropriate protective measures, such as work-rest schedules and heat tolerance guidelines, to ensure the safety and health of personnel exposed to hot weather conditions [ 28 ]. Therefore, it’s advisable to conduct further research on work-rest schedule optimization models for workers, particularly in the context of construction workers [ 28 ]. It is recommended that safe work durations should be modified based on expected type of clothing and work intensity [ 55 ]. Our review’s results indicate that personal risk factors such as dehydration [ 20 , 25 , 28 , 32 , 34 , 37 , 40 , 46 , 47 , 48 ], smoking [ 30 ] and alcohol-drinking habits [ 26 , 28 , 30 , 34 , 37 , 40 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], age [ 16 , 33 , 35 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 46 , 47 ], BMI [ 29 , 30 , 37 , 40 , 47 , 49 ], and non-acclimatization [ 29 , 32 , 37 , 40 , 41 , 43 , 44 , 47 ]; as well as work-related factors like work-rest cycles [ 35 , 39 , 41 , 46 , 47 ] and environmental risk factors such as air temperature [ 12 , 16 , 26 , 27 , 31 , 34 , 40 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 ], relative humidity (RH) [ 16 , 27 , 31 , 34 , 40 , 43 , 45 , 47 , 48 , 49 ], heat radiant [ 16 , 26 , 31 , 36 , 45 , 47 , 48 ], and Thermal Work Limit (TWL) [ 30 ], are significant predictors for determining the physiological responses to HRI among outdoor workers [ 30 ]. More efforts should be made to educate workers and employers about the effects of occupational heat stress on safety, health and performance, and appropriate screening protocols (pre-employment and periodic examinations) should be included in health and safety legislation [ 56 ].

Educating outdoor workers about physiological and perceptual responses to HRI [ 20 , 38 , 40 ] and heat acclimation under uncompensated thermal stress [ 26 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 36 , 37 , 40 , 47 ], as well as emphasizing cooling techniques and fluid intake [ 28 , 33 , 35 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 47 ], is essential. Furthermore, it’s necessary to investigate the impact of gender (both women and men) [ 16 , 33 , 35 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 46 , 47 ] and aging on heat tolerance and psychophysiological adaptation during work in hot-dry and hot-humid environmental conditions. This is especially crucial since elderly workers [ 38 , 40 , 43 , 44 , 46 , 47 ] display increased susceptibility to HRI in future studies, even if they haven’t engaged in prolonged or strenuous physical labor [ 31 ]. Pogačar et al.‘s study revealed that the most common symptoms of heat stress include excessive sweating, thirst, and fatigue. Interestingly, there was a significant difference among age groups regarding thirst and excessive sweating [ 35 ]. Gender differences in temperature regulation become more apparent under varying heat loads [ 8 ]. In general, women lose more heat through convection [ 11 ], which is advantageous in hot-humid environments [ 57 ], while men lose more heat through evaporation, which is more pronounced in hot-dry environments [ 58 ]. The resilience of vulnerable worker groups to heat stress can be compromised despite existing standards and knowledge. This vulnerability is particularly relevant when considering outdoor workers exposed to different climate conditions in tropical and subtropical countries [ 12 , 38 , 47 ]. Kjellstrom et al.‘s study underscores that mine workers remain the most significant population in terms of preventing the impact of thermal stress. This also extends to many construction workers, agricultural workers, and individuals laboring in warm workplaces without effective cooling systems [ 20 ]. Lui et al. demonstrated that wildland firefighters experience heat acclimatization across the thermal stress and fire season, leading to significant decreases in physiological and perceptual responses. These adaptations can reduce the risk of HRI [ 32 ]. Implementing acclimatization [ 26 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 36 , 37 , 40 , 47 ] and adaptation programms [ 13 , 48 , 49 ] for workers exposed to thermal stress is crucial. Adaptation policies aim to increase climate change resilience and reduce climate vulnerability [ 48 ]. Managers and occupational health professionals should also assess workers’ health status and individual habits, such as sleep deprivation [ 33 , 34 , 40 , 47 ], dehydration, and alcohol consumption before work [ 34 ]. International agencies have proposed various climate change adaptation and prevention strategies, including conducting training and awareness programs, using cooling mechanisms [ 13 , 16 , 26 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 44 , 47 ], and ensuring the availability of cool drinking water [ 13 , 16 , 20 , 25 , 44 , 47 , 49 ]. The most effective solutions at mitigating occupational heat strain were heat acclimation [ 26 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 36 , 37 , 40 , 47 ], wearing specialized cooling garments [ 27 , 47 ], cold water immersion [ 59 ], improving aerobic fitness [ 15 ], and applying ventilation [ 49 ]. Extending the exposure time to thermal stress leads to an increase in core body temperature and dehydration levels [ 60 ]. Acclimatized workers, with beneficial physiological adaptations like an efficient sweating system, lower heart rate, and core body temperature, can tolerate higher levels of dehydration and lose more water through sweat per shift. This means that the maximum allowable exposure time is greater for acclimatized workers compared to non-acclimatized workers [ 38 , 42 , 47 ]. Venugopal et al. demonstrated a strong correlation between physical workload, thermal stress exposures, Heat Strain Indicators (HSIs), and HRIs, leading to adverse health outcomes among outdoor workers [ 46 ]. There is a pressing need for evidence-based reviews and interventions to prevent occupational heat stress and enhance comprehensive resilience labor policies for outdoor workers in low and middle-income countries as climate change progresses. Increased awareness and consciousness among workers can lead to better adaptability to climate change risks [ 31 ]. Workers often implement conscious and flexible behavioral attitudes to manage their heat stress, especially in extremely hot workplaces, such as outdoor work [ 49 ]. Understanding the relationship between endurance time and WBGT values is crucial for training workers in very hot environments and ensuring their health and safety [ 43 ]. Elevated carbon emissions in the atmosphere contribute to extremely hot environments and climate changes, exacerbating occupational heat strains for outdoor workers [ 61 ]. A high-quality air and work environment can enhance worker safety, health, productivity, and company profitability [ 37 , 49 ]. Sustainable adaptation to warming climatic conditions [ 13 ] and social protection strategies during exposure to occupational heat stress depend on the availability of financial resources and collaborative efforts to overcome adaptation barriers [ 48 ]. The severity of occupational heat stress caused by climate change depends on workers’ sensitivity and vulnerability to different weather conditions. Additionally, the extent of adaptation capacity and resilience planning plays a crucial role [ 33 , 38 ]. Also, establishing a program that can assess how thermal stress due to climate change may increase heat-related effects on outdoor workers and document future heat-related events leading to relevant occupational health and safety regulations, seems essential [ 15 ].

The HEAT-SHIELD project is a customized occupational heat stress-related warning system that provides short- and long-term heat warnings to safeguard workers’ health and productivity. This project represents a useful adaptation strategy aimed at protecting workers, particularly those exposed to the effects of climate change [ 55 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 ].

The findings of this study are valuable for policymakers and professionals in the field of occupational health. They can use this information to develop guidelines and regulations aimed at preventing occupational heat stress and strengthening the resilience of outdoor workers during exposure to heat stress caused by climate change. However, it’s important to note that developing countries face a higher risk of negative occupational health outcomes compared to developed countries due to their lower adaptive capacity [ 46 ], increased poverty, and insufficient technological progress to combat climate change-induced temperature increases [ 6 , 47 ]. Outdoor workers often lack awareness of heat-related risks and HRI due to global warming [ 67 , 68 ]. Therefore, there is a critical need to raise awareness of heat-related hazards, bolster heat stress education, and update existing heat prevention measures. This includes optimizing current heat-related laws and adaptation policies to ensure effective implementation and compliance, especially in hot-dry and hot-humid work environments, particularly in low-middle-income countries [ 44 , 48 ]. Studies of this nature are essential among workers in these countries to provide health professionals and senior managers with the necessary knowledge to inform occupational heat stress adaptation policies, social protection measures, and resilience strategies for sustainable development.

Limitations

One limitation of this systematic review was the limited focus on female workers. Consequently, the results may not accurately represent the perspectives of women working outdoors, which is an important demographic to consider. Another significant limitation of this study is its heavy reliance on cross-sectional and experimental studies. Incorporating clinical aspects into data collection could greatly enhance and advance occupational health interventions. Furthermore, there is an evident scarcity of research exploring the social dimensions and the broader effects of occupational heat stress. Additionally, there is insufficient investigation into the adaptation strategies employed by workers in the context of increasing thermal stress and climate change, particularly in tropical and subtropical countries. These research gaps highlight the need for further studies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of this critical occupational health issue.

Addressing the health risks associated with occupational thermal stress among outdoor workers requires a multi-level approach that includes standard procedures and safety interventions. Currently, there is a lack of formal guidelines for outdoor workers, and most advisory systems do not adequately support this workforce in implementing solutions to mitigate occupational heat stress and enhance climate change resilience. While many workers acknowledge the importance of increased hydration and clothing adjustments during hot-dry and hot-humid climate conditions, a smaller proportion attempt to modify the nature of their work or seek rest in cooler areas. It is crucial to recognize that occupational heat stress remains a prevalent issue among these populations. To address these challenges, we recommend conducting further research to enhance our understanding of strategies aimed at bolstering the resilience of outdoor workers against heat stress resulting from climate change. This research should encompass diverse fields such as medicine, climatology, occupational health, and epidemiology. Additionally, there is a need to improve information dissemination, develop relevant regulations, and implement protective strategies among outdoor workers. These efforts will aid in identifying and preventing heat stress-related policies, including mitigation and adaptation measures.

Data availability

The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.

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Department of Occupational Health Engineering, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Peymaneh Habibi & Farank Mahdavi

Health, Safety & Environment (HSE), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences and Health Services, Tehran, Iran

Jaleh Razmjouei

Safety and Risk Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland, NL, Canada

Amirhossein Moradi

Department of Health in Emergencies and Disasters, School of Public Health, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran

Saeed Fallah-Aliabadi

Accident Prevention and Crisis Research Center, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran

Department of Health in Disaster and Emergencies, School of Medicine, Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, Sanandaj, Iran

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Habibi, P., Razmjouei, J., Moradi, A. et al. Climate change and heat stress resilient outdoor workers: findings from systematic literature review. BMC Public Health 24 , 1711 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-024-19212-3

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BMC Public Health

ISSN: 1471-2458

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Spring 2025 Semester

Undergraduate courses.

Composition courses that offer many sections (ENGL 101, 201, 277 and 379) are not listed on this schedule unless they are tailored to specific thematic content or particularly appropriate for specific programs and majors.

• 100-200 level

ENGL 201.ST2 Composition II: The Mind/Body Connection

Dr. sharon smith.

In this online section of English 201, students will use research and writing to learn more about problems that are important to them and articulate ways to address those problems. The course will focus specifically on issues related to the body, the mind, and the relationship between them. The topics we will discuss during the course will include the correlation between social media and body image; the psychological effects of self-objectification; and the unique mental and physical challenges faced by college students today, including food insecurity and stress.

English 201 S06 and S11: Composition II with an emphasis in Environmental Writing

S06: MWF at 10–10:50 a.m. in Yeager Hall Addition 231

S11: MWF at 12–12:50 p.m. in Crothers Engineering Hall 217

Gwen Horsley

English 201 will help students develop skills to write effectively for other university courses, careers, and themselves. This course will provide opportunities to further develop research skills, to write vividly, and to share their own stories and ideas. Specifically, in this class, students will (1) focus on the relationships between world environments, land, animals and humankind; (2) read various essays by environmental, conservational, and regional authors; and (3) produce student writings. Students will improve their writing skills by reading essays and applying techniques they witness in others’ work and those learned in class. This class is also a course in logical and creative thought. Students will write about humankind’s place in the world and our influence on the land and animals, places that hold special meaning to them or have influenced their lives, and stories of their own families and their places and passions in the world. Students will practice writing in an informed and persuasive manner, in language that engages and enlivens readers by using vivid verbs and avoiding unnecessary passives, nominalizations, and expletive constructions.

Students will prepare writing assignments based on readings and discussions of essays included in Literature and the Environment and other sources. They will use The St. Martin’s Handbook to review grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and usage as needed.

Required Text: Literature and the Environment: A Reader On Nature and Culture. 2nd ed., edited by Lorraine Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John P. O’Grady.

LING 203.S01 English Grammar

TuTh 12:30-1:45 p.m.

Dr. Nathan Serfling

The South Dakota State University 2023-2024 Undergraduate Catalog describes LING 203 as consisting of “[i]nstruction in the theory and practice of traditional grammar including the study of parts of speech, parsing, and practical problems in usage.”

“Grammar” is a mercurial term, though. Typically, we think of it to mean “correct” sentence structure, and, indeed, that is one of its meanings. But Merriam-Webster reminds us “grammar” also refers to “the principles or rules of an art, science, or technique,” taking it beyond the confines of syntactic structures. Grammar also evolves in practice through application (and social, historical, economic changes, among others). Furthermore, grammar evolves as a concept as scholars and educators in the various fields of English studies debate the definition and nature of grammar, including how well its explicit instruction improves students’ writing. In this course, we will use the differing sensibilities, definitions, and fluctuations regarding grammar to guide our work. We will examine the parts of speech, address syntactic structures and functions, and parse and diagram sentences. We will also explore definitions of and debates about grammar. All of this will occur in units about the rules and structures of grammar; the application of grammar rhetorically and stylistically; and the debates surrounding various aspects of grammar, including, but not limited to, its instruction.

ENGL 210 Introduction to Literature

Jodi andrews.

Readings in fiction, drama and poetry to acquaint students with literature and aesthetic form. Prerequisites: ENGL 101. Notes: Course meets SGR #4 or IGR #3.

ENGL 222 British Literature II

TuTh 9:30-10:45 a.m.

This course serves as a chronological survey of the second half of British literature. Students will read a variety of texts from the Romantic period, the Victorian period, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, placing these texts within their historical and literary contexts and identifying the major characteristics of the literary periods and movements that produced them.

ENGL 240.ST1 Juvenile Literature

Randi l. anderson.

A survey of the history of literature written for children and adolescents, and a consideration of the various types of juvenile literature.

ENGL 240.ST1 Juvenile Literature: 5-12 Grade

In English 240 students will develop the skills to interpret and evaluate various genres of literature for juvenile readers. This particular section will focus on various works of literature at approximately the 5th-12th grade level.

Readings for this course include works such as Night, Brown Girl Dreaming, All American Boys, Esperanza Rising, Anne Frank’s Diary: A Graphic Adaptation, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The Hobbit, Little Women, and Lord of the Flies . These readings will be paired with chapters from Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction to help develop understanding of various genres, themes, and concepts that are both related to juvenile literature, and also present in our readings.

In addition to exploring various genres of writing (poetry, non-fiction, fantasy, historical, non-fiction, graphic novels, etc.) this course will also allow students to engage in a discussion of larger themes present in these works such as censorship, race, rebellion and dissent, power and oppression, gender, knowledge, and the power of language and the written word. Students’ understanding of these works and concepts will be developed through readings, discussion posts, quizzes and exams.

ENGL 240.ST2 Juvenile Literature Elementary-5th Grade

April myrick.

A survey of the history of literature written for children and adolescents, and a consideration of the various genres of juvenile literature. Text selection will focus on the themes of imagination and breaking boundaries.

ENGL 242.S01 American Literature II

TuTh 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Dr. Paul Baggett

This course surveys a range of U.S. literatures from about 1865 to the present, writings that treat the end of slavery and the development of a segregated America, increasingly urbanized and industrialized U.S. landscapes, waves of immigration, and the fulfilled promise of “America” as imperial nation. The class will explore the diversity of identities represented during that time, and the problems/potentials writers imagined in response to the century’s changes—especially literature’s critical power in a time of nation-building. Required texts for the course are The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1865 to the Present and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.

WMST 247.S01: Introduction to Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

As an introduction to Women, Gender and Sexuality studies, this course considers the experiences of women and provides an overview of the history of feminist thought and activism, particularly within the United States. Students will also consider the concepts of gender and sexuality more broadly to encompass a diversity of gender identifications and sexualities and will explore the degree to which mainstream feminism has—and has not—accommodated this diversity. The course will focus in particular on the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, ethnicity, and disability. Topics and concepts covered will include: movements for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights; gender, sexuality and the body; intersectionality; rape culture; domestic and gender violence; reproductive rights; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW); and more.

ENGL 283.S01 Introduction to Creative Writing

MWF 1-1:50 p.m.

Prof. Steven Wingate

Students will explore the various forms of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction and poetry) not one at a time in a survey format—as if there were decisive walls of separation between then—but as intensely related genres that share much of their creative DNA. Through close reading and work on personal texts, students will address the decisions that writers in any genre must face on voice, rhetorical position, relationship to audience, etc. Students will produce and revise portfolios of original creative work developed from prompts and research. This course fulfills the same SGR #2 requirements ENGL 201; note that the course will involve creative research projects. Successful completion of ENGL 101 (including by test or dual credit) is a prerequisite.

English 284: Introduction to Criticism

This course introduces students to selected traditions of literary and cultural theory and to some of the key issues that animate discussion among literary scholars today. These include questions about the production of cultural value, about ideology and hegemony, about the patriarchal and colonial bases of Western culture, and about the status of the cultural object, of the cultural critic, and of cultural theory itself.

To address these and other questions, we will survey the history of literary theory and criticism (a history spanning 2500 years) by focusing upon a number of key periods and -isms: Greek and Roman Classicism, The Middle Ages and Renaissance, The Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Formalism, Historicism, Political Criticism (Marxism, Post-Colonialism, Feminism, et al.), and Psychological Criticism. We also will “test” various theories we discuss by examining how well they account for and help us to understand various works of poetry and fiction.

• 300-400 level

ENGL 330.S01 Shakespeare

TuTh 8-9:15 a.m.

Dr. Michael S. Nagy

This course will focus on William Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic works and on the cultural and social contexts in which he wrote them. In this way, we will gain a greater appreciation of the fact that literature does not exist in a vacuum, for it both reflects and influences contemporary and subsequent cultures. Text: The Riverside Shakespeare: Complete Works. Ed. Evans, G. Blakemore and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

ENGL 363 Science Fiction

MWF 11-11:50 a.m.

This course explores one of the most significant literary genres of the past century in fiction and in film. We will focus in particular on the relationship between science fiction works and technological and social developments, with considerable attention paid to the role of artificial intelligence in the human imagination. Why does science fiction seem to predict the future? What do readers and writers of the genre hope to find in it? Through readings and viewings of original work, as well as selected criticism in the field, we will address these and other questions. Our reading and viewing selections will include such artists as Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Stanley Kubrick and Phillip K. Dick. Students will also have ample opportunity to introduce the rest of the class to their own favorite science fiction works.

ENGL 383.S01 Creative Writing I

MWF 2-2:50 p.m.

Amber Jensen

Creative Writing I encourages students to strengthen poetry, creative nonfiction, and/or fiction writing skills through sustained focus on creative projects throughout the course (for example, collections of shorter works focused on a particular form/style/theme, longer prose pieces, hybrid works, etc.). Students will engage in small- and large-group writing workshops as well as individual conferences with the instructor throughout the course to develop a portfolio of creative work. The class allows students to explore multiple genres through the processes of writing and revising their own creative texts and through writing workshop, emphasizing the application of craft concepts across genre, but also allows students to choose one genre of emphasis, which they will explore through analysis of self-select texts, which they will use to deepen their understanding of the genre and to contextualize their own creative work.

ENGL 475.S01 Creative Nonfiction

Mondays 3-5:50 p.m.

In this course, students will explore the expansive and exciting genre of creative nonfiction, including a variety of forms such as personal essay, braided essay, flash nonfiction, hermit crab essays, profiles and more. Through rhetorical reading, discussion, and workshop, students will engage published works, their own writing process, and peer work as they expand their understanding of the possibilities presented in this genre and the craft elements that can be used to shape readers’ experience of a text. Students will compile a portfolio of polished work that demonstrates their engagement with course concepts and the writing process.

ENGL 485.S01 Writing Center Tutoring

MW 8:30-9:45 a.m.

Since their beginnings in the 1920s and 30s, writing centers have come to serve numerous functions: as hubs for writing across the curriculum initiatives, sites to develop and deliver workshops, and resource centers for faculty as well as students, among other functions. But the primary function of writing centers has necessarily and rightfully remained the tutoring of student writers. This course will immerse you in that function in two parts. During the first four weeks, you will explore writing center praxis—that is, the dialogic interplay of theory and practice related to writing center work. This part of the course will orient you to writing center history, key theoretical tenets and practical aspects of writing center tutoring. Once we have developed and practiced this foundation, you will begin work in the writing center as a tutor, responsible for assisting a wide variety of student clients with numerous writing tasks. Through this work, you will learn to actively engage with student clients in the revision of a text, respond to different student needs and abilities, work with a variety of writing tasks and rhetorical situations and develop a richer sense of writing as a complex and negotiated social process.

ENGL 492.S01 The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

Tuesdays 3-5:50 p.m.

Dr. Jason McEntee

In 1975, the United States officially included its involvement in the Vietnam War, thus marking 2025 as the 50th anniversary of the conclusion (in name only) of one of the most chaotic, confusing, and complex periods in American history. In this course, we will consider how literature and film attempt to chronicle the Vietnam War and, perhaps more important, its aftermath. I have designed this course for those looking to extend their understanding of literature and film to include the ideas of art, experience, commercial products, and cultural documents. Learning how to interpret literature and movies remains the highest priority of the course, including, for movies, the study of such things as genre, mise-en-scene (camera movement, lighting, etc.), editing, sound and so forth.

We will read Dispatches , A Rumor of War , The Things They Carried , A Piece of My Heart , and Bloods , among others. Some of the movies that we will screen are: Apocalypse Now (the original version), Full Metal Jacket , Platoon , Coming Home , Born on the Fourth of July , Dead Presidents , and Hearts and Minds . Because we must do so, we will also look at some of the more fascinatingly outrageous yet culturally significant fantasies about the war, such as The Green Berets and Rambo: First Blood, Part II .

ENGL 492.S02 Classical Mythology

TuTh 3:30-4:45 p.m.

Drs. Michael S. Nagy and Graham Wrightson

Modern society’s fascination with mythology manifests itself in the continued success of novels, films and television programs about mythological or quasi-mythological characters such as Hercules, the Fisher King, and Gandalf the Grey, all of whom are celebrated for their perseverance or their daring deeds in the face of adversity. This preoccupation with mythological figures necessarily extends back to the cultures which first propagated these myths in early folk tales and poems about such figures as Oðin, King Arthur, Rhiannon, Gilgamesh, and Odysseus, to name just a few. English 492, a reading-intensive course cross-listed with History 492, primarily aims to expose students to the rich tradition of mythological literature written in languages as varied as French, Gaelic, Welsh, Old Icelandic, Greek, and Sumerian; to explore the historical, social, political, religious, and literary contexts in which these works flourished (if indeed they did); and to grapple with the deceptively simple question of what makes these myths continue to resonate with modern audiences. Likely topics and themes of this course will include: Theories of myth; Mythological Beginnings: Creation myths and the fall of man; Male and Female Gods in Myth; Foundation myths; Nature Myths; The Heroic Personality; the mythological portrayal of (evil/disruptive) women in myth; and Monsters in myth.

Likely Texts:

• Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
• Faulkes, Anthony, trans. Edda. Everyman, 1995
• Gregory, Lady Augusta. Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster. Forgotten Books, 2007
• Jones, Gwyn, Thomas Jones, and Mair Jones. The Mabinogion. Everyman Paperback Classics, 1993
• Larrington, Carolyne, trans. The Poetic Edda . Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
• Matarasso, Pauline M., trans. The Quest of the Holy Grail. Penguin Classics, 1969
• Apollodorus, Hesiod’s Theogony
• Hesiod’s Works and Days
• Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homeric Hymns
• Virgil’s Aeneid
• Iliad, Odyssey
• Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica
• Ovid’s Heroides
• Greek tragedies: Orestaia, Oedipus trilogy, Trojan Women, Medea, Hippoolytus, Frogs, Seneca's Thyestes, Dyskolos, Amphitryon
• Clash of the Titans, Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, Troy (and recent miniseries), Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

ENGL 492.ST1 Science Writing

Erica summerfield.

This course aims to teach the fundamentals of effective scientific writing and presentation. The course examines opportunities for covering science, the skills required to produce clear and understandable text about technical subjects, and important ethical and practical constraints that govern the reporting of scientific information. Students will learn to present technical and scientific issues to various audiences. Particular emphasis will be placed on conveying the significance of research, outlining the aims, and discussing the results for scientific papers and grant proposals. Students will learn to write effectively, concisely, and clearly while preparing a media post, fact sheet, and scientific manuscript or grant.

Graduate Courses

Engl 575.s01 creative nonfiction.

In this course, students will explore the expansive and exciting genre of creative nonfiction, including a variety of forms such as personal essay, braided essay, flash nonfiction, hermit crab essays, profiles, and more. Through rhetorical reading, discussion, and workshop, students will engage published works, their own writing process, and peer work as they expand their understanding of the possibilities presented in this genre and the craft elements that can be used to shape readers’ experience of a text. Students will compile a portfolio of polished work that demonstrates their engagement with course concepts and the writing process.

ENGL 592.S01: The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

Engl 704.s01 introduction to graduate studies.

Thursdays 3-5:50 p.m.

Introduction to Graduate Studies is required of all first-year graduate students. The primary purpose of this course is to introduce students to modern and contemporary literary theory and its applications. Students will write short response papers and will engage at least one theoretical approach in their own fifteen- to twenty-page scholarly research project. In addition, this course will further introduce students to the M.A. program in English at South Dakota State University and provide insight into issues related to the profession of English studies.

ENGL 792.ST1 Grant Writing

This online course will familiarize students with the language, rhetorical situation, and components of writing grant proposals. Students will explore various funding sources, learn to read an RFP, and develop an understanding of different professional contexts and the rhetorical and structural elements that suit those distinct contexts. Students will write a sample proposal throughout the course and offer feedback to their peers, who may be writing in different contexts, which will enhance their understanding of the varied applications of course content. Through their work in the course, students will gain confidence in their ability to find, apply for, and receive grant funding to support their communities and organizations.

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Infective endocarditis due to corynebacterium jeikeium : four case reports and narrative review of the literature.

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Arnés-García, D.; Lucena-Torres, L.; Bustos-Merlo, A.; Rosales-Castillo, A.; Hidalgo-Tenorio, C. Infective Endocarditis Due to Corynebacterium jeikeium : Four Case Reports and Narrative Review of the Literature. Microorganisms 2024 , 12 , 1337. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms12071337

Arnés-García D, Lucena-Torres L, Bustos-Merlo A, Rosales-Castillo A, Hidalgo-Tenorio C. Infective Endocarditis Due to Corynebacterium jeikeium : Four Case Reports and Narrative Review of the Literature. Microorganisms . 2024; 12(7):1337. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms12071337

Arnés-García, Daniel, Laura Lucena-Torres, Antonio Bustos-Merlo, Antonio Rosales-Castillo, and Carmen Hidalgo-Tenorio. 2024. "Infective Endocarditis Due to Corynebacterium jeikeium : Four Case Reports and Narrative Review of the Literature" Microorganisms 12, no. 7: 1337. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms12071337

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