A literature review is an examination of existing primary and secondary scholarly literature, including books, journal articles, working papers, and other scholarly materials. A literature review can be as brief as a one-page summary, or as comprehensive as a full-length scholarly article such as those found in the
Annual Reviews.
Literature reviews provide scholarly, informative overviews of published literature that help researchers remain up-to-date in their disciplinary areas. Finding relevant articles for a literature review can often be a time-consuming, difficult process and you will likely spend a good deal of time searching for books, articles, dissertations, theses, conference papers, and other resources that will contain good literature reviews. Literature reviews allow scholars to do the following:
- Acquire a better understanding of the current state of knowledge in a particular discipline or field of study, providing context for a research project.
- Identify key concepts, theories, methodologies, and other findings related to their research topic, which helps researchers in build theoretical frameworks based on established theories and concepts.
- Identify gaps in a disciplinary area where there is a lack of research or conflicting findings, and highlight major questions that should be addressed in further literature.