A literature review surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources relevant to a particular issue or area of research and provides a description, summary, critical evaluation, and synthesis of each work and how it contrinutes to our knowledge and understanding of that topic.
The literature review ...
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IS NOT |
- 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
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- 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
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Extracted from What is a Literature Review? (and How Do I Write One?!), PowerPoint Presentation by Nicholas Shunda, University of Connecticut, 2007.