How to Write a Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide

Key Takeaways

• Learning how to write a literature review starts with a focused research question. Your topic, scope, and review boundaries should be clear before you begin searching for sources.
• Strong literature review writing depends on relevant scholarly research, not the number of articles you collect. Each source should be checked for credibility, methodology, relevance, limitations, and contribution to your research question.
• Writing a literature review requires synthesis rather than a series of separate source summaries. Compare studies, connect related findings, explain disagreements, and show how the evidence fits together.
• Themes, patterns, research gaps, conflicting findings, and methodological differences should come from your analysis of the literature rather than being decided in advance.
• A well-developed literature review is usually organized around meaningful relationships in the research, such as themes, theories, methods, debates, or developments over time.
• Critical analysis means judging what the available evidence supports. Look at research design, sample size, methods, limitations, possible bias, and the strength of the conclusions before deciding how much weight to give a study.
• Before submitting, review the paper for scope, source quality, synthesis, analytical depth, paragraph flow, research gaps, citation accuracy, and unnecessary repetition.

Learning how to write a literature review involves more than finding academic sources and summarizing what each author says. The real challenge is deciding which studies matter, comparing their findings, evaluating the evidence, and connecting the research into a discussion that answers your research question.

A strong literature review starts with a focused question and clear scope, followed by a structured search for relevant scholarly research. From there, writing a literature review means evaluating sources, identifying themes and research gaps, comparing conflicting findings, and synthesizing the evidence to show what the existing research collectively tells us.

This process can become demanding when the research base is large, technical, or filled with competing findings. If completing every stage independently is not practical, you can hire a literature review writer to develop the review around your topic, academic level, and assignment requirements. Even then, understanding the process helps you recognize whether the finished review demonstrates meaningful synthesis and critical analysis rather than simple summary.

Before working through how to write a literature review step by step, it helps to understand exactly what a literature review is and what it is expected to accomplish.

What Is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a critical examination of existing research on a defined topic, question, or problem. It brings relevant scholarly sources together to explain what researchers already know, where their findings agree or differ, how strong the available evidence is, and which questions remain unresolved.

The purpose of a literature review is therefore not to report one study after another. In an academic literature review, you examine relationships across the research and use them to build a coherent understanding of the subject. This may involve comparing findings, evaluating research methods, tracing recurring themes, examining contradictions, and identifying gaps that deserve further investigation.

What a Literature Review Is Supposed to Do

When writing a literature review, your discussion should help the reader understand the state of the research rather than simply see a list of sources. A well-developed review should:

• establish what is already known about the research problem;
• compare areas of agreement and disagreement between studies;
• evaluate the strengths, limitations, and relevance of existing evidence;
• identify recurring themes, patterns, and changes in the research;
• reveal gaps, unresolved questions, or areas where evidence remains limited;
• show how the reviewed literature relates to your research question.

One distinction is especially important when learning how to write a literature review: summary explains what an individual source says, synthesis connects findings across multiple sources, and analysis explains what those relationships mean.

Once you understand that difference, you can begin the actual literature review process by defining exactly what your review will investigate.

How to Write a Literature Review in 10 Steps

Knowing how to write a literature review becomes much easier when you treat it as a research process rather than jumping straight into drafting. The steps below take you through that process in order, while allowing you to return to earlier stages when your search reveals new terms, evidence, or directions.

Step 1: Define Your Research Question and Review Scope

Before searching for articles, decide exactly what your literature review will investigate. A topic such as social media and mental health is too broad on its own. A more focused research question, such as How is frequent social media use associated with anxiety among university students aged 18–24?, gives your research a clear direction.

Once you have the question, set boundaries for the literature you will consider. Depending on the assignment, these may include the population, subject area, publication period, geographical context, type of research, or specific variables being studied. You should also check whether your professor has already provided requirements for the types or number of sources you need to use.

Clear boundaries make writing a literature review more manageable because they give you a reason to include or exclude each source. Before moving forward, you should be able to answer two questions: What am I trying to find out, and what research is relevant to that question?

Once the research focus and scope are clear, you can turn them into a search strategy for finding the right scholarly literature.

Step 2: Develop a Literature Search Strategy

Once your research question is focused, break it into its main concepts and turn those concepts into search terms. A planned literature search helps you find relevant studies without relying on one phrase or working through large numbers of unrelated results.

Start by listing synonyms, alternative terminology, and closely related terms for each concept. Then combine them with Boolean operators such as AND to connect different concepts and OR to search for alternatives. 

For example, a review about social media and anxiety among university students might use:

As you search, note which keywords produce useful results and adjust your search strings when researchers use terminology you had not considered. You can also use subject headings, database filters, and citation tracking to refine the search. This makes the research stage of writing a literature review more systematic while still allowing the search strategy to develop as you learn more about the topic.

With a workable set of search terms in place, the next step in how to write a literature review is choosing appropriate academic databases and locating scholarly sources that meet your scope.

Step 3: Find Relevant Scholarly Sources

With your search terms ready, use academic databases that match your subject area. Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science cover research across many disciplines, while resources such as PubMed for health sciences, ERIC for education, JSTOR for humanities and social sciences, and IEEE Xplore for engineering and computing can help narrow the search to your field. Your keyword brief correctly treats these as research resources rather than the main focus of the article.

As you find studies, check their titles and abstracts before reading every paper in full. Prioritize peer-reviewed research that directly relates to your question, then use reference lists to find earlier studies and citation tracking to locate newer research that has cited an important paper. This can uncover relevant sources that your original database search missed.

At this stage of writing a literature review, relevance matters more than collecting the largest possible number of articles. Keep sources that can contribute evidence, a useful perspective, or important context to your research question. A paper that merely contains your keywords may still fall outside the actual scope of your literature review.

Finding relevant research is only the first filter. The next step in how to write a literature review is deciding whether those sources are credible and strong enough to support your analysis.

Step 4: Evaluate the Quality and Relevance of Each Source

Not every scholarly article you find deserves a place in your literature review. Before using a source, check both its relevance to your research question and the quality of the evidence it provides. A peer-reviewed paper can still be a poor fit if its population, research design, variables, or context fall outside your review scope.

When evaluating a study, look closely at its research question, methodology, sample size, research design, theoretical framework, findings, and stated limitations. Consider whether the methods are appropriate for the conclusions being made and whether bias or methodological weaknesses could affect the results. These factors help you decide how much weight a study should receive when writing a literature review.

You should also consider publication date in context. Recent research is often necessary in fast-changing fields, but older studies should not automatically be excluded. A seminal study may still be relevant if it introduced an important theory, method, or finding that later research continues to use.

This evaluation stage is an important part of how to write a literature review because strong synthesis depends on strong evidence. Once you have removed weak, irrelevant, or unsuitable sources, you need a practical way to record and compare the studies that remain.

Step 5: Read, Extract, and Organize the Evidence

Once you have selected credible sources, read them with comparison in mind. Instead of taking general notes on each article, record the information you will need to compare studies later. This makes writing a literature review easier because you can see relationships across the research without repeatedly returning to every paper.

A simple literature matrix can help you track the evidence:

Source	Method	Sample	Main Findings	Limitations	Theme	Relevance
Study A	Survey	450 students	Finding related to the research question	Self-reported data	Theme 1	High
Study B	Interviews	32 students	Different perspective on the same issue	Small sample	Theme 1	High

Record methodological details as well as findings. Two studies may reach different conclusions because they used different populations, measurements, research designs, or theoretical frameworks. Capturing those differences early gives you material for analysis rather than leaving you with a collection of source summaries.

You can manage the research with a spreadsheet, synthesis matrix, evidence table, or reference manager such as Zotero, EndNote, or Mendeley. The tool matters less than keeping your notes consistent and traceable to the original sources.

As your evidence table develops, patterns should begin to appear. The next stage of how to write a literature review is to move beyond individual studies and examine the themes, relationships, and disagreements that emerge across the literature.

Step 6: Identify Themes, Patterns, and Relationships Across Studies

After organizing your sources, stop looking at each study in isolation and start examining what happens across the literature. Look for findings that repeatedly appear, areas where researchers disagree, changes in results over time, and differences linked to methodology, population, context, or theoretical perspective.

For example, several studies may report a relationship between social media use and anxiety, while others find a weaker or insignificant association. Rather than reporting these studies separately, compare them. The difference might be connected to how social media use was measured, the age of participants, sample characteristics, or the research design. Exploring those relationships is what turns source notes into literature review analysis.

As you work through the research, group related evidence into themes or analytical categories. A single study may contribute to more than one theme, so avoid forcing every source into only one category. Your categories should develop from what the evidence actually shows rather than from headings decided before you examined the research.

This stage is central to how to write a literature review because it moves the discussion from summary toward literature synthesis. Once you can see the major patterns, agreements, and contradictions across the studies, you are in a much better position to identify where the existing research remains incomplete.

Step 7: Identify Meaningful Gaps in the Literature

Once you can see how the studies connect, look for questions the existing research has not answered adequately. A research gap is not simply a topic with few search results. It should be supported by what you find when comparing the available evidence.

Gaps can appear in different ways. Researchers may have studied one population extensively while overlooking another, used similar methods that leave a methodological limitation unresolved, produced conflicting findings, or tested a theory in only a narrow geographical or social context. You may also find outdated evidence or an important relationship that previous studies have identified but not explained.

When writing a literature review, avoid inventing a gap simply because it fits your intended argument. Your claim should follow from the literature you have analyzed and should account for relevant contradictory evidence. Identifying a defensible gap helps clarify what the existing research can explain and where further investigation may be justified.

After establishing the main themes, relationships, and gaps, the next step in how to write a literature review is deciding how to organize that evidence into a logical discussion.

Step 8: Choose the Best Way to Organize the Literature

Once you have identified the main themes, patterns, disagreements, and research gaps, decide how those findings should be arranged. The best organization depends on your research question and the relationships you need the reader to understand. Avoid arranging the literature review simply in the order you found the sources.

You can organize the discussion thematically when several studies address recurring ideas or issues, chronologically when changes in research over time matter, methodologically when differences in research methods explain important findings, or theoretically when competing frameworks shape how researchers understand the topic. Some reviews combine these approaches when one method alone cannot represent the evidence clearly.

Whichever approach you choose, each section should contribute to the same research focus. For example, thematic organization should not become a set of unrelated categories. The themes need to connect logically so that the reader can follow how the research develops and how each part contributes to the overall analysis.

Organization becomes especially important when writing a literature review with a large body of evidence. Once you know how the studies should be grouped, you can work out where those groups belong within the paper. If you need to plan that arrangement before drafting, our guide to building a clear structure for your literature review explains how to develop the outline in more detail.

With the research organized, the next step in how to write a literature review is to connect the studies within those groups through synthesis rather than discussing them one at a time.

Step 9: Synthesize the Literature Instead of Summarizing Sources

Synthesis is where writing a literature review becomes different from writing a series of article summaries. Instead of explaining one study, moving to the next, and repeating the pattern, bring multiple sources into the same discussion and examine what they show when considered together.

Suppose two studies report a strong relationship between social media use and anxiety, while another finds only a weak association. Simply listing those findings tells the reader what each study found. Literature synthesis goes further by comparing the evidence and asking why the results differ. The studies may use different age groups, measures of social media use, sample sizes, or research methods. Those differences can help explain the conflicting findings.

A useful way to develop synthesis is to move through four questions:

1. What does the evidence collectively show?
2. Where do the studies agree or disagree?
3. What might explain those similarities or differences?
4. What does this mean for your research question?

For example, instead of writing “Smith found X, Jones found Y, and Brown found Z,” you might explain that several studies associate X with Y, although the relationship is weaker in research using Z methodology. You can then examine whether that methodological difference affects how confidently the overall evidence should be interpreted.

This cross-study analysis is central to how to write a literature review effectively. Your sources provide the evidence, but your job is to connect that evidence and explain its meaning. Once those relationships are clear, you can turn the synthesis into a critical academic discussion rather than a source-by-source report.

Step 10: Draft the Literature Review With a Critical Academic Voice

Once your sources have been grouped and synthesized, begin drafting around the ideas in the literature, not around individual authors. Each part of the discussion should make an analytical point and then use relevant studies to support, challenge, or qualify it.

When writing a literature review, avoid a repetitive pattern such as “Smith found… Jones found… Lee argued…” Instead, lead with the finding or relationship you want to discuss. You can then bring several sources into the same paragraph, compare their evidence, and explain why their similarities or differences matter.

For example, if most studies support a relationship but a smaller group reports conflicting results, do not hide the disagreement. Examine whether differences in sample characteristics, research methods, measurements, or theoretical assumptions could explain it. Where the evidence does not support a firm conclusion, say so rather than making the research appear more certain than it is.

Your own academic voice should remain visible throughout the discussion. Sources provide the evidence, but you decide how that evidence connects, how much weight different findings deserve, and what the combined research suggests about your question. This balance between evidence and interpretation is a major part of how to write a literature review that demonstrates critical understanding rather than simple reporting.

With the first draft complete, the next task is to strengthen that analysis at paragraph level so each section develops a clear and connected line of discussion.

How to Write Strong Literature Review Paragraphs

Strong paragraphs are what turn a well-researched literature review into a connected argument. Each paragraph should develop one clear analytical point, bring relevant studies into conversation with one another, and explain how the evidence contributes to your research question.

Start With an Analytical Point

Begin each paragraph with the idea, pattern, debate, or relationship you want to examine rather than the name of a researcher. This keeps the discussion focused on the literature as a whole and gives the reader a clear reason for the evidence that follows.

For example, instead of starting with “Smith (2024) studied social media use among college students,” you could establish the broader point: “Frequent social media use has been associated with higher anxiety levels among college students, although the strength of this relationship varies across studies.”

Bring Multiple Sources Into the Discussion

After establishing the point, use several relevant sources to show how the evidence supports, challenges, or complicates it. Studies do not need to reach the same conclusion. Agreements can strengthen a finding, while disagreements may reveal methodological differences, competing explanations, or areas where the evidence remains uncertain.

This is an important part of writing a literature review because it prevents paragraphs from becoming isolated summaries of individual articles.

Explain What the Evidence Means

Do not stop after comparing findings. Explain why the relationship between the studies matters. Consider whether differences in methodology, sample, setting, measurement, or theoretical approach could account for conflicting results and what those differences mean for your interpretation of the evidence.

A useful paragraph progression is:

You do not need to follow this sequence mechanically in every paragraph. Its purpose is to make sure your discussion contains analysis rather than citations alone.

Maintain a Clear Flow Between Paragraphs

Each paragraph should also connect logically with the discussion around it. If one paragraph establishes a consistent pattern and the next examines contradictory evidence, make that shift clear. If a limitation leads to a research gap, show the relationship rather than introducing the gap without context.

When learning how to write a literature review, paragraph structure matters because synthesis happens not only within individual paragraphs but across the entire discussion. Once your paragraphs are connected effectively, the next step is making sure the analysis within them is genuinely critical.

How to Write Critically About the Literature

Critical writing does not mean finding faults in every study. It means judging the evidence carefully and explaining how much confidence should be placed in different findings. When writing a literature review, you need to consider not only what researchers concluded but also how they reached those conclusions.

Start by examining the research design and methodology behind each finding. Consider whether the sample was appropriate, the variables were measured reliably, the methods suited the research question, and the conclusions were supported by the results. Limitations such as small or unrepresentative samples, self-reported data, short study periods, or uncontrolled variables may affect how broadly a finding can be applied.

Critical analysis also requires comparison across studies. If several researchers reach different conclusions, investigate what could explain the disagreement. Differences in populations, methods, theoretical frameworks, definitions, or research settings may produce different results. In other cases, conflicting evidence may indicate that the relationship itself is not yet well understood.

As you develop your literature review, ask questions such as:

• How strong is the evidence supporting this finding?
• Do other studies reach the same conclusion?
• Could the research method have influenced the results?
• Are the sample and setting appropriate for the claim being made?
• What limitations affect how the findings should be interpreted?
• Are researchers working from different theoretical assumptions?
• Is there credible evidence that challenges the dominant view?
• What can reasonably be concluded from the research as a whole?

This is an important part of how to write a literature review because critical analysis prevents you from treating every published finding as equally convincing. It allows you to show where evidence is strong, where conclusions need qualification, and where uncertainty remains.

Once you have established how the evidence should be interpreted, the next step is integrating and citing that evidence without allowing your sources to take over the discussion.

How to Use Citations Without Losing Your Own Analysis

Citations support a literature review, but they should not control the discussion. A paragraph can contain several credible sources and still be weak if it only reports what those sources say. Your role is to use published research as evidence while keeping the comparison, interpretation, and overall direction of the discussion in your own academic voice.

When writing a literature review, cite a source whenever you paraphrase a finding, discuss an author’s argument, refer to a theory or method, or use evidence that is not your own. When several studies support the same point, they can often be cited together rather than described in separate sentences. This keeps the focus on the shared finding while showing the breadth of evidence behind it.

Paraphrasing also needs care. Changing a few words from the original does not make an idea your own. Read the source, understand the finding, explain it accurately in your own wording, and provide the appropriate in-text citation. Direct quotations can be used when the author’s exact wording is necessary, but most literature review writing relies more heavily on paraphrase and synthesis.

Citation accuracy matters just as much as citation frequency. Check that every in-text citation corresponds with the reference list, names and publication details are correct, and the required citation style is applied consistently. More importantly, make sure the source actually supports the claim attached to it.

As you learn how to write a literature review, treat citations as evidence for your analysis rather than substitutes for it. The reader should always be able to distinguish what previous researchers found from what you conclude after comparing their work.

Before moving into common writing mistakes, there is one distinction worth clearing up: a general literature review and a systematic literature review may examine existing research, but they do not follow the same research process.

Literature Review vs. Systematic Literature Review

A literature review and a systematic literature review both examine existing research, but they are not interchangeable. The main difference lies in how the evidence is searched for, selected, documented, and analyzed.

A traditional literature review allows more flexibility in how sources are identified and organized around a research question. The search should still be thorough and well planned, but the writer can refine the scope, follow emerging themes, and organize studies according to the relationships that become important during the review.

A systematic literature review follows a predefined and more transparent research protocol. It typically establishes the research question, databases, search strategy, eligibility criteria, screening process, and methods of analysis before the evidence is reviewed. These procedures are documented so readers can understand how studies were selected and, where appropriate, reproduce the search process.

Literature Review	Systematic Literature Review
Uses a focused research question or topic	Uses a precisely defined research question
Search process can develop as the review progresses	Search strategy is predefined and documented
Source selection follows the review’s scope	Studies are screened against explicit eligibility criteria
Often uses thematic, theoretical, chronological, or methodological synthesis	Follows a structured method for selecting and synthesizing evidence
Suitable for examining and critically discussing a body of research	Suitable when a transparent, reproducible evidence-review method is required

This distinction matters when deciding how to write a literature review for an assignment. If your instructions require documented database searches, predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, formal study screening, and a reproducible methodology, a general review process may not be sufficient. In that case, conducting research with a systematic review process requires a more controlled approach to finding, selecting, documenting, and synthesizing the available evidence. 

Once you know which type of review your assignment requires, you can avoid another common problem: mistakes in the research and writing process that weaken an otherwise well-sourced review.

Common Mistakes When Writing a Literature Review

Even with strong sources, a literature review can lose analytical depth if the research is presented poorly. Most problems come from treating the review as a collection of source summaries instead of a connected evaluation of the evidence.

Summarizing Sources One by One

A common mistake when writing a literature review is giving each study its own paragraph and reporting its findings before moving to the next. This tells the reader what you found but does not show how the studies relate. Organize the discussion around themes, findings, debates, or other relationships, then bring relevant sources together within those discussions.

Including Sources Just Because They Mention the Topic

Not every paper containing your search terms belongs in the review. Including weakly related research can blur the scope and make the discussion harder to follow. Each source should contribute directly to the research question, provide necessary context, or help explain an important relationship in the literature.

Treating All Evidence as Equally Strong

Published studies can differ considerably in research design, sample quality, methodology, and limitations. When learning how to write a literature review, avoid giving a weak study the same analytical weight as stronger evidence simply because both reached similar conclusions. Evaluate how the findings were produced before deciding how much they support your discussion.

Identifying Research Gaps Without Enough Evidence

A gap should emerge from your analysis of the existing research. Finding only a few studies in an initial search does not prove that a subject has been neglected. Before claiming a gap, check whether the limitation persists across the relevant literature and define exactly what remains underexplored.

Ignoring Studies That Disagree With Your Argument

Conflicting evidence is not something to remove from a literature review. If credible studies reach different conclusions, examine the disagreement. Differences in methods, samples, contexts, measurements, or theoretical assumptions may reveal something important about the research problem.

Using Citations in Place of Analysis

Adding several citations after a claim does not automatically demonstrate synthesis. Explain what the cited studies collectively show, how they differ, and why those relationships matter. The evidence should support your analysis rather than become the analysis itself.

Allowing the Scope to Expand During Writing

Research often leads to interesting related issues, but following every one of them can pull the review away from its original purpose. During literature review writing, return regularly to your research question and inclusion boundaries. If a source or discussion does not help answer that question, reconsider whether it belongs.

Avoiding these problems gives the draft a stronger analytical foundation, but the work is not finished yet. The next stage of how to write a literature review is revising the complete draft to check whether its scope, synthesis, analysis, and source connections hold together from beginning to end.

How to Revise and Improve a Literature Review

Finishing the first draft does not mean the literature review is finished. Revision is where you check whether the research works as a connected discussion rather than a set of individually strong sections. Instead of trying to fix everything at once, review the draft in separate passes.

Pass 1: Check the Research Focus and Scope

Read the full draft against your original research question. Every major section should contribute to that question, and the scope should remain consistent from beginning to end.

Remove or shorten material that is interesting but only loosely related to the research focus. Also check whether important evidence has been overlooked or whether one theme receives more attention than its importance in the literature justifies. This keeps writing a literature review focused on the research problem rather than everything you discovered during the search.

Pass 2: Strengthen Synthesis and Critical Analysis

Next, examine how well the sources interact. Look for paragraphs that discuss studies individually, repeat similar findings, or present conflicting evidence without explaining the disagreement.

Strengthen these areas by comparing sources directly and examining differences in methodology, samples, theoretical approaches, contexts, or results. Check that research gaps follow from the evidence and that your conclusions do not go further than the reviewed studies can support.

Pass 3: Refine Coherence, Citations, and Language

Finally, read the literature review for clarity and continuity. Check whether paragraphs follow a logical sequence, transitions reflect genuine relationships between ideas, and repeated points can be removed or combined.

Verify every in-text citation against the reference list, correct citation-style inconsistencies, and make sure paraphrases accurately represent the original research. Then proofread for unclear sentences, unnecessary wording, grammar, and formatting.

Revision is an essential part of how to write a literature review because it tests whether the final paper does what the research process was designed to achieve: present relevant evidence, connect it meaningfully, evaluate it critically, and maintain a clear focus throughout.

Once those revisions are complete, a final checklist can help you catch anything that still needs attention before submission.

Literature Review Checklist Before Submission

Before submitting your literature review, check the complete draft against the points below. The aim is not only to catch citation or formatting errors but also to make sure the research has been selected, connected, and evaluated properly.

• Research question: Is the review consistently focused on the question or research problem you set at the beginning?
• Scope: Are the population, context, timeframe, and other boundaries clear and consistently applied?
• Source relevance: Does every major source contribute directly to the research question or provide necessary context?
• Source quality: Have you considered methodology, sample, credibility, limitations, bias, and evidence quality rather than treating all studies equally?
• Research coverage: Have you included the major studies and perspectives needed to represent the existing literature fairly?
• Synthesis: Are sources compared and connected instead of being summarized one at a time?
• Critical analysis: Do you explain why findings agree or differ and how methodological or theoretical differences affect their interpretation?
• Research gaps: Are claimed gaps supported by the reviewed evidence rather than assumed from a limited search?
• Conflicting evidence: Have credible disagreements and competing explanations been addressed rather than omitted?
• Paragraph coherence: Does each paragraph develop a clear analytical point and connect logically with the discussion around it?
• Citations and references: Does every in-text citation match the reference list, and is the required citation style used consistently?
• Final relevance check: Does the completed review explain what the existing research collectively shows about your research question?

Using this checklist after writing a literature review helps catch problems that sentence-level proofreading alone may miss. If the evidence is relevant, the synthesis is clear, and the analysis remains tied to the research question, the review is ready for its final proofread and submission.

Final Thoughts on How to Write a Literature Review

Learning how to write a literature review comes down to what you do with the research, not simply how much of it you collect. A strong review starts with a focused question, uses relevant and credible scholarly sources, and then connects those sources through comparison, synthesis, and critical analysis.

Throughout writing a literature review, keep returning to the same question: What does this evidence contribute to my understanding of the research problem? That question helps you decide which sources belong, how studies should be grouped, where findings conflict, and whether a claimed research gap is actually supported by the literature.

The finished literature review should leave the reader with a clearer understanding of what the research currently shows, how reliable that evidence is, where uncertainty or disagreement remains, and what has yet to be adequately investigated. If your review achieves that, it has moved beyond summarizing previous research and developed a reasoned account of the existing evidence.

Frequently Asked Questions About Writing a Literature Review