Do you hate writing a literature review? I can relate to this! That’s why I share my simple process that makes it easy for you to write a literature review!

Writing a literature review can be challenging. I can relate to this! At the very beginning of my academic career, when I didn’t know much about writing scholarly articles, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information available in my field of study. 

However, as I’ve started building an understanding of the relevant literature in my field, I’ve realised how important it is to understand the current state-of-the-art in my research. And it doesn’t only apply to writing journal articles. Understanding the key themes and key findings in your research will help you to come up with innovative ideas for your own research. You can later share these ideas with the scientific community in the form of a research article or review article. 

I know the literature review process isn’t simple. Still, I want to share the process I use to write scientific papers, grant applications or any other relevant piece of academic writing. 

By the way, if you’re looking for literature review tools or scholarly sources, check out my other article here.

Why do you write a literature review?

The main aim of a literature review is to gain a systematic understanding of the current state-of-the-art. It helps us:

• understand the central themes in our field of study
• understand how our field of study and studied topics changed over time
• understand the challenges, issues, limitations in the current knowledge 
• understand the significance of findings from our research
• identify research gaps for our future study 
• identify relevant papers and influential theories that have changed our field of study within defined time periods 

As you can see, a review of the literature is crucial to generating and justifying new ideas. Regardless of whether you need to write a dissertation literature review or a review for a standalone piece that will undergo a peer-review process, a successful review will have a single focus – to demonstrate your understanding of the current literature and justify your proposed research.

What is a literature review?

Now that you know why we need to perform lit reviews, let’s talk about what it actually is. 

According to the University of Edinburgh, “A literature review is a piece of academic writing demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the academic literature on a specific topic placed in context. A literature review also includes a critical evaluation of the material; this is why it is called a literature review rather than a literature report.” 

In summary, a literature review is a document presenting a comprehensive discussion of information presented in the key sources in your field of study. At the postgraduate level (Masters & PhD), it’s insufficient to present an overview of the current literature. 

That’s why I want you to place a high emphasis on the specific phrase in this definition – a critical assessment. A literature review isn’t merely an overview of what has already been done in your research area. You need to include an in-depth discussion of the validity of that research, questioning the assumptions made to perform that research.

Be brave to identify any limitations, challenges and issues with the current academic sources in your research field. 

How to write a literature review?

Step 1: Why do you need to write a literature review?

We often miss this step. Before you even start collecting data for your review, you need to define a clear rationale for it. Why do you need a literature review? Your “why” will define the scope, extent and structure of your lit reviews. 

Here are some examples you may encounter in your academic career: 

• a literature review to support your papers in academic journals 
• a literature review for your PhD/MSc thesis 
• a literature review to support your research grant application
• a review article to support your research project

Step 2: What type of literature review you need?

Depending on why you need to review the current literature in your field, there are different types of literature review that will be best suited to provide the information you need. 

We can distinguish:

• Traditional review – presents a thorough summary, critique and discussion of the current literature. It aims to synthesise the current literature and provide a comprehensive account of research gaps and further direction for research.
• Systematic review – includes a systematic approach (i.e. clearly formulated protocol) to a selection of sources and usually includes a standardised statistical analysis of the literature sources. The review protocol is usually made available. It aims to answer a clearly formulated question. 
• Integrative review – similarly to traditional review, it provides a critique of synthesised information for a specific research topic. However, it is structured in a way that supports the development of new frameworks or perspectives. 
• Argumentative review – it aims to examine the currently published works to test a specific hypothesis.
• Theoretical review – it aims to provide a comprehensive account of the available information about a specific theory or concept.

Step 3: Identify keywords 

Once you identify the type of literature review that fulfil your goals, you’d need to come up with a list of keywords for your literature search. 

The simplest approach to identify your keywords is to start reading academic papers relevant to your work and identify the names for: 

• theories
• concepts
• frameworks
• methods
• technologies
• processes
• phenomena
• issues

These will help you with finding further studies in your work. Just to give you an example, my work focuses on carbon capture, utilisation and storage. More specifically, I tend to focus on high-temperature technology called calcium looping. So the keywords I would use to find more papers include:

• calcium looping
• carbon capture
• CO2 capture
• carbon utilisation
• carbon storage
• CO2 use
• CO2 utilization 
• carbonate looping
• high-temperature CO2 capture
• …

As you can see, it’s fairly straightforward to come up with relevant keywords! Make sure that you keep a list of keywords for your research updated! 

Step 4: Search for relevant sources

Knowing your keywords, it should be easy to identify relevant studies. Have a look at the list of databases that you can use to find relevant academic literature that I compiled here. 

Now you need to use your keywords to find relevant studies. Using keywords as they are may lead to a high number of hits, which can be overwhelming. But there are ways to narrow down your search: 

• use Boolean operators (i.e. “carbon capture” AND “economic assessment” to find studies that focus on the economics of carbon capture)
• use quotation marks to search specific phrase (i.e. “carbon capture for coal-fired power plants”)
• use filters available in a specific database (i.e. use filter to search only for review papers in a specific time period)

Step 5: Critically appraise and categorise sources

Once you identify the sources you want to include in your review, it’s time to categorise and critically appraise them. 

There are two things you need to consider at this stage. 

First, make sure you develop an efficient system to store your data. When reading a paper, write a critical summary and collect all important data that will help you answer the main question(s) for your study.

When I write literature reviews, I always compile summary tables. This helps me to keep all relevant information such as keyword, theme, paper title, authors, critical summary of paper’s content, key variables and so on. Also, I use Mendeley to keep track of my references. Want to read some of my review papers? Have a look at my Google Scholar profile. 

Second, you need to decide how you’ll categorise your work. Broadly speaking, you can categorise the data you collect, and subsequently, structure your review: 

• chronologically – chronological method assumes that you’ll organise your data from the oldest to the most recent one
• thematically – categorise your data based on common themes in the literature 
• methodologically – organise your data by the methodological approach used in the literature sources
• theoretically- organise your data based on the theoretical approach used in the literature sources

Step 6: Outline and write a focused account for selected categories

Now that you’ve categorised your data, it’s finally time to write. If you’ve reviewed a sufficient amount of academic papers, efficiently organised your data and decided on how you’re going to approach your review, the writing should be much easier! 

The key here is to have a vision for how your review will look like after you finish. Outlining key sections is crucial to achieving a logical flow of information. You need to know what questions you want to answer in each section. 

Once you have an outline, use the data you’ve collected to write a focused and critical appraisal of the current literature. Make sure that you don’t merely overview what has already been published. Think about what challenges are yet to be resolved, what’s missing and how this can be resolved. 

A final thought…

We all find writing a literature review a daunting challenge. We tend to hate this part of research and try to avoid it at all cost. However, once you realise that by performing your own literature review, you’ll find an astonishing amount of information that will elevate your research to the next level. You’ll become hungry for reading and reviewing the literature.

Never let anyone else do this for you. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on an important part of doing research! 

What is your main struggle when it comes to the literature review? Share it in the comment!