PA 681: Capstone in Public Administration

A literature review surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources relevant to a particular issue or area of research and provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of each work. 

The literature review ...

IS

• an overview of research on a given topic and answers to related research questions
• features of such an overview:
  • organizes literature
  • evaluates literature
  • identifies patterns and trends in literature
  • synthesizes literature
  • an overview of what we know and of what we do not know about a given topic
  • not necessarily exhaustive, but up-to-date and includes all major work on the topic
  • intellectual context for your original research
  • motivation for your original research
    • structure of review guided by your objectives
    • continually refers back to your thesis or research questions

IS NOT

• a "laundry list" of everything written on a topic, where each source gets its summary paragraph
  • lacks organization guided by thesis or research questions
  • lacks synthesis of literature
  • lacks critical evaluation of literature
• an annotated bibliography
• a literary or book review

Extracted from What is a Literature Review? (and How Do I Write One?!), PowerPoint Presentation by Nicholas Shunda, University of Connecticut, 2007.

A literature review is a summary of previous research on a topic. The purpose of a literature review is to provide an overview of published research on a topic.