Interdisciplinary & Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research: Writing a Literature Review

What is a literature review, then?

Literature reviews summarize and analyze what has been written on a particular topic and identify gaps or disagreements in the scholarly work on that topic.

Within a scholarly work, the literature review situates the current work within the larger scholarly conversation and emphasizes how that particular scholarly work contributes to the conversation on the topic. The literature review portion may be as brief as a few paragraphs focusing on a narrow topic area. 

It is more than a simple summary of your sources; it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information.

It often compares studies and provides critique based on the strengths and weaknesses of your research.

But how is a literature review different from an academic research paper?

The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, and a research paper will contain a literature review as one of its parts. In a research paper, you use the literature as a foundation and as support for a new insight that you contribute. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.

Why do we write literature reviews?

In order to locate your own arguments, you must first spend time organizing, assessing, and unpacking your sources. Once you see clearly what kinds of voices and perspectives address your research questions, you can enter into the conversation by addressing counter-arguments as well as articulating and supporting your own arguments.

Use the following steps in writing your literature review:

Organize your sources by detecting a pattern that helps you explain why one group of sources comes up with one answer and another group comes up with another answer.

Analyze the content of these sources in terms of the answer they provide to your central question or in terms of the question they raise (which may be slightly different from your question). Show how they offer important insights. Show how they neglect particular areas.

As you compare studies, you’ll begin to be able to offer critique. You may consider asking the following questions:

• How do the different studies relate to one another? What is new, different, or controversial about the various studies?
• What views need to be further tested?
• What evidence is lacking, inconclusive, contradicting, or too limited?

Annotated Literature Review

This annotated review shows how to structure a literature review, use sources, transition ideas, and connect to your research