LibGuides: Writing a Literature Review: Home

Getting Started

This guide will help you successfully write a literature review and is updated frequently, so check back for more tips and resources. Try the Communication Resource Center for help writing, reading, & speaking.
Nursing students: Please visit the MSN Capstone LibGuides for more information on writing a literature review.

What is a literature review?

What's the purpose of a literature review?

Good news! If you've ever written an academic paper, you've done a review of literature for your Introduction section, so you're already familiar with most of what we'll be talking about. If you keep in mind that you've done this before, writing literature reviews is pretty simple.
Literature review articles summarize, evaluate, and analyze the existing literature into a narrative about a given topic and are an important part of your research into that topic. The most important piece of this, and the thing that makes literature review articles different from annotated bibliographies, is analysis. You're not only summarizing the sources you've selected, you're talking about how they fit together and what the greater implications of that are.
Once you've done a review of the literature, you have a much better understanding about the topic, where there are gaps in the literature, and even which directions you could pursue for your own new research. Literature review articles are an important piece of grant proposals, theses, and dissertations, but even outside of academia, they're very useful to anyone looking to understand a topic better.

So how do you write a literature review article?

Literature review articles are written as a cohesive narrative that most often consists of three parts: introduction, body, and conclusion, though longer literature review articles may also contain an abstract. The formatting for all of these parts is the same as formatting any other type of article in APA style.
The central topic of a literature review article is broken down into smaller subsections and the articles within each subsection are compared with each other. These subsections can be based on similar concepts, methodology, outcome - really, any way that makes sense to you.
Begin with broad background information or studies to introduce your topic. Once you've set the stage, you can begin to include more narrow research into the parts of your topic that you want to focus on more specifically.
And that's really about all there is to it! For more detailed information about writing each part of the article, choosing topics, or deciding how to organize studies, check out the links below to guides other libraries have created for students.

Looking for more detailed guides?

UNC Writing Center - Literature Reviews
Explains more specifically how to choose a topic for a literature review article, the steps involved in writing one, and different ways of organizing sources and ideas into a cohesive narrative.
UW Writing Center - Learn how to write a review of literature
Describes each section of a literature review article in more detail and includes several sample papers.

Examples & Help

Need examples of literature reviews in academic writing?

Search TOPCAT for practice-based inquiry project to find the Master of Science in Nursing capstone project reports.

Search TOPCAT for Master's action research report to find the Master's Action Research Reports by Alverno's Masters of Arts graduates. Find the physical copies near the Research Assistance Desk, call numbers start with 001.4.

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