Literature reviews
Discover what a literature review is and why you need to do one. Find out how and where to search for literature, and what support is on offer.
Literature reviews
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What is a literature review?
A literature review examines, evaluates and critiques the literature on a topic. In this context, ‘literature’ refers to academic sources of information such as books, book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, theses and postgraduate dissertations. For some subjects you will also examine reports as part of a literature review, such as government reports. Check with your tutor what sources of information you should use.
A literature review is undertaken for different types of academic work and publications, for example:
- The introduction to, or a specific section of, a dissertation or thesis
- The introduction to a research journal article
- The entire content of a journal article, known as a review article
- An individual assignment where the sole focus of the assignment is a review of the literature
Literature reviews written for an individual assignment or as an introduction to a journal article tend to be more selective in the literature reviewed. Whereas literature reviews written as review articles or as part of a dissertation or thesis are more comprehensive in terms of reviewing the literature on that topic.
Literature reviews that are more comprehensive, require a structured approach to literature searching in order to provide a thorough overview of the research previously undertaken on the topic.
Don’t forget to read your assignment brief or unit handbook, or seek guidance form your tutor for the specific requirements of your literature review.>
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Why do a literature review?
The purpose of a literature review is to place your own research in the context of the wider research that has already been published in that field or topic. Undertaking a literature review is an essential part of the research process and it will help you to understand the topic and develop your own ideas in the area. When writing up your literature review you will be demonstrating your knowledge and understanding of that topic.
When examining the literature on a topic you will:
- Build your knowledge
- Identify trends, issues but also gaps in research
- Identify theorists and the key authors of research on that topic
- Identify and understand appropriate research methodologies in the field
- Justify your research question/area and position it in the context of existing and current research>
How do I search for literature?
How do I search for literature?
We can help you find the literature you need to review. For comprehensive literature reviews, such as when writing a dissertation or thesis, it’s useful to have a structured approach to your searching. This includes creating a plan for the search terms you will use and the resources (for example, journal databases) you will search.
It’s also useful to record the searches you have done so that you don’t repeat the same searches at another time and so you can be sure you have used all of the resources available to you.
- Scope the topic by carrying out broad searches on it. Library Search is a good starting point to do this.
- Read literature review journal articles on the topic and related topics
- Use Library Search and enter “literature review” as a search term along with broad search terms related to your topic.
- Use journal databases and refine your search by document type to ‘review’ or ‘literature review’.
How do I create a search strategy?
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Search strategy
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Search terms
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Phrase searching
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Truncation and wildcards
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Combining keywords
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Example search
Once you’ve scoped the literature and understand the broad subject area, you’re ready to start a more focused search. You’ll need to use search terms specific to your research area/question to produce a comprehensive literature review.
Start by identifying the key concepts in your research question.
Example research question:
A study of the impact of social media addiction on narcissistic behaviour and self-esteem among students.
Firstly, list the keywords in your research question, for example:
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social media |
addiction |
narcissistic |
behaviour |
self-esteem |
students |
The keywords will be used as search terms on appropriate resources.
As part of your planning process you should identify alternative search terms, along with the keywords in the research question/dissertation title.
Alternative search terms are words or phrases that are related to the keywords in the research question. These can be synonyms, or words that are broader or narrower in scope or focus to your initial keywords.
For example:
- ‘Facebook’ is a narrower term than ‘social media’ but may be useful to include in a search.
- ‘University’ is a broader term than ‘student’ but may be useful to include in a search.
Using our research question example, below is a list of alternative search terms for the initial keywords identified.
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social media |
addiction |
narcissistic |
behaviour |
self-esteem |
students |
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social networking |
habit dependence overuse abuse attachment obsession |
self-centred self-obsessed self-absorbed conceited egotistical egocentric vanity |
conduct action attitude ways |
confidence self-respect self-regard self-assurance |
undergraduates scholars college university higher education |
Phrase searching is one of the techniques that can be used to make your results as relevant as possible. It can be useful if the number of results retrieved is very high. Simply place double quotation marks around keywords that are phrases, i.e. two or more words. For example:
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“social media” |
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“higher education” |
Don’t overuse phrase searching by placing double quotation marks around sentences, as you will narrow down your search too much and retrieve too few results. This is an example where phrase searching is overused: “the impact of social media on narcissistic behaviour”
Truncation and wildcards are search techniques which make a search more effective and efficient. Using truncation and wildcard symbols allow searching for different spellings of a word and various word endings.
Truncation is most often used to search for plurals and different, but related, word endings. The truncation symbol is usually the asterisk * and it replaces letters at the end of the search term entered.
For example, truncating the search term addiction as below, will search for: addict addicts addicted and addiction
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addict* |
The Wildcard is most often used to search for different spellings of a word and is usually represented by the question mark ? or a hash sign # or sometimes the asterisk *.
For example, placing the wildcard symbol in the correct position as below will search for the English and American spelling: behaviour and behavior.
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behavio?r |
NB: Truncation and wildcard symbols vary between databases, so check the help pages to find out which to use.
One of the most important aspects of a successful search is the search string. This is the way you combine your keywords and ‘string’ them together. To successfully combine search terms together, use ‘AND’ and ‘OR’.
Combine the different concepts together with AND. For example:
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“social media” AND addiction AND narcissistic |
Combine alternative and related search terms together with OR. For example:
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“social media” OR Twitter OR Facebook |
Most journal databases will have an advanced search page which provides several rows to enter search terms. Using the advanced search page will allow you to build a more complex search required for locating information for a literature review.
Below is an example search using some of the keywords identified from and related to the example research question.
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“social media” OR Facebook OR Twitter |
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AND |
addict* OR habit |
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AND |
self-esteem OR confidence |
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AND |
student* OR undergraduate* |
The number of rows you will use for your search string will depend on your research question and will usually be the same as the number of keywords or concepts identified.
You can also search within specific fields, such as the abstract of journal articles, as highlighted above. This will reduce the number of results and make them more relevant. If you do not select a particular field, your results will include articles where your search terms have appeared anywhere in the article.
