Writing a Literature Review: Plan Your Review

Like writing a research paper, you need to have a topic in mind when writing a literature review. If you haven't select a topic yet for your literature view or you feel that your topic is too broad, this advice may be useful for you!

The key to successfully picking a topic is to select one that is not too broad (and impossible to do) but also not too narrow (and not finding any research about it).

Defining your topic may require an initial review of literature on your topic to get a sense of the scope about your topic.   Select a topic of interest, and do a preliminary search to see what kinds of research is being done and what is trending in that topic area.  This will give you a better sense of the topic, and help you focus your research question.

When developing a searchable question, it helps to identify the key concepts of your research proposal. A clear and precise search question can be used to develop search terms during the literature searching process.

There are a number of frameworks available to use to help you break your question into its key concepts. Here are some common frameworks:

• Demonstrate skills in library searching
• Show command of the subject area and understanding of the problem
• Justify the research topic, design and methodology
• Bring the reader up-to-date with current literature on a topic
• Justification for future research in the area.

The three key points of a literature review:

• Tell me what the research says (theory).
• Tell me how the research was carried out (methodology).
• Tell me what is missing, ie the gap that your research intends to fill.