The literature review process utilizes critical thinking skills (such as comprehension, analysis, and evaluation) to synthesize existing works on a topic or question, resulting in a unique analysis or assessment of the literature on a topic.
Purpose
It often includes one or more of the following:
- to identify trends in the literature,
- to connect ideas in the literature,
- to find gaps in the literature, and
- to find resources that will be the foundation for further research.
Source for image "Bloom’s Taxonomy Inverted Pyramid" in Skills to Make a Librarian, figure 14.1
Lit Review Steps
Most reviews follow this process:
- Choose a topic or question
-
Apply a framework or lens to the review (for graduate-level and professional work)
- Set a criteria for what you include (i.e,. decide what kind of sources will be needed for your review)
- Create an effective search strategy
- Iterative searching of the literature
- Search the literature, understanding the results, apply new observations and questions to the search strategy, and repeat the process.
- Select final sources.
- Summarize and analyze the results.
- Write the review and properly cite sources.
