In a long college term paper, one of the most difficult tasks you may be asked to complete is to write a literature review. A literature is an important part of a master's thesis, a doctoral dissertation, a journal article, and a lengthy class paper. Here's what a literature review is supposed to do, and how to write a good one.
What is a Literature Review?
A lit review is a discussion of writings that are similar to yours that add something valuable to your project. Lit reviews provide crucial background information for understanding your own research. A lit review also contextualizes your research within existing research. Literature reviews are located towards the beginning of your paper project, so that you can refer to the readings discussed in the literature review throughout the paper.
How is a Literature Review Written?
A lit review is not a report that summarizes relevant articles and books one by one sequentially. Rather, a lit review is a cohesive account of important bodies of works and arguments in your discipline, and the articles and books that are a part of these bodies of work and arguments. The trick is to choose the bodies of work that are most relevant to your project.
For example, if you were writing a paper that argues that violent video games are not nearly as dangerous as many feel they are, you could draw upon several bodies of literature. First, you might write about literature that argues that the dangers of violence in the media in general have been overstated. Second, you might write about literature that argues that the effects of violent video games have been overstated.
As you summarize the literature, be careful that you're not just discussing each piece of writing in a vacuum. Relate each piece of research to the broader research question, and relate individual pieces of research to each other.
The outline for your literature review might look something like this:
Literature Review
I. A growing body of research indicates that the effects of violence in the media have been overstated.
- A. The seminal study in this area is by Smith, who argues...
- B. Drawing upon Smith, Johnson takes the argument a step further and argues...
- C. Somewhat in contrast to Smith and Johnson is Garcia, who argues...
- D. Taking the argument in a new direction is Brown, who argues....
II. More specifically, recent research has also called into questions the popular public assumption that video game violence leads to real life violence.
- A. One important research study that demonstrates this was conducted by Cohen and Williams, who found that...
- B. A much different study that yielded similar results was conducted by Green, who found...
- C. A similar study was conducted by Kelly, who argued....
How Long and Broad Should Should the Literature Be?
This depends on the length of your project, your subject, and plain old common sense. After you write enough lit reviews, you start to get a feel for how many works and how many bodies of literature you should include. If you are inexperienced at this, talk to your advisor or instructor for guidance.
A good literature review must be comprehensive. That is, you need to do your homework and locate all relevant works. Of course, some bodies of literature are larger than others, so it might not be possible to cover absolutely everything. However, it's very important to include works that are considered important by many people in your field. Again, this is a topic about which your advisor and instructor can offer guidance.
A good literature review also achieves the right amount of breadth. Be careful not to make your lit review too broad. For example, if you're writing about violent video games, there's no need to include a background discussion of all the different kinds of research on violence. There's also no need to include a discussion of literature that argues that media research is important. On the other hand, don't make your lit review too narrow. In the outline above, the writer included a more broad section about research that questions the effects of violence in the media in general, which is just broad enough to supplement the main focus of the paper on the effects of violent video games.
Lit reviews are tricky! The best way to learn is to write lots of them, get good feedback from instructors, and keep writing. With experience, you'll learn instinctively how to write appropriate literature reviews.
