Write Here, Right Now

Literature Reviews

Literature Reviews are typically found in research articles, grant and research proposals, theses, and dissertations. In a literature review the author selects relevant past research and synthesizes it into a coherent discussion. In your review you will not only present the sources but also weave them together in a way that you present a coherent picture of the research available on a subject or in a field.

Literature reviews can be stand-alone projects or be a section in a bigger project, like the introduction in a journal article or a chapter in a dissertation. They exist in order to show mastery of a subject and also to point out how your research may fit within the field. With this in mind, in the literature review you should think of the literature review in narrative terms: you weave the sources together, illustrating the scholarly conversation which has taken place in the field.

When academics talk about "reviewing" the "literature" what they mean is that a writer searches for sources (oftentimes scholarly), reads them, provides an overview of the field, describes or summarizes the sources, and, lastly, evaluates them. Your review should identify major themes, recurring concepts, and/or critical gaps. It can be organized in different ways, too. The organization depends on your literature review's guiding idea: you could focus on the major works, recurring themes, or order of publication, among others. Also, keep in mind that depending on the topic, you may need a broad overview or you may need a narrow focus (by ethnic group, by class, by gender, by time period, etc).

When you are going to work on a literature review you need to:

When in doubt Make an appointment and one of our Writing consultants will be happy to help!

 

Revised: 07/2012

Quick Question?

Do you have a quick writing question? Not sure how to cite a particular source? Want to double-check correct semi-colon usage?  Ask a writing consultant.

Do you have a question about the Writing Center or our services? E-mail us.

Attention KU Students! The Writing Center will be closing for the semester on Thursday, December 12th, 2013 at 8:00 pm. Make your appointments now! http://www.writing.ku.edu/
KU Writing Center | KU Writing Center
Welcome to the KU Writing CenterWriters need feedback, sounding boards, and other people to coach and guide them while they compose. That's where the KU Writing Center comes in. It's a place for productive talk about writing, with trained peer consultants to help you brainstorm, draft or edit your w...

KU Writing Center Videoconferences Consultant Brittany Brannon describes how Videoconferences work.


One of 34 U.S. public institutions in the prestigious Association of American Universities
26 prestigious Rhodes Scholars – more than all other Kansas colleges combined
Nearly $290 million in financial aid annually
One of 9 public universities with outstanding study abroad programs.
—U.S. News & World Report
46 nationally ranked graduate programs.
—U.S. News & World Report
Top 50 nationwide for size of library collection.
—ALA
$275 million in externally funded research expenditures
23rd nationwide for service to veterans —"Best for Vets," Military Times
http://www.writing.ku.edu/literature-reviews
www.writing.ku.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-48
78502
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KMDF7LNJKW6CCGOSRVXDUGKQS7V4IULR
<urn:uuid:7758623e-0e4c-4c73-b133-39e7b9ad1c06>
2013-12-12T02:48:55Z
129.237.11.204
sha1:XCSWW2REWC4SPFFHIYDV26WCUAFBJUGG
<urn:uuid:eb722010-5269-446d-914e-59fa889e8a4b>
http://www.writing.ku.edu/literature-reviews
length
response
<urn:uuid:32e21f11-fb68-453e-9886-7fef97b5bc16>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-48
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Winter 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf