Introduction to Literature Reviews

What is the literature?

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A literature review asks:

Initial Goals

• Getting familiar with the scholarly conversation in your area of interest
• Extracting salient findings
• Synthesizing salient findings

Your job is to present

• new developments,
• gaps,
• directions,
• changes,
• which shows how your work contributes to the field.

It's not:

• an annotated bibliography
• a book/article review
• summary
• survey of the literature
• a dump

Questions to be answered

• What is already known about the area of study?
• What are the relationships between key concepts?
• What are the existing theories?

Questions to be answered

• What are the inconsistencies in our knowledge?
• Why further study the research problem?
• What contributions can your study be expected to make?

Concept Maps

Map the literature

• extracting "big ideas" from individual articles
• thinking about how those ideas are related
• documenting how certain articles contribute to the ideas

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