How to Write a Literature Review in Apa
The Literature Review | A Complete Step-by-Step Guide
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
Conducting a literature review involves collecting, evaluating and analysing publications (such as books and periodical articles) that relate to your research question. At that place are five chief steps in the process of writing a literature review:
- Search for relevant literature
- Evaluate sources
- Identify themes, debates and gaps
- Outline the structure
- Write your literature review
A skillful literature review doesn't just summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear pic of the state of knowledge on the subject.
Why write a literature review?
When you write a dissertation or thesis, you lot will take to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:
- Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
- Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
- Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
- Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
You might besides have to write a literature review as a stand up-alone assignment. In this instance, the purpose is to evaluate the current country of research and demonstrate your cognition of scholarly debates around a topic.
The content will wait slightly different in each instance, but the procedure of conducting a literature review follows the same steps.
Step 1: Search for relevant literature
Earlier you begin searching for literature, y'all demand a clearly divers topic.
If you lot are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your inquiry objectives and questions.
If y'all are writing a literature review as a stand up-solitary assignment, you will have to cull a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Different a dissertation enquiry question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original information. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.
Make a listing of keywords
Showtime by creating a listing of keywords related to your inquiry topic. Include each of the cardinal concepts or variables yous're interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. Y'all tin add to this listing if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.
- Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
- Body paradigm, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
- Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth
Search for relevant sources
Utilize your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some databases to search for journals and articles include:
- Your university's library catalogue
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
- EBSCO
- Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
- Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
- EconLit (economic science)
- Inspec (physics, engineering science and informatics)
You can use boolean operators to assist narrow downwards your search:
- AND to find sources that contain more than 1 keyword (e.k. social media AND body image AND generation Z
- OR to notice sources that comprise 1 of a range of synonyms (e.one thousand. generation Z OR teenagers OR adolescents)
- NOT to exclude results containing certain terms (e.g. apple tree Not fruit)
Read the abstruse to discover out whether an commodity is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or commodity, you lot can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.
To place the nigh important publications on your topic, accept note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles proceed appearing in your reading, brand certain to seek them out.
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Step 2: Evaluate and select sources
You probably won't be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic – y'all'll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.
For each publication, ask yourself:
- What question or trouble is the writer addressing?
- What are the primal concepts and how are they defined?
- What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the research employ established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
- What are the results and conclusions of the study?
- How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it ostend, add to, or challenge established noesis?
- How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
Make sure the sources you use are credible, and make sure you lot read whatsoever landmark studies and major theories in your field of enquiry.
You tin find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high commendation count ways the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.
The scope of your review will depend on your topic and subject field: in the sciences you unremarkably but review recent literature, but in the humanities yous might take a long historical perspective (for case, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).
Take notes and cite your sources
Every bit you lot read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It'southward important to keep runway of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism. It can exist helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where y'all compile full reference information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you call back what y'all read and saves time after in the process.
You can use our costless APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consequent citations.
Step 3: Identify themes, debates and gaps
To begin organising your literature review's statement and structure, y'all need to empathise the connections and relationships between the sources you've read. Based on your reading and notes, you lot can look for:
- Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more than or less pop over time?
- Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
- Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where exercise sources disagree?
- Pivotal publications: are at that place any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
- Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that demand to be addressed?
This step will help you lot work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) prove how your ain research volition contribute to existing knowledge.
- Virtually enquiry has focused on immature women.
- There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
- But there is still a lack of robust enquiry on highly-visual platforms similar Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that you could address in your own research.
Step 4: Outline your literature review'southward structure
There are various approaches to organising the body of a literature review. You should accept a crude thought of your strategy before yous start writing.
Depending on the length of your literature review, y'all can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall construction might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).
Chronological
The simplest arroyo is to trace the development of the topic over time. All the same, if you choose this strategy, exist careful to avoid simply listing and summarising sources in order.
Effort to analyse patterns, turning points and central debates that take shaped the management of the field. Give your estimation of how and why certain developments occurred.
Thematic
If you accept found some recurring cardinal themes, you lot can organise your literature review into subsections that address unlike aspects of the topic.
For case, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, primal themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal condition, and economic admission.
Methodological
If you depict your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a multifariousness of research methods, you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from dissimilar approaches. For example:
- Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
- Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
- Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources
Theoretical
A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework. Yous tin can apply it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of central concepts.
You lot might contend for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your inquiry.
Step five: Write your literature review
Similar any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction, a main body, and a determination. What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.
Introduction
The introduction should clearly institute the focus and purpose of the literature review.
Dissertation literature review
If you are writing the literature review every bit part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your fundamental trouble or inquiry question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You lot tin can emphasise the timeliness of the topic ("many recent studies have focused on the problem of x") or highlight a gap in the literature ("while at that place has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration").
Stand-solitary literature review
If you are writing a stand-alone paper, give some background on the topic and its importance, discuss the scope of the literature you will review (for example, the time period of your sources), and land your objective. What new insight will you draw from the literature?
Trunk
Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to split up the torso into subsections. You tin employ a subheading for each theme, fourth dimension period, or methodological approach.
As you lot write, make sure to follow these tips:
- Summarise and synthesise: requite an overview of the master points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
- Analyse and translate: don't merely paraphrase other researchers – add your ain interpretations, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature equally a whole.
- Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources.
- Write in well-structured paragraphs: utilize transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.
Conclusion
In the conclusion, you should summarise the fundamental findings y'all have taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.
Dissertation literature review
If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This tin lead directly into your methodology section.
Stand-alone literature review
If you are writing a stand up-lonely paper, you tin can hash out the overall implications of the literature or brand suggestions for hereafter research based on the gaps y'all have identified.
Ofttimes asked questions about literature reviews
- What is the purpose of a literature review?
-
There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:
- To familiarise yourself with the electric current country of knowledge on your topic
- To ensure that yous're not merely repeating what others accept already done
- To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can accost
- To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
- To provide an overview of the central findings and debates on the topic
Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.
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