WRI Literature Review

Welcome to WRI Library's Lit Review guide! The purpose of this guide is to help you understand what literature reviews are and the process of writing them in the social sciences, humanities and sciences. This guide will give you tips and point you to other sites with in-depth explanation on how to write literature reviews.

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, the 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, otherwise known as the research objective (i.e., the problem or issue being addressed, or the argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries.

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

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

A literature review must do these things:

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