Lit review is the easiest and least important part of a term paper, right? Wrong!
A single glance at your literature review will let your professor know just how well you understand the topic. Moreover, if you’re sloppy when doing a review, you won’t be able to formulate your research questions right, and your whole study will be skewed. On the other hand, a lit review will become a thing of beauty and earn brownie points from your instructor if you do it right.
Luckily, whether you want to learn how to write a literature review for a thesis, dissertation, or a term paper, you can use our advice, tips, and tricks.
What Is a Good Literature Review?
If you think a literature review is nothing but paraphrasing one or two sources, you couldn’t be more wrong. And if you use this approach in your writing, don’t expect to get a good grade.
A great literature review is an in-depth study of the chosen topic as it is covered by credible, relevant, and reliable sources. Moreover, a review is not a mere retelling of the facts or a collection of quotes. Instead, it should reflect your comprehension of the field; therefore, it should include your analysis and synthesis.
When you know how to perform a literature review correctly, it can become an article or a paper. However, most long-form academic papers include it as one of the sections that usually comes after the introduction and before the methodology. And that’s where it should go in your term paper.
How to Write a Literature Review for a Research Paper
We might disappoint you, but the actual steps to writing a literature review are no different than for any other writing assignment. You need to narrow down your topic, find reliable sources, research and take notes, write, proofread, and edit. However, it’s the actual writing that often causes the most trouble, even if you’re not afraid of the blank page. To help you along, we’ll focus on structure, organization, and useful tips.
How to Do a Lit Review With a Proper Structure
Considering a literature review can be an independent piece, it should come as no surprise that it follows the basic 3-part structure of introduction-body-conclusion. Even if your lit review is a part of a term paper, dissertation, or thesis, you will still include a short introductory and conclusion passages to make it complete.
As usual, the introduction must comprise a short overview of your topic and a thesis statement. You can also include a quick summary of the core points you’re about to make and even an overview of your search for the sources to be used. If you’re having a hard time formulating the introductory passage, you can leave it for last.
The conclusion should be similarly short, with a single passage summarizing the key points made and revisiting the research topic stated within the introduction. You can also include a transition into the following part of the term paper.
Body paragraphs are a bit more complex, so we’ll cover them in the next section.
How to Organize a Literature Review: 3 Ways
The answer to how to complete a literature review hinges on the class you’re writing for. Soft and hard sciences call for different, even opposing tactics when creating a lit review, so whichever approach you settle on, always consult your professor or TA before moving forward.
You can organize your review:
- Chronologically. In this case, you break down the sources and introduce them in the order of their publication. You could combine several references if they were published in the same year, decade, or century, especially if you have dozens of sources. You need to focus on the changes in trends, pivotal moments, as well as the causes behind these events to add to your analysis.
- Thematically. With this approach, you should focus on the core themes that run throughout all the references and split the review into sections that focus on each subtopic separately and the connections or contradictions between them.
- Methodologically. This tactic works best if you have enough data from sources that rely on various research approaches. You can compare and contrast the results of historical, social, and economic analysis, quantitative and qualitative research, theoretical and experimental data.
If you choose a thematic or methodological organization, you may also wish to include a short description of the current state of affairs or a historical overview of the problem. Prevailing theories, commonplace definitions and biases, and standards will also add weight to your overview.
How to Write a Literature Review for Dummies: Tips and Tricks
While there is no single easy way to write a literature review, over the years, we’ve come up with a few tricks that make the process much faster, and we’re willing to share them with you:
- Create an annotated bibliography as you read. It makes your research a little longer, but in the end, you’ll be able to use most of what you write in a lit review, adding a few analysis bits here and there.
- Balance quotes with paraphrasing. Too many quotes will make your work look disjointed, while too much careless paraphrasing may result in mistakes and inaccurate representation of the authors’ ideas.
- Review the number of citations in every paragraph. To ensure you synthesize instead of summarizing, there should be at least two or three. Look for similarities, contradictions, pivotal research, and knowledge gaps.
- Emphasize your perspective. While your research should remain objective and unbiased, it should still reflect your take on the problem, a new point of view you formulate while studying the sources.