Sage Research Methods database à Project Planner à Reviewing the Literature

Your literature review is not an annotated bibliography or a research paper where you select resources to support one side of an issue versus another.

The literature review:
 

• Provides background to the research topic
   
• Demonstrates why a topic is significant in that area
   
• Identifies major themes, concepts and researchers in an area
   
• Helps focus your own work 
   
• Discovers relationships between different research topics
   
• Suggests unexplored ideas or relationships
   
• Identifies critical gaps, disagreements, or poor methodology or theory
   
• Indicates directions for future research 

Academic Skills Centre offer a workshop on Writing a Literature Review as part of the Academic Skills for Thesis Writers

• Have you indicated the purpose of the review?
   
• Why did you include some of the literature and exclude others ?
   
• Have you emphasised recent developments?
   
• Is your bibliographic data complete?
   
• Is there a logic to the way you have organized your material?
   
• Does the amount of detail included on an issue relate to its importance?
   
• Have you been sufficiently critical of design and methodological issues?
   
• Have you indicated when results were conflicting or inconclusive and discussed possible reasons?