Literature reviews

You may be asked to write a literature review as one of your assignments, rather than as part of a dissertation. If this is the case, you’ve probably been given a general topic or title to help guide your literature search. For these assignments, try to rephrase your topic as a specific question – the idea here is that each paper you include in the literature review can then help you to answer a small part of this question.

For example, imagine that you have been asked to write a literature review on dogs. 

This is a wide topic area that would be impossible to cover in one assignment. Instead, setting a research question on a more focused aspect of the topic will help you to find relevant literature and demonstrate your analysis skills (by breaking the topic down, you are already showing that you are a critical thinker!) You can then select the articles that help to provide an answer to the question you have set. 

By introducing limits on setting, participants and intended outcomes for the literature review, it is possible to narrow the topic of 'dogs breeds' down to a more focused research question. Here are three possible titles for a literature review on this broad topic:

• What are the emotional and behavioral impacts of therapy dogs for autistic children?
• How might aptitude be tested and measured in puppies selected for guide dog training?
• What are the key success factors for dogs as social media influencers on Instagram and Facebook?

Your initial reading will help you to identify trends or themes in the literature that might help to focus your search. You can then follow the standard structure for writing a literature review, using the funnel structure from this guide.

An annotated bibliography combines a correctly formatted list of references (APA) with a short paragraph that gives:

• a short summary of the source, that picks out the key points of the article, such as context and setting, participants and conclusions;
• a brief evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the article;
• a sentence or two on the relevance of the source to your question or topic – what does it contribute to your knowledge of the subject, and in what ways might its relevance be limited?

Sources are not discussed together in the same paragraph, but the document itself will have a key theme or topic that ties the different sources together – almost like a module reading list:Brym, R., Godbout, M., Hoffbauer, A., Menard, G. & Huiquan Zhang, T. (2014) Social media in the 2011 Egyptian uprising. The British Journal of Sociology, 65: 266-271. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12080

This article conducts a comparative analysis of quantitative data on social media usage and political engagement during the 2011 Egyptian uprising, using new bit.ly and Gallup survey results. The study generates a large amount of data on the key differences in social media usage between active demonstrators and sympathetic onlookers. Most significantly, the study explores the key drivers of participating in social unrest, such as a lack of confidence in the government, and how these are facilitated by social media. However, by only gathering quantitative data, the study is limited in its ability to provide an insight into how protestors narrate and explain their involvement in the protests in their own words. Overall, this article offers significant evidence to support a study of the importance of social media in contemporary political movements, and is particularly useful as one of few studies to focus on events outside of Europe and North America.

Be sure to check your assessment criteria for tips on how you should evaluate your sources: for example, you might be asked to include specific methodology types or to link your sources to professional practice.