Literature Review

Lit Review

Basic Requirements:

The body of your paper should be a minimum of five pages (excludes title page and reference page). It should be written in accordance with the APA style guidelines.A minimum of six peer reviewed journal articles should be reviewed.

FAQs

How many references are needed?

There isn’t a magic number.

First, remember that you need to review at least six articles in detail. There’s no upper limit to this, however it’s only a five-page paper, so there are practical limitations.

Of course, you are likely to have many other references that aren’t for articles you’re reviewing, but rather references to articles containing other useful content: single statements, source definitions of particular constructs, or any other related research. For example, terms like learned helplessness (Seligman, 1967) are usually followed with a reference the first time the term is used in a paper, even though the source article isn’t one you are “reviewing.”

Thus, depending on the nature of your topic and your writing/thinking style, you may have well over a dozen references on your reference page, even though only six of them are articles you are reviewing in detail.

How should the paper be organized?

There is not one cookie cutter approach to writing a literature review. The general idea is to write a comprehensive summary of the research that has been done on your topic.

Regarding the larger purpose of the paper, remember that you’re not trying to “prove a point,” but rather to present the reader with a summary of information about each study, and a clear general grasp of what’s been done. You want the paper to have a logical flow, with good transitions when you move from discussing one study to the next.  You may organize your paper according to the chronology of research (oldest to newest), from broad to specific, or by a few themes that you see emerge (sometimes referred to as categorical organization).  Your conclusion should put it all together into a few statements about what we now know about the topic (a concise overall summary) as well as what we have yet to learn. Your recommendations for future research should be tied to what we don’t know, and why it would be useful to know it.

Each study you review will be a little different or a lot different. Likewise, students’ lit reviews will differ in structure and organization according to many variables: total number of articles reviewed, whether there are subtopics, the diversity of methods across studies, and the degree of differences found in the results of the studies.  Any and all of these will play a role in how you organize your paper.

What should be done when results vary from one study to another?

Results of the studies may vary in direction or strengthaccording to the specific questions researchers are trying to answer, and the methods employed. In fact, sometimes, the results of one study may contradict another study; in that situation, your job is to explain these divergent results by analyzing the differences in the participants, methods, stats, etc.  It can be useful to make evaluative statements about studies, especially when you see any particular flaws in logic or methods, etc.  A critique, however, should be logical and evidence based, not simply based on a whim or subjective opinion.  Please avoid statements that begin with “I believe…”
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Bottom line: There’s a fair amount of leeway in how you organize the paper.

If you’d like to access additional guidance, there are a many online resources for writing lit reviews, although some are much more useful than others. I looked over the UC San Diego site and I think it’s quite well done. Here’s the link (below).  Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of their page and look at their list of external sources.
https://psychology.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-program/undergraduate-resources/academic-writing-resources/writing-research-papers/writing-lit-review.html

You might find some helpful tips here, as well.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3715443/