What's a Literature Review?
A literature review surveys scholarly articles, books and other sources (e.g. dissertations, conference proceedings) relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, providing a description, summary, and critical evaluation of each work. The purpose is to offer an overview of significant literature published on a topic. For further information, take a look at the California State University, Chico's guide to literature reviews.
A good literature review will be well focused on the specific research question. The sources used will be currrent, relevant, authoratative, accurate, and from an unbiased perspective.
Example Literature Reviews: Different Disciplines
For a social science example, look at The role of justice and social exchange relationships in workplace deviance: Test of a mediated model from Human Relations.
For a biology example: Assisted colonization: Integrating conservation strategies in the face of climate change.
Literature Review Video
Eleanor Smith (Content development, scripting), Kim Duckett (Screencasting, editing), Sarah Bankston (Narration), Dr. John Classen (Scripting, narration), Andreas Orphanides (Web development), & Susan Baker (Graphics, animation, and web design)
Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Literature Reviews Made Easy by ISBN: 1617351911Publication Date: 2010-10-01eBook
This book is designed to help you achieve one specific goal. It's not designed to give you the philosophies of conducting research. It's not designed to give you a background in a specific academic discipline or a specific topic. It's not designed to give you theory. It's designed specifically to instruct you in the practicalities of the writing process used to create strong, thorough, and potentially bulletproof literature reviews. This book is the culmination of years of research experience. It's also the culmination of several years of teaching writing and critical thinking to doctoral students. Although it began as a tool for doctoral students, it has been expanded to be useful for everyone from senior high school students through doctoral candidates working on developing their first literature review or a larger literature review than they normally develop. It has been created for everyone from academics to new business entrepreneurs with good ideas who are trying to write their first reviews to support the new idea they're proposing.
Helpful Books
Writing Literature Reviews-1st Ed by Call Number: H61.8 .G35 1999ISBN: 1884585183Publication Date: 1999-03-01Loan Shelves
