Speaker 1: A literature review is an objective, concise, critical summary of published research literature relevant to a topic being researched in an article. A good literature review will order articles and books to focus on unresolved debates, inconsistencies, tensions, and questions in a research field. It will also summarize the most relevant, important aspects of scientific literature related to your area of research, and synthesize past and current research on the topic and show how your research fits in. One way to think about doing a literature review is to imagine building a bookshelf. You don't need to cut each piece by yourself, rather you can take the pieces that other researchers have made and put them together to build your project. The literature review provides an understanding of the background of the field, identifying which studies are important and which are not, to put together your bookshelf of a study. So what should the literature review include? Historical background for research. You should show what has been written about your field of research so that you can present something new and significant and contribute to the understanding of this field, even in a small way. This also demonstrates to other researchers and journal editors that you know how to read theoretical concepts and put them in your own words to show understanding. Include current research context in which your research is situated. This means discussion questions, issues, and debates in the field. You can contextualize your work by showing related work as both historical background and the modern state of research, showing the development and trends of research. Include relevant theories and concepts. For example, if you are researching the relationship between the ecological environment and human population in that environment, providing models and theories that focus on specific aspects of this connection will help contextualize your study. Introduce and define relevant terminology to show how terms fit into the context of your work. Add related research and show how your work expands or challenges this research, or works to fill in a gap in the work in this field. You can use the literature review as evidence of what works, what doesn't, and what is missing. Provide supporting evidence for a practical problem or issue that your research is addressing, showing its importance. Referencing related research establishes your area of research as reputable and shows you are building upon previous work that other researchers have deemed significant. Literature reviews range from the selective, a very narrow area of research or only a single work, to the comprehensive, or a larger amount or range of works. They can also exist as part of a larger work or stand on their own. A course assignment is an example of a selective, standalone work. It focuses on a small segment of the literature on a topic and makes up an entire work on its own. The literature review in a dissertation or thesis is both comprehensive and helps make up a larger work. A majority of journal articles start with a selective literature review to provide context for research reported in the manuscript, which is the broader work for which the literature gives context. The literature review is often included in the introduction. Some literature reviews are both comprehensive and stand as a separate work. The entire article analyzes the literature on a given topic. Thus, the literature review, while it has common applications across many kinds of documents, can serve slightly different purposes and take different forms. The two types of literature reviews found in journals are research articles, such as studies and surveys, and standalone literature analyses. They differ in their scope, length, and specific purpose. The literature review found at the beginning of a journal article is used to introduce the research related to the specific study and is found in the introduction section, usually near the end. It is shorter than standalone reviews because it must limit its scope to very specific studies and theories that are directly relevant to this study. It is also often used to set research precedent and support theory or methods. Here is an example of a review of the literature, accompanied by the heading, Related Research. This section is four paragraphs in length and cites four to five sources, or roughly one source per short paragraph. This is fairly standard for a literature review introducing an article or study. When a literature review exists as a part of an introduction to a study, it follows the structure of the introduction itself and moves from the general to the specific, presenting the broadest background information about a topic first and then moving to specific studies that support your study, finally leading to your hypothesis statement. The literature is often indistinguishable from the introduction itself, introducing the background and defining the gaps your study aims to fill. The standalone literature review published as its own article, on the other hand, presents and analyzes as much of the important text in an area of study as possible to provide background information and context for a current area of research or a specific study that is being conducted now or will be conducted in the future. This can be an excellent resource for researchers when they are first seeking out the most relevant information on an area of study. Such an article, thus, presents and analyzes as many relevant texts as necessary to give a full account of a research topic, approach, or theory. It is generally a bit broader in scope and extends further back in time. This means that sometimes a scientific literature review can be highly theoretical. In addition, it focuses on the results and methods of previous studies. It often has a more extended analysis and goes into greater detail. All of the sections of this kind of review refer to the literature rather than detailing a specific current study. In this example of a literature review in a journal, there are two features that distinguish it. First, the words literature review are contained in the title. While it is not necessary to include this exact term, many literature reviews do indicate the type of article in their title. The second feature one notices is the length of the text. It is much longer than the literature review that introduces a study. The headings indicate what kind of literature is being discussed and how it contributes to the topic. At the end of the review is a conclusion that once again explicitly ties all of these works together to show how this analysis is itself a contribution to the literature. So how do authors turn a network of articles into a coherent review of relevant literature? Writing the literature review is not usually a linear process. You will often need to go back and check the literature while reformulating your ideas. This means you will not be writing the literature review at any one time, but constantly working on it before, during, and after your study is complete. This process will apply more to standalone literature reviews, but can also be useful in understanding what to include to introduce your study. The first step is to choose a topic to write on, focus, and explore this topic. Choose a topic that you are familiar with and highly interested in analyzing, a topic your intended readers and researchers will find interesting and useful, and a topic that is current, well-established in the field, and about which there has been sufficient research conducted for a review. This will help you find the sweet spot for what to focus on. In a journal article introduction, this is the point where you might realize you need to adjust your scope depending on what you learn from the literature. Next, research and collect all of the scholarly information on that topic that might be pertinent to your study. Scholarly articles, books, academic conference speeches, dissertations and theses, and any other academic work related to your area of study is called the literature. Next, analyze the network of information that extends or responds to the major works in your area. Select the material that is most useful. Use thought maps and charts to identify intersections in the research and to outline important categories. Select the material that will be most useful for you to review. Following this, it's time to describe and summarize each article. Provide the essential information of the article that pertains to your study. Determine two to three important concepts, depending on the length of your article, that are discussed in the literature. Take notes about all of the important aspects of the study relevant to your topic being reviewed. For example, in a study of heart disease, perhaps some of the main concepts are arthrosclerosis, hypertension, and obesity. Note these concepts and then write a brief summary about how the article incorporates them. For instance, Yang's 1995 longitudinal study of obese patients attempts to measure the effects of chronic hypertension on arthrosclerosis. In reviews that introduce a study, these can be relatively short summaries. In standalone reviews, there may be significantly more text and concepts to review. After you've summarized each article, you want to demonstrate how these concepts in the literature relate to what you discovered in your study or how the literature connects the concepts or topics being discussed. In a literature intro for the article, this information might include a summary of the results or methods of previous studies that correspond or confirm to the sections in your own study. You might identify the missing parts in previous studies that your study addresses or highlight concepts that support your hypothesis, methods, results, or conclusions. In a standalone literature review, this may mean highlighting the concepts in each article and showing they strengthen a hypothesis or show a pattern. For example, you might identify any unaddressed issues in the previous studies. You can identify what is accurate and what is out of scope within these works. The final step in the literature review process is to identify relationships in the literature and develop and connect your own ideas to them. This is essentially the same as the previous step, but focus on the connections between the literature and the current study or guiding concepts or arguments in the paper, not only the connections between the works themselves. Examining these concepts is almost like doing a study in itself, pointing to the most important information from previous studies and drawing possible conclusions from the results of these works. Your hypothesis, argument, or guiding concept is the golden thread that will ultimately tie the works together and give them the importance they wouldn't have had outside of your literature review. Furthermore, your review will not only cover publications on your topics, but will include your own ideas and contributions. By following these steps, you will be telling the specific story that sets the background and shows the significance of your research, and you can turn a network of related works into a focused review of the literature. How long should a literature review be? The length of your literature review will be determined by how many sources you are reviewing and how many concepts you are exploring, as well as how much tension exists between these concepts. A stand-alone literature review can be anywhere from 2-3 pages to an entire book in length. For a separate article, this section is usually no more than 2-4 paragraphs maximum. How many sources should I review? The amount of articles you review will be heavily determined by how broad or narrow your topic is, how in-depth you want to explore an issue, and perhaps how much consensus or disagreement exists in this area. In a stand-alone review, the number of works reviewed might be anywhere from 5-15 and up to 30 or more in a full book of literature review, whereas a journal article usually has fewer than 5 sources and does not go into great depth, but often focuses on the most important points. Here are some tips for creating a stronger literature review. Always define your topic and audience before beginning your research. This will help later when deciding which works to ultimately include in the review. Read as many journal articles as you can, especially those that are in your area of interest. These will give you an excellent idea of how to structure and order your review. Focus on more current literature, especially when it comes to studies and articles. Using older theories is fine if they are fundamental and provide a stable foundation for work that hasn't changed over the years, but more current research will always be highly sought after by researchers and other readers. This might go without saying, but researchers should always take ample notes while they are researching the texts. Using note cards, tables, and computing programs like Microsoft Excel will help organize and index information and make it much easier to categorize later. Whatever you do, don't simply stack texts in the relevant pile without first writing down exactly what in the texts makes them relevant. For more resources on research writing and publication information, as well as a full list of academic editing services, visit wordvice.com.