Undergraduate Research Center: The Research Process

The Purdue University OWL describes a literature review as "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."

In their book Writing the Literature Review (see bottom of page), authors Sara Efron and Ruth Ravid offer that a literature review "synthesizes the scholarly work of others whose own research is relevant to yours. Literature reviews aim to analyze and evaluate the scholarly work of prior researchers. By understanding what other scholars have said on your research topic, you develop a greater sense of your topic (i.e. what are the themes), as well as understand how others have come to the conclusions they have drawn (i.e. their research methods), and can identify gaps in the research (i.e. future questions for research).  Literature reviews can be done for research papers, research proposals."

This guide is designed to provide a series of small processes to help you complete the research and writing of a literature review.

Once you have found sources for your literature review, reading them effectively for relevant content can be difficult.  Below are suggestions on how to scan and/or read large amounts of academic literature.

Understanding Research Articles

This video explains the different parts of a journal article, and recommends reading certain parts first to see if it is relevant to your topic.

Using a Concept Matrix to Code the Article Content

Once you've found relevant articles, there are different ways to "code" or "concept map" those articles to highlight their most important parts.

The UC Davis Writing Center recommends using a synthesis or concept matrix to break down articles by themes and quotes relevant to your topic. (Link to embedded PPT and PDF files.)

Concept Matrices are helpful in capturing the most essenstial content that you'd lke to use in your literature review and in providing a visual map of which concepts you are finding the most lterature for. A column with few references mapped to it show you where you might have to do more research. In the example below, you can see where each column represents a concept for your literature review, and each row a specific source.

These links can also help you understand and write your literature review.

Writing a Literature Review from the Purdue University OWL.

Literature Reviews from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center