How to Prepare a Literature Review
This Resource Page will help you:
- Navigate the process of preparing a literature review through a step-by-step guide
- Find resources to support you in preparing your literature review in each step
Introduction
A literature review is no different from other written assignments (e.g., essays) that you are familiar with. When starting an assignment, the first thing you may think of doing is opening a word document and start writing. However, writing is the final stage of the process: pre-writing preparation is required to lay the foundations for your paper content and structure.
As shown in the roadmap below, this resource page divides literature review preparation into four stages: planning, researching, pre-writing, and writing.
1. Plan
Planning is the first and pivotal stage of preparing a literature review. It helps you stay focused, efficiently allocate your time and resources, and ensure that your work aligns with the designated objectives and requirements of your writing assignments. The planning stage involves two steps: 1) understand your assignment and 2) make a plan. You can find more information about each step in the cards below.
Understand Your Assignment
A thorough understanding of the assignment can help you clarify the purpose of your literature review. By carefully checking the requirements, you gain insights into the expectations of your instructor or research project. This understanding is pivotal because it not only guides the scope and direction of your literature review but ensures that you align your efforts with the specific goals of the assignment, leading to a focused, relevant, and academically satisfying literature review.
For specific strategies and information, check our resource page on understanding assignment instructions and planning.
Make a Plan
Once you’ve established a clear understanding of the expectations and requirements of your literature review assignment, it is crucial to create a feasible work plan. In this plan, you establish strategies, approaches, and estimated time allocation for each step (i.e., conducting a literature search, conducting analysis, and drafting your literature review). This helps you stay focused and work efficiently on your assignment.
You can use an assignment planner to help divide your tasks according to your timeframe. Assignment Planner | Digital Scholarship Unit (utoronto.ca).
For specific strategies and information, check our resource page on understanding assignment instructions and planning.
2. Research
At this stage, you implement your plan and develop the content of your literature review. In many cases, you will begin with research, which typically involves the following steps:
When initiating your plan, you often need to choose an appropriate topic for your literature review. Your topic, or a specific research question in some cases, shapes your choice of keywords for literature search and the amount and quality of literature you can find in the subsequent steps. However, you should know that topic selection and refinement is often not a one-time effort. It is an ongoing process where you might repeatedly test whether your topic is appropriate or needs revisions based on the results of your literature search and analysis. For example, your topic may sometimes yield an overwhelming volume of literature. In such cases, adjustments to your topic will be necessary to strike the right balance.
For specific strategies and information, check our resource page on how to select assignment topics.
After you’ve chosen your literature review topic or research question, the next step is to search for appropriate sources using the library databases and effective search strategies. Learn more about this in our resource page on how to find sources for assignments.
As you search for sources, you need to establish evaluation criteria to select an appropriate amount of high-quality literature that aligns with your topic. The outcomes of this step can also help confirm whether the scope of your topic is appropriate and if any adjustments are necessary.
Learn more about evaluation criteria on our resource page on how to evaluate and select literature.
Once you have gathered the relevant literature for your assignment and read it in detail, you need to organize key information and notes systematically to compare and contrast study results, methods, etc. This organized system will prepare you to analyze the information and develop the main ideas for your assignment. In addition, it will help you determine whether additional literature search is needed or if you need to further refine your topic. Learn more about organizing your literature on our resource page How to Organize Literature.
3. Pre-Write
When you have gathered and organized literature relevant to your research topic, you are ready to 1) analyze the content, 2) develop your main ideas and 3) produce an outline for your assignment.
Analyze Literature
Once you have organized the content of each source you have selected, you need to analyze it by summarizing relevant findings, evaluating arguments and implications, finding gaps and limitations, comparing and contrasting findings and methods, and finding connections among sources. Learn more in our resource page on how to analyze literature and develop ideas for your literature review.
Develop and Organize Ideas
While and after analyzing all the sources you have read, you will develop the main ideas you intend to write about. Analysis and idea development go hand in hand and don’t follow a perfectly linear process - go back and forth between the literature and the analysis you organized in the previous steps to confirm what supports your ideas, adjust and refine them. Learn more in our resource page on how to analyze literature and develop ideas for your literature review.
Create an Outline
Once you have confirmed the main ideas you intend to include in your literature review, create an outline where you list ideas, sub-points, and supporting evidence. This outline will be the skeleton for the structure of your paper. Learn more about outlines in our resource page on how to analyze literature and develop ideas for your literature review.
4. Write
Once you have established a solid outline, you are now ready for writing. This is the stage when you officially begin to write paragraphs for your literature review. It includes two steps: 1) Write a Draft and 2) Revise.
At this stage, you produce your initial draft based on the outline you crafted in the previous stage. As introduced in "What is a Literature Review", a good literature review goes beyond a simple summary of findings in the existing literature; it involves your interpretation and critical evaluation of these findings. For this reason, you should include both descriptive and critical points instead of merely compiling descriptions of previous studies.
For specific strategies and information, check the following resource pages:
Good writing is never a one-time effort but involves multiple rounds of reviews and revisions. Therefore, it is often necessary to revisit your initial draft a couple of times and improve your writing. For example, you may want to review your instructor’s rubric to confirm whether you have fulfilled all the requirements (e.g., content, structure, and citation format) and ask for feedback from your peers, student advisors, and professors.
For specific strategies and information, check our resource page Revising, Editing & Proofreading and Citations and APA Style.
Literature Review Sample
This is a full literature review paper written by an OISE student on the topic of Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) and Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) in Writing Centers (WC). Throughout the paper, you will find several annotations. Yellow annotations refer to the structure of the paper, its content and how ideas are developed. Purple annotations refer to writing elements and language elements (e.g., paragraphs, paraphrases, summaries, quotes, stance and voice, cohesion, etc.).
Help & Additional Resources
Related Resource Pages on ASH
- How to Understand and Plan Assignments
- How to Select Assignment Topics
- How to Find Sources for Assignments
- How to Evaluate and Select Literature
- How to Read Academic Articles
- How to Organize Literature
- How to Analyze Literature and Develop Ideas for my Literature Review
- How to Integrate Others' Research into your Writing