14 Writing a Literature Review: Introduction
Often the place where thesis students embark on their writing journey, the literature review is also the section where students can struggle the most.
What is a literature review?
A literature review provides an overview of the relevant work that has been done in a field and can be presented in a separate chapter in a traditional thesis, or as a section near the beginning of each publishable paper in a sandwich thesis.
The introduction chapter of a sandwich thesis may also contain a literature review that is broader in scope than those of the individual papers included.
The review of literature is a significant portion of most academic writing, as it orients both the researcher and the reader to what research has been done in an area to date (so as to avoid “re-inventing the wheel”), and also highlights gaps in current knowledge that the present research will seek to address. Literature reviews also indicate that the researcher is knowledgeable in their field, being an active member and participant in it.[1]
According to Kamler and Thomson (2006), there are six key tasks that must be accomplished by a literature review, as illustrated in the following poster.[2]
Why is writing the literature review so often a challenge?
The concept of “the literature review” itself is likely intimidating for graduate students, in part, because of the connotations the different parts of this title evoke when placed together. First, “the” erroneously signifies that your literature review is one standalone thing, as opposed to something that is integrated and referred to throughout the entire thesis or article. A literature review should not simply be a separate piece completed at the beginning of the research/writing process and then only marginally edited at the end.
Second, the statement “the literature” also carries a potentially intimidating air about it. Literature signifies something of high culture and pretentious importance – impossible to attain, broad in scope, and just frustratingly out of reach.
Finally, “review” gives off the assumption that the reviewer is in the position of a passive audience member who looks on from the outside at all that is going on in the “literature” – not much activity or agency in this positioning.
Types of literature reviews
According to Arlene Fink (2014) in “Conducting Research Literature Reviews”, a literature review surveys books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by doing so, 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 explored while researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within a larger field of study.
The following table provides a comparison of the types of literature reviews you may encounter as a graduate student.[3]
Table 1: Types of literature reviews based on research approach
| Research Approach | Literature Review | Mapping/ Scoping Review | Meta Analysis | Systematic Review |
| Search Strategy | Can be comprehensive | Determined by constraints (e.g., time; scope) | Exhaustive and comprehensive | Exhaustive and comprehensive |
| Synthesis Strategy | Narrative | Tables and narrative | Tables and narrative | Narrative and tables |
| Methodological Approach | Can include quality assessment | No quality assessment | Necessarily includes quality assessment as a criterion for inclusion | Necessarily includes quality assessment as a criterion for inclusion |
| Analysis | Can be thematic, chronological, or conceptual | Addresses quality/quantity of evidence; there is a need for further research | Numerical appraisal of effects to allow inferences | What is known; what (clinical) recommendations might be inferred |
- Christine B. Feak and John M. Swales, Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2009). ↵
- Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson, Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision (London: Routledge, 2006). ↵
- Maria Grant and Andrew Booth, “A typology of reviews: An analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies,” Health Information and Libraries Journal 26.2 (2009): 91-108. ↵
