Graduate Life Cycle > Writing your Thesis > Literature Review

Chapter 2: Literature Review

A literature review should not only serve as a major summary of scholarly and scientific publications on your research topic, but also present reasoned arguments of how your research will contribute to the field. A good literature review therefore synthesizes the results of your reading and critical appraisal of the literature into a discussion of what is and is not yet known about a topic.

The literature review therefore should enable you to demonstrate mastery of skills in two areas: information selection and critical review/appraisal of available literature.

Through a careful literature review, you should ultimately be able to generate new questions or issues that merit further research, thus justifying the focus of your thesis or dissertation study. In essence you are identifying research gaps in the body of literature that you propose to fill through your research efforts.

Points to consider when writing the Literature Review:

• The literature review must relate the literature to the objectives of your research.
• Jargon should be avoided, as theses typically have wide audiences.
• New ideas, points of view, or hypotheses, rather than new experimental facts, should be presented.
• A review should not consist of summaries of paper abstracts.
• The first paragraph must carefully limit the scope of the review.
• All relevant published data should be included and discussed even when it does not appear to support your hypotheses.
• When published papers are contradictory, and you cannot select one view over the other, then you should state the situation.