Literature Review Essay
Literature reviews are useful tools but they can be a little complex to write. Among planning the structure, looking for the right sources and collecting information, there are so many details to pay attention to. It gets hard to find a way to give the firsts steps. In this article, we tell you the best tips to write a great literature review.
What is a literature review?
A literature review is research that collects scholarly sources that can give an overview of a particular study subject. The intention is to list which are the most relevant studies and publications about the topic and display them with a structure. The objective of this paper is to show an organized bibliography that demonstrates the state of a topic in the academic world, a field of knowledge or subject of study.
Literature reviews are academic papers, and, as such, they should follow a particular structure, this is to keep a universal code in order to assure that any person can understand the information in them. To that end, every literature review must contain a general description of the publication, a summary of the main points, a space to explain the gaps in research and a final evaluation of the contribution the publication gave to the topic. A good literature review also includes information about different points in which diverse publications differ from one another.
The main utility that literature reviews have is that they are very handy when you need to inform yourself about a topic but don’t have the time to do thorough research. By reading a literature review, you can have the necessary information to gain a general knowledge of the subject, and it’s the best way to find relevant studies that will guide the rest of your research paper or academic investigation.
How to write a literature review?
It is not too easy to start writing a literature review. Since it’s an academic paper, it has a lot of rules and notions that must be taken into account that increase the complexity of the work. Also, you need to study every publication you intend to include. There are a lot of things but don’t panic because we are here to help. Let us give you the steps to write the best literature review possible:
- Define your objective: are you doing a profound study and will need the literature reviewas a resource? Or do you want to do it now and use it in the future? Maybe you want to study the topic and to write the review will make your learning more efficient. Decide and define what you need from the review.
- Structure the length. A literature review’s length will depend on the length of the paper, if your paper must have 5 pages, then the literature review should have between 2 and 3 pages. This also defines the number of publications you are going to review.
- Start your research: here’s where the hunting begins. Use books, internet, articles and any formal publication. Read as much as you can and take the authors’opinions regarding which studies are the most respectable and reliable. Takes notes while you are reading, they will be very useful later.
- Select the “ones”: once you have read enough, make a selection of the publications adequate for your review, organize them by priority and select useful quotes.
- Start writing: after you have all the research done, you just need to summarize what you have already read and organized it in an adequate structure for a literature review.
The structure of a literature review
The structure of a literature review should obey some academic writing parameters that will depend on the type of format you are giving to it. Here are the most commons.
- The chronological format, in which publications are organized according to the order of the events it studied.
- The methodological format, in which publications are organized according to the research methods that were used to perform it.
- The thematic format that structures the publications according to the similarity of the informationthey provide and subjects that were studied.
J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan is a children’s novel about a boy who doesn’t want to grow up. It’s a story of adventure and fantasy. The focus of the story is on a magical place called Neverland where Peter Pan lives with fairies, pirates, and Indians. …
Read moreJ.M Barrie’s Peter Pan is a children’s novel about a boy who doesn’t want to grow up. It’s a story of adventure and fantasy. The focus of the story is on a magical place called Neverland where Peter Pan lives with fairies, pirates, and Indians. …
Read moreOliver Twist or Parish boy’s in progress is Charles Dickens second novel and was first published on 1837. I still admired this novel since I was grade 9 because the story centered on the orphan name Oliver Twist, he was born in a workhouse was …
Read moreOliver Twist was the second novel Charles Dickens wrote, published in 1838. This heart-touching novel is about an orphan named Oliver Twist, born in Victorian society. Despite all the misfortunes he faces, his story ends happily. Dickens uses a third person narrative in his novel …
Read moreAnalysis: Poverty Introduction Body (Poverty) Conclusion Introduction: Children’s social novel “Oliver Twist” was written by writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870) in 1839 and is one of his most popular works. As a writer in the realistic literature era where “Oliver Twist” is also a work of …
Read more1. Cupid (Eros) and Psyche In Greek mythology, Psyche was an exceptionally beautiful woman. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was so jealous of Psyche’s beauty and fame that she asked Eros, her son, to ruin Psyche’s fame and make her undesirable to men. However, upon …
Read moreThe most notable telling of their similarities is found in Apollodorus’ library epitome 3.5 which ones more tells of the infamous quarrel at Olympus. For one of these reasons Strife threw and apple as a prize of beauty to be contented for by Hera, Athena …
Read moreThe novel, ‘Northanger Abbey’, is a satire of gothic literature written by Jane Austen between 1798 and 1799 during the era when gothic literature and romanticism were very popular. The novel is a direct parody of Ann Radcliffe’s ‘Mysteries of Udolpho’ and several other popular …
Read more“In Gothic Literature women are often portrayed as characters that actively resist their gender stereotypes” In the light of this comment, discuss the different ways in which Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber and Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre present women in Gothic Literature. In …
Read moreIn her autobiography, From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs, known in her narrative as Linda Brent as a pseudonym, writes about her life as a slave growing up and soon as an escaped slave. When she was just a little …
Read moreIn J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the narrator, Holden Caulfield often expresses his hatred towards “phoniness” and phony people. In accordance with the story, calling a person “phony” can mean that they are not honest, and do not have an authentic personality. …
Read moreSula is a novel that tells the story of complex situations of different, yet quite similar,women who represent the society of African American females in the middle twentiethcentury. It allows the reader to see how the people in the situation of these charactersreact to obstacles …
Read moreConsidered to be one of the most widely celebrated Black American writers of our time, Toni Morrison has made an undeniable impact in the literary world over the last fifty years. Her simple portrayals and her honest depictions of everyday lives of ordinary Black people …
Read moreFrost wrote ‘Mending walls’ between two world wars, where he lost a friend in the first, defending borders and where the entire continent of Europe would be carved up again and again for his foreseeable future. Even in his later years with the Cold War …
Read moreIt is a poem by Robert Frost illustrates a relationship between individual and neighbors. He also asserts, “Good fence, good neighbors”. Which attracts the reader and lead us to discuss about it further up. A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbor’s. In …
Read more