LibGuides: Resources in Psychological Sciences: Literature Reviews

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a systematic survey of the scholarly literature published on a given topic. Rather than providing a new research insight, a literature review lays the groundwork for an in-depth research project analyzing previous research. Type of documents surveyed will vary depending on the field, but can include:

books
journal articles,
theses
dissertations.

A thorough literature review will also require surveying what librarians call "gray literature," which includes difficult-to-locate documents such as:

technical reports
government publications
working papers
preprints

Purpose of the Lit Review

What's the point?

Purposes of the Literature Review

Delimit the research problem
Avoid fruitless approaches
Identify avenues of future research
Seek new lines of inquiry
Gain methodological insight

Reasons for Conducting a Literature Review

Distinguishing what has been done from what needs to be done
Discovering important variables relevant to the topic
Synthesizing and gaining new perspective
Identifying relationships between ideas and practices
Establishing the context of the topic
Rationalizing the significance of the problem
Enhancing and acquiring subject vocabulary
Understanding the structure of the subject
Relating ideas and theory to applications
Identifying main methodologies and research techniques that have been used
Placing research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-art development

Questions to consider

What is the overarching question or problem your literature review seeks to address?
How much familiarity do you already have with the field? Are you already familiar with common methodologies or professional vocabularies?
What types of strategies or questions have others in your field pursued?
How will you synthesize or summarize the information you gather?
What do you or others perceive to be lacking in your field?
Is your topic broad? How could it be narrowed?
Can you articulate why your topic is important in your field?

Adapted from Hart, C. (1998). Doing a literature review: Releasing the social science research imagination. London: Sage. As cited in Randolph, Justus. “A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review.”Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, 14(13), p. 2.

Acknowledgements

Merinda Hensley gave permision for content to be borrowed by permission from Literature Review: Demystified LibGuide from the University of Illnois at Urbana-Champaign.

Getting Started

Once you've decided what you want to write about you will need to conduct a systematic review of journal literature to establish what has been written in your field.

Databases enable you to combine search terms and locate high quality journal articles, conference papers and proceedings from a wide range of sources. Have a look at the Accessing Databases tab to choose the right one for your subject area. There are links to brief online tutorials or pdf guides to help you with using each of the databases there too.

Why use a database?