COMM 300 - Principles of Communication: Literature Review: An Overview
What's a Literature Review?
A Literature Review...
- Provides comprehensive discussion of the scholarly research that has already been done on a topic.
- Includes some summary of important articles on a topic.
- Includes comparison: between how different authors discuss the same topic and how the topic has been handled over time.
- Synthesizes previous ideas on a topic, but also looks for gaps in the literature: what needs to be investigated further?
What Should a Literature Review Do?
A Literature Review should...
- Relate directly and clearly to your thesis or research question.
- Synthesize and contextualize results, not just report them.
- Identify areas of controversy in the literature.
- Formulate questions that need further research.
Adapted from “The Literature Review: A Few Tips on Conducting It”, by Dena Taylor and Margaret Procter, University of Toronto: www.writing.utoronto.ca (file linked below)
- The Literature Review: A Few Tips on Conducting ItThis two-page PDF handout created by Dena Taylor and Margaret Procter at the University of Toronto has excellent guidance on conducting a literature review.
Literature Review Search Strategies
Strategies for a literature review search...
- Comb through references of relevant journal articles and books. You'll probably start to see patterns: authors, journals, and themes that show up over and over.
- Find out who cited an article, and how many times it was cited, through Google Scholar. This will show you how influential an article was and gives you more articles and authors to investigate.
Literature Review: An Overview
This excellent overview of the literature review explains what a literature review and outlines processes and best practices for doing one. It includes input from an NCSU professor on what a literature review is and what it should do. (Shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US license, attributed to North Carolina State University Libraries).