how to do literature review for final year project

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What is a Literature Review? How to Write It (with Examples)

A literature review is a critical analysis and synthesis of existing research on a particular topic. It provides an overview of the current state of knowledge, identifies gaps, and highlights key findings in the literature. 1 The purpose of a literature review is to situate your own research within the context of existing scholarship, demonstrating your understanding of the topic and showing how your work contributes to the ongoing conversation in the field. Learning how to write a literature review is a critical tool for successful research. Your ability to summarize and synthesize prior research pertaining to a certain topic demonstrates your grasp on the topic of study, and assists in the learning process. 

Table of Contents

• What is the purpose of literature review? 
• a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction: 
• b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes: 
• c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs: 
• d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts: 

How to write a good literature review 

• Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question: 
• Decide on the Scope of Your Review: 
• Select Databases for Searches: 
• Conduct Searches and Keep Track: 
• Review the Literature: 
• Organize and Write Your Literature Review: 
• How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal? 
• Frequently asked questions 

What is a literature review?

A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with the existing literature, establishes the context for their own research, and contributes to scholarly conversations on the topic. One of the purposes of a literature review is also to help researchers avoid duplicating previous work and ensure that their research is informed by and builds upon the existing body of knowledge.

What is the purpose of literature review?

A literature review serves several important purposes within academic and research contexts. Here are some key objectives and functions of a literature review: 2  

1. Contextualizing the Research Problem: The literature review provides a background and context for the research problem under investigation. It helps to situate the study within the existing body of knowledge. 

2. Identifying Gaps in Knowledge: By identifying gaps, contradictions, or areas requiring further research, the researcher can shape the research question and justify the significance of the study. This is crucial for ensuring that the new research contributes something novel to the field. 

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3. Understanding Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks: Literature reviews help researchers gain an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in previous studies. This aids in the development of a theoretical framework for the current research. 

4. Providing Methodological Insights: Another purpose of literature reviews is that it allows researchers to learn about the methodologies employed in previous studies. This can help in choosing appropriate research methods for the current study and avoiding pitfalls that others may have encountered. 

5. Establishing Credibility: A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with existing scholarship, establishing their credibility and expertise in the field. It also helps in building a solid foundation for the new research. 

6. Informing Hypotheses or Research Questions: The literature review guides the formulation of hypotheses or research questions by highlighting relevant findings and areas of uncertainty in existing literature. 

Literature review example

Let’s delve deeper with a literature review example: Let’s say your literature review is about the impact of climate change on biodiversity. You might format your literature review into sections such as the effects of climate change on habitat loss and species extinction, phenological changes, and marine biodiversity. Each section would then summarize and analyze relevant studies in those areas, highlighting key findings and identifying gaps in the research. The review would conclude by emphasizing the need for further research on specific aspects of the relationship between climate change and biodiversity. The following literature review template provides a glimpse into the recommended literature review structure and content, demonstrating how research findings are organized around specific themes within a broader topic. 

Literature Review on Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity:

Climate change is a global phenomenon with far-reaching consequences, including significant impacts on biodiversity. This literature review synthesizes key findings from various studies: 

a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction:

Climate change-induced alterations in temperature and precipitation patterns contribute to habitat loss, affecting numerous species (Thomas et al., 2004). The review discusses how these changes increase the risk of extinction, particularly for species with specific habitat requirements. 

b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes:

Observations of range shifts and changes in the timing of biological events (phenology) are documented in response to changing climatic conditions (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003). These shifts affect ecosystems and may lead to mismatches between species and their resources. 

c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs:

The review explores the impact of climate change on marine biodiversity, emphasizing ocean acidification’s threat to coral reefs (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007). Changes in pH levels negatively affect coral calcification, disrupting the delicate balance of marine ecosystems. 

d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts:

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the literature review discusses various adaptive strategies adopted by species and conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change on biodiversity (Hannah et al., 2007). It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for effective conservation planning. 

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Writing a literature review involves summarizing and synthesizing existing research on a particular topic. A good literature review format should include the following elements. 

Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your literature review, providing context and introducing the main focus of your review. 

• Opening Statement: Begin with a general statement about the broader topic and its significance in the field. 
• Scope and Purpose: Clearly define the scope of your literature review. Explain the specific research question or objective you aim to address. 
• Organizational Framework: Briefly outline the structure of your literature review, indicating how you will categorize and discuss the existing research. 
• Significance of the Study: Highlight why your literature review is important and how it contributes to the understanding of the chosen topic. 
• Thesis Statement: Conclude the introduction with a concise thesis statement that outlines the main argument or perspective you will develop in the body of the literature review. 

Body: The body of the literature review is where you provide a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, grouping studies based on themes, methodologies, or other relevant criteria. 

• Organize by Theme or Concept: Group studies that share common themes, concepts, or methodologies. Discuss each theme or concept in detail, summarizing key findings and identifying gaps or areas of disagreement. 
• Critical Analysis: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each study. Discuss the methodologies used, the quality of evidence, and the overall contribution of each work to the understanding of the topic. 
• Synthesis of Findings: Synthesize the information from different studies to highlight trends, patterns, or areas of consensus in the literature. 
• Identification of Gaps: Discuss any gaps or limitations in the existing research and explain how your review contributes to filling these gaps. 
• Transition between Sections: Provide smooth transitions between different themes or concepts to maintain the flow of your literature review. 

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Conclusion: The conclusion of your literature review should summarize the main findings, highlight the contributions of the review, and suggest avenues for future research. 

• Summary of Key Findings: Recap the main findings from the literature and restate how they contribute to your research question or objective. 
• Contributions to the Field: Discuss the overall contribution of your literature review to the existing knowledge in the field. 
• Implications and Applications: Explore the practical implications of the findings and suggest how they might impact future research or practice. 
• Recommendations for Future Research: Identify areas that require further investigation and propose potential directions for future research in the field. 
• Final Thoughts: Conclude with a final reflection on the importance of your literature review and its relevance to the broader academic community. 

Conducting a literature review

Conducting a literature review is an essential step in research that involves reviewing and analyzing existing literature on a specific topic. It’s important to know how to do a literature review effectively, so here are the steps to follow: 1  

Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question:

• Select a topic that is relevant to your field of study. 
• Clearly define your research question or objective. Determine what specific aspect of the topic do you want to explore? 

Decide on the Scope of Your Review:

• Determine the timeframe for your literature review. Are you focusing on recent developments, or do you want a historical overview? 
• Consider the geographical scope. Is your review global, or are you focusing on a specific region? 
• Define the inclusion and exclusion criteria. What types of sources will you include? Are there specific types of studies or publications you will exclude? 

Select Databases for Searches:

• Identify relevant databases for your field. Examples include PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. 
• Consider searching in library catalogs, institutional repositories, and specialized databases related to your topic. 

Conduct Searches and Keep Track:

• Develop a systematic search strategy using keywords, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and other search techniques. 
• Record and document your search strategy for transparency and replicability. 
• Keep track of the articles, including publication details, abstracts, and links. Use citation management tools like EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley to organize your references. 

Review the Literature:

• Evaluate the relevance and quality of each source. Consider the methodology, sample size, and results of studies. 
• Organize the literature by themes or key concepts. Identify patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing research. 
• Summarize key findings and arguments from each source. Compare and contrast different perspectives. 
• Identify areas where there is a consensus in the literature and where there are conflicting opinions. 
• Provide critical analysis and synthesis of the literature. What are the strengths and weaknesses of existing research? 

Organize and Write Your Literature Review:

• Literature review outline should be based on themes, chronological order, or methodological approaches. 
• Write a clear and coherent narrative that synthesizes the information gathered. 
• Use proper citations for each source and ensure consistency in your citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). 
• Conclude your literature review by summarizing key findings, identifying gaps, and suggesting areas for future research. 

Whether you’re exploring a new research field or finding new angles to develop an existing topic, sifting through hundreds of papers can take more time than you have to spare. But what if you could find science-backed insights with verified citations in seconds? That’s the power of Paperpal’s new Research feature!  

How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal?

Paperpal, an AI writing assistant, integrates powerful academic search capabilities within its writing platform. With the Research feature, you get 100% factual insights, with citations backed by 250M+ verified research articles, directly within your writing interface with the option to save relevant references in your Citation Library. By eliminating the need to switch tabs to find answers to all your research questions, Paperpal saves time and helps you stay focused on your writing.   

Here’s how to use the Research feature:  

• Ask a question: Get started with a new document on paperpal.com. Click on the “Research” feature and type your question in plain English. Paperpal will scour over 250 million research articles, including conference papers and preprints, to provide you with accurate insights and citations. 
• Review and Save: Paperpal summarizes the information, while citing sources and listing relevant reads. You can quickly scan the results to identify relevant references and save these directly to your built-in citations library for later access. 
• Cite with Confidence: Paperpal makes it easy to incorporate relevant citations and references into your writing, ensuring your arguments are well-supported by credible sources. This translates to a polished, well-researched literature review. 

The literature review sample and detailed advice on writing and conducting a review will help you produce a well-structured report. But remember that a good literature review is an ongoing process, and it may be necessary to revisit and update it as your research progresses. By combining effortless research with an easy citation process, Paperpal Research streamlines the literature review process and empowers you to write faster and with more confidence. Try Paperpal Research now and see for yourself.  

Frequently asked questions

A literature review is a critical and comprehensive analysis of existing literature (published and unpublished works) on a specific topic or research question and provides a synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a particular field. A well-conducted literature review is crucial for researchers to build upon existing knowledge, avoid duplication of efforts, and contribute to the advancement of their field. It also helps researchers situate their work within a broader context and facilitates the development of a sound theoretical and conceptual framework for their studies.

Literature review is a crucial component of research writing, providing a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. The aim is to keep professionals up to date by providing an understanding of ongoing developments within a specific field, including research methods, and experimental techniques used in that field, and present that knowledge in the form of a written report. Also, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the scholar in his or her field.  

Before writing a literature review, it’s essential to undertake several preparatory steps to ensure that your review is well-researched, organized, and focused. This includes choosing a topic of general interest to you and doing exploratory research on that topic, writing an annotated bibliography, and noting major points, especially those that relate to the position you have taken on the topic. 

Literature reviews and academic research papers are essential components of scholarly work but serve different purposes within the academic realm. 3 A literature review aims to provide a foundation for understanding the current state of research on a particular topic, identify gaps or controversies, and lay the groundwork for future research. Therefore, it draws heavily from existing academic sources, including books, journal articles, and other scholarly publications. In contrast, an academic research paper aims to present new knowledge, contribute to the academic discourse, and advance the understanding of a specific research question. Therefore, it involves a mix of existing literature (in the introduction and literature review sections) and original data or findings obtained through research methods. 

Literature reviews are essential components of academic and research papers, and various strategies can be employed to conduct them effectively. If you want to know how to write a literature review for a research paper, here are four common approaches that are often used by researchers.  Chronological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the chronological order of publication. It helps to trace the development of a topic over time, showing how ideas, theories, and research have evolved.  Thematic Review: Thematic reviews focus on identifying and analyzing themes or topics that cut across different studies. Instead of organizing the literature chronologically, it is grouped by key themes or concepts, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of various aspects of the topic.  Methodological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the research methods employed in different studies. It helps to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies and allows the reader to evaluate the reliability and validity of the research findings.  Theoretical Review: A theoretical review examines the literature based on the theoretical frameworks used in different studies. This approach helps to identify the key theories that have been applied to the topic and assess their contributions to the understanding of the subject.  It’s important to note that these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and a literature review may combine elements of more than one approach. The choice of strategy depends on the research question, the nature of the literature available, and the goals of the review. Additionally, other strategies, such as integrative reviews or systematic reviews, may be employed depending on the specific requirements of the research.

The literature review format can vary depending on the specific publication guidelines. However, there are some common elements and structures that are often followed. Here is a general guideline for the format of a literature review:  Introduction:   Provide an overview of the topic.  Define the scope and purpose of the literature review.  State the research question or objective.  Body:   Organize the literature by themes, concepts, or chronology.  Critically analyze and evaluate each source.  Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the studies.  Highlight any methodological limitations or biases.  Identify patterns, connections, or contradictions in the existing research.  Conclusion:   Summarize the key points discussed in the literature review.  Highlight the research gap.  Address the research question or objective stated in the introduction.  Highlight the contributions of the review and suggest directions for future research.

Both annotated bibliographies and literature reviews involve the examination of scholarly sources. While annotated bibliographies focus on individual sources with brief annotations, literature reviews provide a more in-depth, integrated, and comprehensive analysis of existing literature on a specific topic. The key differences are as follows: 

References 

• Denney, A. S., & Tewksbury, R. (2013). How to write a literature review.  Journal of criminal justice education ,  24 (2), 218-234. 
• Pan, M. L. (2016).  Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches . Taylor & Francis. 
• Cantero, C. (2019). How to write a literature review.  San José State University Writing Center . 

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Writing a Literature Review

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A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

• An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
• A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
• Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
• Summarize and synthesize: Give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: Don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically Evaluate: Mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: Use transition words and topic sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

• Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
• Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

• Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
• Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
• Qualitative versus quantitative research
• Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
• Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

• It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
• Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
• Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
• Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

Getting Started with your FYP (Final Year Project)

• What is a FYP?
• Research Topic
• Research Question

A literature review is....

Reviewing the literature, starting off..., libguide - literature review.

• Key Section: Methodology
• Recommended Reading
• Some Final Tips

'a description of work that has already been published in a particular field or on a specific topic....part of a thesis or dissertation, forming an early context-setting chapter....'

                                                                                                                           (Emerald, 2020)

           ( Wolfson , 2013)

(Steely Library, 2015)

(Gacho, 2018)

Literature Review - what is a Literature Review, why it is important and how it is done

by Monika Bukowska, TUS Library

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• Next: Key Section: Methodology >>
• Last Updated: Apr 10, 2024 2:41 PM
• URL: https://lit.libguides.com/gettingstartedwithyourfyp

The Library, Technological University of the Shannon: Midwest

• Selecting a Topic
• Searching Tools & Tips

Introduction

Accessing resources not found in ntu library, what a literature review is not, searching for resources, more readings and resources, getting started on your literature review, research mindset, purpose of a literature review.

• Grey Literature
• Evaluating Sources
• Research Methods
• Academic Integrity & Citations
• Submitting FYP to DR-NTU

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a systematic analysis and summary of the published academic writings directly relating to your topic of research. It should provide the reader with background information on your topic, and explain the significance of your research, and how your research relates to the rest of the academic publications on the topic. 

This section will guide you on what a literature review is and is not, why you need a literature review, and how you should go about getting started with your literature review. 

Be sure to check out the below links with more details on how to evaluate the sources for your literature review as well as the usage of grey literature in your literature review!

• Using Grey Literature
• Document Delivery - For Journal Articles
• Inter-library Loan - For Books

Take note that a literature review forms the basis and provides background information about your research - some common mistakes students make is when they write a literature review that fails to meet its purpose.

Your literature review should NOT be an annotated bibliography , where you list and summarize a number of articles or academic works about your research topic. The literature review should identify important academic developments of your topic, and analyze them, so as to situate your own research in this background.

Your literature review should also NOT provide only a biased view , where you only choose articles that support your findings. Remember that a literature review needs to provide a picture of how the academic debate surrounding your research topic as developed, as well as areas that are being debated, so that you can position your research within the context of the wider academic discussion.

• Searching Tools and Tips For a more in-depth guide on how to search for resources you need for your literature review, refer to this section of the guide.
• University of Wisconsin Guide on Literature Review
• University of Pittsburgh Guide on Literature Review

Four major steps:

1.Problem definition

• identify a research problem or idea
• formulate research questions
• identify relevant KEYWORDS

2.Search strategies

• identify your information needs
• develop information seeking strategies
• identify relevant information sources
• use KEYWORDS to conduct searches
• retrieve relevant articles, books, etc.
• review and summarise articles
• take detailed notes
• focus on identifying and comparing issues, variables, theories, methods and gaps
• extract key information and tabulate key items in a matrix or summarised fashion
• include pertinent variables, main issues and theories
• analyse how your study relates to the available literature
• highlight gaps in research works
• compare and contrast studies and findings
• create a list of references - a BIBLIOGRAPHY  

Research is not done in a vacuum or in isolation. It has to be positioned into the existing scholarly work. The researcher needs to know what has already been covered in his/her field of research, like:

• what variables were analysed?
• what were the relationships amongst the variables?
• what are the existing definitions, theories and findings?

Purpose of literature review

• to explore the works of others
• to look at existing relevant works in your research area
• to identify important variables from other studies pertinent to your research
• to identify gaps, misconceptions, contradictions in the issues relevant to your research
• to assist in developing your research design

Literature review is an essential entity in research and is a part of:

• dissertations
• papers  
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• Next: Grey Literature >>
• Last Updated: Mar 26, 2024 9:18 AM
• URL: https://libguides.ntu.edu.sg/FYPguide

You are expected to comply with University policies and guidelines namely, Appropriate Use of Information Resources Policy , IT Usage Policy and Social Media Policy . Users will be personally liable for any infringement of Copyright and Licensing laws. Unless otherwise stated, all guide content is licensed by CC BY-NC 4.0 .

How To Write An A-Grade Literature Review

3 straightforward steps (with examples) + free template.

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Expert Reviewed By: Dr. Eunice Rautenbach | October 2019

Quality research is about building onto the existing work of others , “standing on the shoulders of giants”, as Newton put it. The literature review chapter of your dissertation, thesis or research project is where you synthesise this prior work and lay the theoretical foundation for your own research.

Long story short, this chapter is a pretty big deal, which is why you want to make sure you get it right . In this post, I’ll show you exactly how to write a literature review in three straightforward steps, so you can conquer this vital chapter (the smart way).

Overview: The Literature Review Process

• Understanding the “ why “
• Finding the relevant literature
• Cataloguing and synthesising the information
• Outlining & writing up your literature review
• Example of a literature review

But first, the “why”…

Before we unpack how to write the literature review chapter, we’ve got to look at the why . To put it bluntly, if you don’t understand the function and purpose of the literature review process, there’s no way you can pull it off well. So, what exactly is the purpose of the literature review?

Well, there are (at least) four core functions:

• For you to gain an understanding (and demonstrate this understanding) of where the research is at currently, what the key arguments and disagreements are.
• For you to identify the gap(s) in the literature and then use this as justification for your own research topic.
• To help you build a conceptual framework for empirical testing (if applicable to your research topic).
• To inform your methodological choices and help you source tried and tested questionnaires (for interviews ) and measurement instruments (for surveys ).

Most students understand the first point but don’t give any thought to the rest. To get the most from the literature review process, you must keep all four points front of mind as you review the literature (more on this shortly), or you’ll land up with a wonky foundation.

Okay – with the why out the way, let’s move on to the how . As mentioned above, writing your literature review is a process, which I’ll break down into three steps:

• Finding the most suitable literature
• Understanding , distilling and organising the literature
• Planning and writing up your literature review chapter

Importantly, you must complete steps one and two before you start writing up your chapter. I know it’s very tempting, but don’t try to kill two birds with one stone and write as you read. You’ll invariably end up wasting huge amounts of time re-writing and re-shaping, or you’ll just land up with a disjointed, hard-to-digest mess . Instead, you need to read first and distil the information, then plan and execute the writing.

Step 1: Find the relevant literature

Naturally, the first step in the literature review journey is to hunt down the existing research that’s relevant to your topic. While you probably already have a decent base of this from your research proposal , you need to expand on this substantially in the dissertation or thesis itself.

Essentially, you need to be looking for any existing literature that potentially helps you answer your research question (or develop it, if that’s not yet pinned down). There are numerous ways to find relevant literature, but I’ll cover my top four tactics here. I’d suggest combining all four methods to ensure that nothing slips past you:

Method 1 – Google Scholar Scrubbing

Google’s academic search engine, Google Scholar , is a great starting point as it provides a good high-level view of the relevant journal articles for whatever keyword you throw at it. Most valuably, it tells you how many times each article has been cited, which gives you an idea of how credible (or at least, popular) it is. Some articles will be free to access, while others will require an account, which brings us to the next method.

Method 2 – University Database Scrounging

Generally, universities provide students with access to an online library, which provides access to many (but not all) of the major journals.

So, if you find an article using Google Scholar that requires paid access (which is quite likely), search for that article in your university’s database – if it’s listed there, you’ll have access. Note that, generally, the search engine capabilities of these databases are poor, so make sure you search for the exact article name, or you might not find it.

Method 3 – Journal Article Snowballing

At the end of every academic journal article, you’ll find a list of references. As with any academic writing, these references are the building blocks of the article, so if the article is relevant to your topic, there’s a good chance a portion of the referenced works will be too. Do a quick scan of the titles and see what seems relevant, then search for the relevant ones in your university’s database.

Method 4 – Dissertation Scavenging

Similar to Method 3 above, you can leverage other students’ dissertations. All you have to do is skim through literature review chapters of existing dissertations related to your topic and you’ll find a gold mine of potential literature. Usually, your university will provide you with access to previous students’ dissertations, but you can also find a much larger selection in the following databases:

• Open Access Theses & Dissertations
• Stanford SearchWorks

Keep in mind that dissertations and theses are not as academically sound as published, peer-reviewed journal articles (because they’re written by students, not professionals), so be sure to check the credibility of any sources you find using this method. You can do this by assessing the citation count of any given article in Google Scholar. If you need help with assessing the credibility of any article, or with finding relevant research in general, you can chat with one of our Research Specialists .

Alright – with a good base of literature firmly under your belt, it’s time to move onto the next step.

Need a helping hand?

Step 2: Log, catalogue and synthesise

Once you’ve built a little treasure trove of articles, it’s time to get reading and start digesting the information – what does it all mean?

While I present steps one and two (hunting and digesting) as sequential, in reality, it’s more of a back-and-forth tango – you’ll read a little , then have an idea, spot a new citation, or a new potential variable, and then go back to searching for articles. This is perfectly natural – through the reading process, your thoughts will develop , new avenues might crop up, and directional adjustments might arise. This is, after all, one of the main purposes of the literature review process (i.e. to familiarise yourself with the current state of research in your field).

As you’re working through your treasure chest, it’s essential that you simultaneously start organising the information. There are three aspects to this:

• Logging reference information
• Building an organised catalogue
• Distilling and synthesising the information

I’ll discuss each of these below:

2.1 – Log the reference information

As you read each article, you should add it to your reference management software. I usually recommend Mendeley for this purpose (see the Mendeley 101 video below), but you can use whichever software you’re comfortable with. Most importantly, make sure you load EVERY article you read into your reference manager, even if it doesn’t seem very relevant at the time.

2.2 – Build an organised catalogue

In the beginning, you might feel confident that you can remember who said what, where, and what their main arguments were. Trust me, you won’t. If you do a thorough review of the relevant literature (as you must!), you’re going to read many, many articles, and it’s simply impossible to remember who said what, when, and in what context . Also, without the bird’s eye view that a catalogue provides, you’ll miss connections between various articles, and have no view of how the research developed over time. Simply put, it’s essential to build your own catalogue of the literature.

I would suggest using Excel to build your catalogue, as it allows you to run filters, colour code and sort – all very useful when your list grows large (which it will). How you lay your spreadsheet out is up to you, but I’d suggest you have the following columns (at minimum):

• Author, date, title – Start with three columns containing this core information. This will make it easy for you to search for titles with certain words, order research by date, or group by author.
• Categories or keywords – You can either create multiple columns, one for each category/theme and then tick the relevant categories, or you can have one column with keywords.
• Key arguments/points – Use this column to succinctly convey the essence of the article, the key arguments and implications thereof for your research.
• Context – Note the socioeconomic context in which the research was undertaken. For example, US-based, respondents aged 25-35, lower- income, etc. This will be useful for making an argument about gaps in the research.
• Methodology – Note which methodology was used and why. Also, note any issues you feel arise due to the methodology. Again, you can use this to make an argument about gaps in the research.
• Quotations – Note down any quoteworthy lines you feel might be useful later.
• Notes – Make notes about anything not already covered. For example, linkages to or disagreements with other theories, questions raised but unanswered, shortcomings or limitations, and so forth.

If you’d like, you can try out our free catalog template here (see screenshot below).

2.3 – Digest and synthesise

Most importantly, as you work through the literature and build your catalogue, you need to synthesise all the information in your own mind – how does it all fit together? Look for links between the various articles and try to develop a bigger picture view of the state of the research. Some important questions to ask yourself are:

• What answers does the existing research provide to my own research questions ?
• Which points do the researchers agree (and disagree) on?
• How has the research developed over time?
• Where do the gaps in the current research lie?

To help you develop a big-picture view and synthesise all the information, you might find mind mapping software such as Freemind useful. Alternatively, if you’re a fan of physical note-taking, investing in a large whiteboard might work for you.

Step 3: Outline and write it up!

Once you’re satisfied that you have digested and distilled all the relevant literature in your mind, it’s time to put pen to paper (or rather, fingers to keyboard). There are two steps here – outlining and writing:

3.1 – Draw up your outline

Having spent so much time reading, it might be tempting to just start writing up without a clear structure in mind. However, it’s critically important to decide on your structure and develop a detailed outline before you write anything. Your literature review chapter needs to present a clear, logical and an easy to follow narrative – and that requires some planning. Don’t try to wing it!

Naturally, you won’t always follow the plan to the letter, but without a detailed outline, you’re more than likely going to end up with a disjointed pile of waffle , and then you’re going to spend a far greater amount of time re-writing, hacking and patching. The adage, “measure twice, cut once” is very suitable here.

In terms of structure, the first decision you’ll have to make is whether you’ll lay out your review thematically (into themes) or chronologically (by date/period). The right choice depends on your topic, research objectives and research questions, which we discuss in this article .

Once that’s decided, you need to draw up an outline of your entire chapter in bullet point format. Try to get as detailed as possible, so that you know exactly what you’ll cover where, how each section will connect to the next, and how your entire argument will develop throughout the chapter. Also, at this stage, it’s a good idea to allocate rough word count limits for each section, so that you can identify word count problems before you’ve spent weeks or months writing!

PS – check out our free literature review chapter template…

3.2 – Get writing

With a detailed outline at your side, it’s time to start writing up (finally!). At this stage, it’s common to feel a bit of writer’s block and find yourself procrastinating under the pressure of finally having to put something on paper. To help with this, remember that the objective of the first draft is not perfection – it’s simply to get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper, after which you can refine them. The structure might change a little, the word count allocations might shift and shuffle, and you might add or remove a section – that’s all okay. Don’t worry about all this on your first draft – just get your thoughts down on paper.

Once you’ve got a full first draft (however rough it may be), step away from it for a day or two (longer if you can) and then come back at it with fresh eyes. Pay particular attention to the flow and narrative – does it fall fit together and flow from one section to another smoothly? Now’s the time to try to improve the linkage from each section to the next, tighten up the writing to be more concise, trim down word count and sand it down into a more digestible read.

Once you’ve done that, give your writing to a friend or colleague who is not a subject matter expert and ask them if they understand the overall discussion. The best way to assess this is to ask them to explain the chapter back to you. This technique will give you a strong indication of which points were clearly communicated and which weren’t. If you’re working with Grad Coach, this is a good time to have your Research Specialist review your chapter.

Finally, tighten it up and send it off to your supervisor for comment. Some might argue that you should be sending your work to your supervisor sooner than this (indeed your university might formally require this), but in my experience, supervisors are extremely short on time (and often patience), so, the more refined your chapter is, the less time they’ll waste on addressing basic issues (which you know about already) and the more time they’ll spend on valuable feedback that will increase your mark-earning potential.

Literature Review Example

In the video below, we unpack an actual literature review so that you can see how all the core components come together in reality.

Let’s Recap

In this post, we’ve covered how to research and write up a high-quality literature review chapter. Let’s do a quick recap of the key takeaways:

• It is essential to understand the WHY of the literature review before you read or write anything. Make sure you understand the 4 core functions of the process.
• The first step is to hunt down the relevant literature . You can do this using Google Scholar, your university database, the snowballing technique and by reviewing other dissertations and theses.
• Next, you need to log all the articles in your reference manager , build your own catalogue of literature and synthesise all the research.
• Following that, you need to develop a detailed outline of your entire chapter – the more detail the better. Don’t start writing without a clear outline (on paper, not in your head!)
• Write up your first draft in rough form – don’t aim for perfection. Remember, done beats perfect.
• Refine your second draft and get a layman’s perspective on it . Then tighten it up and submit it to your supervisor.

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling short course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

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38 Comments

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You’re welcome, Yinka. Thank you for the kind words. All the best writing your literature review.

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• What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

Published on 22 February 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 7 June 2022.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

Why write a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1: search for relevant literature, step 2: evaluate and select sources, step 3: identify themes, debates and gaps, step 4: outline your literature review’s structure, step 5: write your literature review, frequently asked questions about literature reviews, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a dissertation or thesis, you will have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.

The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research objectives and questions .

If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:

Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

To identify the most important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.

You probably won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic – you’ll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.

The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).

Remember that you can use our template to summarise and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using!

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It’s important to keep track of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full reference information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

You can use our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations.

To begin organising your literature review’s argument and structure, you need to understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly-visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organising the body of a literature review. You should have a rough idea of your strategy before you start writing.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarising sources in order.

Try to analyse patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organise your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic (“many recent studies have focused on the problem of x”) or highlight a gap in the literature (“while there has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration”).

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, make sure to follow these tips:

• Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
• Analyse and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole.
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources.
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.

In the conclusion, you should summarise the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.

If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This can lead directly into your methodology section.

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a dissertation , thesis, research paper , or proposal .

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarise yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your  dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

Cite this Scribbr article

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How to write a literature review in 6 steps

What is a literature review?

How to write a literature review, 1. determine the purpose of your literature review, 2. do an extensive search, 3. evaluate and select literature, 4. analyze the literature, 5. plan the structure of your literature review, 6. write your literature review, other resources to help you write a successful literature review, frequently asked questions about writing a literature review, related articles.

A literature review is an assessment of the sources in a chosen topic of research.

A good literature review does not just summarize sources. It analyzes the state of the field on a given topic and creates a scholarly foundation for you to make your own intervention. It demonstrates to your readers how your research fits within a larger field of study.

In a thesis, a literature review is part of the introduction, but it can also be a separate section. In research papers, a literature review may have its own section or it may be integrated into the introduction, depending on the field.

➡️ Our guide on what is a literature review covers additional basics about literature reviews.

• Identify the main purpose of the literature review.
• Do extensive research.
• Evaluate and select relevant sources.
• Analyze the sources.
• Plan a structure.
• Write the review.

In this section, we review each step of the process of creating a literature review.

In the first step, make sure you know specifically what the assignment is and what form your literature review should take. Read your assignment carefully and seek clarification from your professor or instructor if needed. You should be able to answer the following questions:

• How many sources do I need to include?
• What types of sources should I review?
• Should I evaluate the sources?
• Should I summarize, synthesize or critique sources?
• Do I need to provide any definitions or background information?

In addition to that, be aware that the narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to get a good overview of the topic.

Now you need to find out what has been written on the topic and search for literature related to your research topic. Make sure to select appropriate source material, which means using academic or scholarly sources , including books, reports, journal articles , government documents and web resources.

➡️ If you’re unsure about how to tell if a source is scholarly, take a look at our guide on how to identify a scholarly source .

Come up with a list of relevant keywords and then start your search with your institution's library catalog, and extend it to other useful databases and academic search engines like:

• Google Scholar
• Science.gov

➡️ Our guide on how to collect data for your thesis might be helpful at this stage of your research as well as the top list of academic search engines .

Once you find a useful article, check out the reference list. It should provide you with even more relevant sources. Also, keep a note of the:

• authors' names
• page numbers

Keeping track of the bibliographic information for each source will save you time when you’re ready to create citations. You could also use a reference manager like Paperpile to automatically save, manage, and cite your references.

Read the literature. You will most likely not be able to read absolutely everything that is out there on the topic. Therefore, read the abstract first to determine whether the rest of the source is worth your time. If the source is relevant for your topic:

• Read it critically.
• Look for the main arguments.
• Take notes as you read.
• Organize your notes using a table, mind map, or other technique.

Now you are ready to analyze the literature you have gathered. While your are working on your analysis, you should ask the following questions:

• What are the key terms, concepts and problems addressed by the author?
• How is this source relevant for my specific topic?
• How is the article structured? What are the major trends and findings?
• What are the conclusions of the study?
• How are the results presented? Is the source credible?
• When comparing different sources, how do they relate to each other? What are the similarities, what are the differences?
• Does the study help me understand the topic better?
• Are there any gaps in the research that need to be filled? How can I further my research as a result of the review?

Tip: Decide on the structure of your literature review before you start writing.

There are various ways to organize your literature review:

• Chronological method : Writing in the chronological method means you are presenting the materials according to when they were published. Follow this approach only if a clear path of research can be identified.
• Thematic review : A thematic review of literature is organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time.
• Publication-based : You can order your sources by publication, if the way you present the order of your sources demonstrates a more important trend. This is the case when a progression revealed from study to study and the practices of researchers have changed and adapted due to the new revelations.
• Methodological approach : A methodological approach focuses on the methods used by the researcher. If you have used sources from different disciplines that use a variety of research methods, you might want to compare the results in light of the different methods and discuss how the topic has been approached from different sides.

Regardless of the structure you chose, a review should always include the following three sections:

• An introduction, which should give the reader an outline of why you are writing the review and explain the relevance of the topic.
• A body, which divides your literature review into different sections. Write in well-structured paragraphs, use transitions and topic sentences and critically analyze each source for how it contributes to the themes you are researching.
• A conclusion , which summarizes the key findings, the main agreements and disagreements in the literature, your overall perspective, and any gaps or areas for further research.

➡️ If your literature review is part of a longer paper, visit our guide on what is a research paper for additional tips.

➡️ UNC writing center: Literature reviews

➡️ How to write a literature review in 3 steps

➡️ How to write a literature review in 30 minutes or less

The goal of a literature review is to asses the state of the field on a given topic in preparation for making an intervention.

A literature review should have its own independent section. You should indicate clearly in the table of contents where it can be found, and address this section as “Literature Review.”

There is no set amount of words for a literature review; the length depends on the research. If you are working with a large amount of sources, then it will be long. If your paper does not depend entirely on references, then it will be short.

Most research papers include a literature review. By assessing the available sources in your field of research, you will be able to make a more confident argument about the topic.

Literature reviews are most commonly found in theses and dissertations. However, you find them in research papers as well.

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Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Marco pautasso.

1 Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), CNRS, Montpellier, France

2 Centre for Biodiversity Synthesis and Analysis (CESAB), FRB, Aix-en-Provence, France

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1] . For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2] . Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3] . Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read [4] . For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [5] .

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6] . However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7] . In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8] . The topic must at least be:

• interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
• an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
• a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9] , but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

• keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10] ),
• keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
• use a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
• define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the review to help define its scope), and
• do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a literature review ( Figure 1 ), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33] .

• discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
• trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
• incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules apply:

• be thorough,
• use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
• look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11] , but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12] . A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13] , [14] . When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15] .

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice to keep it focused 16 , 17 . Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [18] . If you are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19] . After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

• the major achievements in the reviewed field,
• the main areas of debate, and
• the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20] .

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21] . This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22] .

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers, and rightly so [23] . As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24] .

Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25] ? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies (“sleeping beauties” [26] )). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27] – [32] . I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to M. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, M. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Funding Statement

This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

Engineering: The Literature Review Process

• How to Use This Guide

What is a literature review and why is it important?

Further reading ....

• 2. Precision vs Retrieval
• 3. Equip Your Tool Box
• 4. What to look for
• 5. Where to Look for it
• 6. How to Look for it
• 7. Keeping Current
• 8. Reading Tips
• 9. Writing Tips
• 10. Checklist

A literature review not only summarizes the knowledge of a particular area or field of study, it also evaluates what has been done, what still needs to be done and why all of this is important to the subject.  

• The Stand-Alone Literature Review A literature review may stand alone as an individual document in which the history of the topic is reported and then analyzed for trends, controversial issues, and what still needs to be studied.  The review could just be a few pages for narrow topics or quite extensive with long bibliographies for in-depth reviews.   In-depth review articles are valuable time-savers for professionals and researchers who need a quick introduction or analysis of a topic but they can be very time-consuming for authors to produce. Examples of review articles:   Walker, Sara Louise (2011)   Building mounted wind turbines and their suitability for the urban scale - a review of methods of estimating urban wind resource .   Energy and Buildings  43(8):1852-1862. For this review, the author focused on the different methodologies used to estimate wind speed in urban settings.  After introducing the theory, she explained the difficulty for in-situ measuring, and then followed up by describing each of the different estimation techniques that have been used instead.  Strengths and weaknesses of each method are discussed and suggestions are given on where more study is needed.   Length: 11 pages. References: 59. Calm, J.M. (2008)   The next generation of refrigerants - historical review, considerations, and outlook.   International Journal of Refrigeration  31(7):1123-1133. This review focuses on the evolution of refrigerants and divides the evolution into 4 generations.  In each generation the author describes which type of refrigerants were most popular and discusses how political, environmental, and economic issues as well as chemical properties effected choices.  Length: 11 pages.  References: 51.  
• The Literature Review as a Section Within a Document Literature reviews are also part of dissertations, theses, research reports and scholarly journal articles; these types of documents include the review in a section or chapter that discusses what has gone before, how the research being presented in this document fills a gap in the field's knowledge and why that is important.   Examples of literature reviews within a journal article:  Jobert, Arthur, et al. (2007) Local acceptance of wind energy: factors of success identified in French and German case studies.  Energy Policy  35(5):2751-2760.  In this case, the literature review is a separate, labeled section appearing between the introduction and methodology sections.  Peel, Deborah and Lloyd, Michael Gregory (2007)   Positive planning for wind-turbines in an urban context.   Local Environment  12(4):343-354. In this case the literature review is incorporated into the article's introduction rather than have its own section.   Which version you choose (separate section or within the introduction) depends on format requirements of the publisher (for journal articles), the ASU Graduate College and your academic unit (for ASU dissertations and theses) and application instructions for grants.   If no format is specified choose the method in which you can best explain your research topic, what has come before and the importance of the knowledge you are adding to the field.    Examples of literature reviews within a dissertation or thesis :  Porter, Wayne Eliot (2011)   Renewable Energy in Rural Southeastern Arizona: Decision Factors: A Comparison of the Consumer Profiles of Homeowners Who Purchased Renewable Energy Systems With Those Who Performed Other Home Upgrades or Remodeling Projects .    Arizona State University, M.S. Thesis.  This author effectively uses a separate chapter for the literature review for his detailed analysis.  Magerman, Beth (2014)   Short-Term Wind Power Forecasts using Doppler Lidar.   Arizona State University, M.S. Thesis. The author puts the literature review within Chapter Two presenting it as part of the background information of her topic.   Note that the literature review within a thesis or dissertation more closely resembles the scope and depth of a stand- alone literature review as opposed to the briefer reviews appearing within journal articles.  Within a thesis or dissertation, the review not only presents the status of research in the specific area it also establishes the author's expertise and justifies his/her own research.   

Online tutorials:

• Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students Created by the North Caroline State University Libraries

Other ASU Library Guides: 

• Literature Reviews and Annotated Bibliographies More general information about the format and content of literature reviews; created by Ed Oetting, History and Political Science Librarian, Hayden Library. ​

Readings: 

• The Literature Review: A Few Tips on Conducting It Written by Dena Taylor, Health Sciences Writing Centre, University of Toronto
• Literature Reviews Created by The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 
• << Previous: How to Use This Guide
• Next: 2. Precision vs Retrieval >>
• Last updated: Jan 2, 2024 8:27 AM
• URL: https://libguides.asu.edu/engineeringlitreview

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How to Write a Literature Review for Your Final Year Project

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Writing a literature review for your final year project.

To have a great final year project, many things have to be carefully put in place; a literature review is one of those things. Aside from helping achieve the aim of your final year project , your literature review helps to provide ground information on your selected topic.

Let me explain, a literature review is a play by play analysis and evaluation of all resource materials used in your project. These works are explained, showing their support or opposition to your project topic stance, and how this particular material helps solidify your project topic. The strengths and weaknesses of these works of literature are also presented but, in a very objective manner.

These materials are usually presented in a summarized and linked form in the literature review so the meaning and connection between all the resource materials used as well as your background topic are not lost. The aim of the literature review and its direction will be lost on your reader and professors if you cannot connect seamlessly all facts and theories presented by the materials used in your literature review.

The idea is to present to your readers prior knowledge already established and shared by experts or more experienced researchers in your field regarding your project topic. Now review does not necessarily mean ‘ this is what I think ’ rather it is more of ‘ this is what the material is saying .’ You present it in a way that helps people understand their relationship to your research topic.

Why a Literature review?

It shows you have done ample research on your topic and have been brought up to speed (by yourself, of course) on the current happenings in the field you are carrying out your research.

It also helps in providing background knowledge on the topic your project aims to discuss. These materials help to either show the chronological development in the field of your project topic, the themes surrounding it, or research methods used by researchers to speak on the matter. A literature review works both ways.

So, how exactly does one write a literature review?

Have a chat with your Supervisor

The project is the whole and your literature review is just a part of it. If the topic for your project is not selected, you cannot create a table of content let alone a literature review. You need to sit with your supervisor to;

• Talk about your topic. You get to select one but he/she has to approve of it. Also, if you having a hard time getting a topic, your supervisor might be able to help with that.

• Talk about the scope of your literature review and how much freedom you have with it. Some boundaries are set by them or your academic institution concerning literature reviews and final year projects in general. These you need to know about as well as the existing restrictions;

for example, some do not permit students to review materials written less than five years ago from the date of your project or some do not appreciate the use of projects submitted by students of any level. So, you need to know the parameters of your literature review. That way, when you go researching, you do not select the wrong material and earn a minus in the process.

Research and Evaluate Your Selected Materials

There is a lot of information out there, trust me! It is very important that in the course of your research you, stick to your project topic and its requirements. Do not get carried away by the information that has no place in your project unless you realize it is going to be extremely useful.

When materials are selected, evaluate them. Ask yourself certain questions on them;

• Do they provide any valuable information for what I am trying to make in my project?

• What was the aim of the author when he/she was writing this?

• What are the strengths and weaknesses of this publication? Is this publication objective enough or is it bias?

• Is the material from a credible source and is this Author an expert or one with a considerable amount of knowledge in this field.

Do you have your resource materials, have you asked and answered all the questions concerning their validity and the direction of your project? Then, it is time to write! A literature review is best delivered in three parts;

Introduction: In introduction, you present your project topic, the objective of your literature review, its parameters, and the importance of your literature review and project as well.

Body: This is where the bulk of your work is. The review of these materials is done in this part and should be done with orderliness and abiding by a laid down structure. What do I mean? Your review of these materials will follow a pattern depending on the aim of your project as a whole; is it to show a progression, support a claim, or simply explore your topic.

If it is for progressive study, your review will most likely follow a chronological order. This will show how things have progressed in the said field, using the materials reviewed. If otherwise, you could decide to team the materials up by their shared theories or the similar research methodology used by the Authors.

Whichever structure you decide to use, make sure your ideas are not scattered all over the place and your review is presented in a connected manner that shows the connection between the materials selected, why you choose them and how they help you bring home the overall point of your final year project. These materials, their ideas, and stance must be linked back to your topic and the goal of your final project; whatever it may be.

Also, note that it is not a monotonous description of these works. You are not there to list stuff and jump to the next one or quote stuff and jump to the next one. Try as much as possible to summarize and evaluate every material referenced, showing their strength, weaknesses as well as their connection to your project topic and stance.

Conclusion: Summarize all that you have said from the beginning till the last idea shared in the last paragraph of your body (you know you are going to paragraph it, right?). Reiterate the stance or overall idea of your literature review here and close with a final tone.

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There are many ways to structure your research project. You may be given an exact structure to follow from your supervisor or you may have to decide on the structure that most suits your project. You should always consult your module handbook and your supervisor when deciding on the structure of your project .

In this section you will find some general advice about creating a coherent structure, some examples of common structures and some guidance to the type of content that is usually included in the different sections of a research project. You will not need to include all of the sections covered below; instead choose the parts relevant for your specific project.

Click below to see some example structures for different types of project:

Literature-based structure

If you are using a literature-based structure, you might look at:

Introduction

• Themed Chapters
• Reference List/Bibliography

Research report structure

If you are writing a research report, you might look at:

• Literature Review
• Methodology/Methods
• Findings/Results and Discussion

Business report structure

If you are writing a business report, you might look at:

• Executive Summary

Technical report structure

If you are writing a technical report, you might look at:

There are different chapter combinations depending on your type of project – consult your supervisor if you are unsure. There are more example structures within the advice about creating a coherent structure directly below.

• Creating a Coherent Structure

Creating a coherent structure

You will need to consider both the overall structure of your project and the structure within each chapter/section. It will be easier to understand and identify your key points if your work is organised in a logical and coherent manner. This means thinking about your reader; what do they need to know and in what order? You should have a clear idea of the questions you are answering and the argument(s) that will build throughout your project. Each chapter/section should link together with a common theme that underpins the whole of your work, and should lead towards a logical conclusion.

It can be useful to outline the overall structure as part of your introduction particularly if you are not using a prescriptive structure (i.e. intro, literature review, methodology, findings, discussion, conclusion). Explain briefly to the reader what will be in each chapter and why. Outline your key arguments and the order in which they will be presented. It can also be useful to include a short introduction and conclusion within each chapter.

Use meaningful headings and sub-headings to guide your reader through your written work. The examples below show tables of contents for different types of research project. You will notice that each project uses very specific headings to inform their reader of what to expect in that section. This will help the reader, but also helps you to plan your content and ensure it is in a logical order and directly relevant to your topic.

Video - What does a coherent structure look like? View video using Microsoft Stream (link opens in a new window, available for University members only).

• Abstract/Executive Summary

Abstract or executive summary

Presented at the start of your research project after the title page, the abstract provides a brief summary of your whole project and should be written at the end of the process. It should include:

• The purpose of the research project and the question you are attempting to answer
• The methods you used to conduct your research
• The main findings and conclusions

If you are writing a business report you may be expected to include an executive summary instead of an abstract. Written last, it will be presented after the title page and will provide a summary of the report. It will usually be longer than a research abstract (approx. 2 paragraphs), and will:

• Outline the key problem
• Identify the scope and objectives
• Emphasise the main findings and conclusions
• Highlight the crucial recommendations

The Introduction

This is where you will set the scene for the rest of your project. There is not one way to write it, but asking yourself these questions can help you to present a clear and well-structured introduction:

What are you doing?

Why are you doing, how are you going to do it.

If you are not incorporating a separate literature review or background chapter you might include a review of relevant current literature in your introduction.

The use of themed chapters is common in arts and humanities, or if you are undertaking a literature-based project. These chapters are where you will present and build your arguments. Each chapter should deal with a major aspect of your subject but link together. Remember you are constructing an argument, not just reporting your research or the research of others. You should analyse and evaluate the primary evidence, arguments ideas and conclusions presented.

Give your chapter clear titles, not just chapter 1, chapter 2 etc. Your title should accurately reflect the content and should be consistent in terms of tone and writing style.

Literature review

You will probably find that you have a lot of material to read through for your research project, and that can feel overwhelming. There are different strategies that you can use to help make your reading more efficient and to decide which sources are relevant to your project.

Video - What is a literature review and why is it an important part of a research project? View video using Microsoft Stream (link opens in a new window, available for University members only).

A literature review IS NOT :

• A descriptive list or summary of sources, such as books and journals
• An exhaustive bibliography on everything ever written on the topic - you need to make decision about what to include

A literature review SHOULD :

• Demonstrate an in-depth understanding of your topic area, including key concepts, controversies or debates, significant authors, terminology, theories and definitions
• Identify what research has been conducted and identify any gaps or limitations in the research to help you formulate your own research question
• Identify the main research methodologies in your subject area
• Provide a context and justification for your own work

Video - What did you find most difficult about doing your literature review? View video using Microsoft Stream (link opens in a new window, available for University members only).

Structure of a literature review

Every literature review is different; how you structure your review will depend on the type of final year project you are writing and what subject you are studying. It is a good idea to seek guidance from your supervisor.

Below are some common structures that could be considered, and it may be appropriate to combine these approaches. You may want to check with your supervisor about which structure(s) would be most appropriate for you.

Thematically

Chronologically, methodologically/theoretically.

Once you have decided on the structure of your review, you can develop headings and subheadings.

When deciding on the structure of your literature review, you may want to think about the degree of depth that you need to go into when discussing previous research. You could structure your review by starting off with general references to the literature in the topic area, then move closer to the literature that is directly relevant to your study. This is sometimes referred to as a funnel structure.

Medium Shots

Funnel model adapted from Succeeding with your doctorate by Wellington et al., 2005.

Longs shots and close ups adapted from Surviving your dissertation by Rudestam, 2007.

Introduction to a literature review

The introduction to your literature review may include:

• Why the topic you are looking at is important - is it an area of current interest?
• Has the topic been widely researched or not?
• Any significant gaps in the research
• Any debates of controversy about the topic, or whether there is a consensus?
• The scope of the review - what aspects of the topic are you going to cover in your review?
• How is the review organised, e.g. chronologically, thematically or methodologically?

Checklist adapted from Writing a Literature Review session, delivered by Dr Hazel Kent and Jane Sharp, Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, 2011.

Writing critically in the literature review

When you start to write your literature review, you need to draw on the critiques you have developed during the critical reading stage . You should be writing critically about the literature which can include:

• Comparing and contrasting different theories, concepts etc., and indicating the position you are taking for your own work
• Showing how limitations in others’ work creates a research gap for you
• Strategic and selective referencing to support the underpinning arguments which form the basis of your research
• Synthesising and reformulating arguments from various sources to create a new/more developed point of view
• Agreeing with/defending a point of view or finding
• Accepting that current viewpoints have some strengths, but qualifying your position by highlighting weaknesses
• Rejecting a point of view with reasons (e.g. lack of evidence)
• Making connections between sources

List adapted from Ridley, D. 2008. The literature review: A step-by-step guide for students. London: SAGE .

The Conclusion of a literature review

Conclude your literature review with a statement that summarises your review and links this to your own research/current issues.

Reviewing your literature review

This checklist will help you assess your literature review. Writing a literature review is an iterative process, so be prepared to re-visit it if you feel you haven’t addressed all of these questions:

• Does your review show a clear understanding of the topic?
• Have all key landmark studies been cited and most of them discussed?
• Is there a suitable structure and logical development to the review?
• Does the review state clear conclusions about previous research, using appropriate evidence?
• Does the review show the variety of definitions and approaches to the topic?
• Does the review reach sound recommendations, using a coherent argument that is based on evidence?
• Is the text written in a clear style, free of spelling and grammatical errors and with complete references?
• Does the review show a gap in existing knowledge?

Anticipate readers’ questions, do not leave your work open to questions such as:

• “What is your point here?”
• “What makes you think so?”
• “What is your evidence?”

Methodology / Methods

The methods section would usually appear after your literature review. For more information about what goes into this section, please see Researching Your Topic .

Findings / results and discussion

You might combine your findings and discussion into one chapter, or you might present them in two separate chapters.

Findings/results

You should provide an objective description of the key findings that help you to answer your research question(s). Even if your findings/results section is separate from your discussion, it is usually appropriate to highlight any significant results, indicating whether they confirm, partially support, are inconclusive, or contradict your hypothesis or previous research.

You need to consider the best way to organise your results, such as under the headings that reflect your research questions or by importance; consult your supervisor if you are unsure.

You should consider using headings and sub-headings to help your reader navigate your results.

Where appropriate, use tables, graphs or other visual aids to help your reader understand your results. Make sure they are clearly labelled and that you explain them in your text. You don’t need to present all of your data/results in this section, just highlight the key trends and use your appendix to provide the rest of the data.

You need to interpret and critically analyse your results and explain to what extent and in what way they answer your research questions. You need to set your findings within the context of existing research that you will have discussed earlier in your project, usually in the literature review. It might be helpful to consider the following questions:

• Do your findings reflect, contradict or build on existing knowledge?
• Do they confirm, partially support, are inconclusive or contradict your hypothesis?
• Are there any anomalies?
• Were your findings unexpected and why that might be?
• What are the implications of your findings?

Here you can return your writing to the context of the wider academic debates. This should draw everything together and reiterate your main argument(s). Don’t bring in any new ideas/theories into your conclusion; anything you write about here should already have been discussed in the main body.

• What have you found? Remind the reader of your research problem, including your aims and objectives and research questions
• Synthesise your main findings. This will involve highlighting the main themes and showing how they fit together (rather than repeating all of your points). What is your overall conclusion?
• How does your work correspond with, or differ from, other studies or theories?
• What has your research added to the academic debate in this area? Do you have any recommendations for future research, or implications for the real world?

Reference list / bibliography

You need to include a list of all the material you have cited throughout your project. Check with your school which referencing style you should use. For more information on referencing see Writing Up Your Project .

This is supplementary material that the reader may want to see, but does not fit into the main body of your project e.g. example questionnaire, consent forms, complete raw data. Clearly label your appendices (e.g Appendix A, Appendix B etc.) and use these labels when referring to your appendices in your project, e.g. "Appendix A shows…". Appendices are usually not included in your word count but make sure you check this with your supervisor.

Coherent structure in chapters Example

The following is from a School of Languages, Cultures and Societies master's dissertation entitled 'Antoinette's construction of the Self in Wide Sargasso Sea'.

Click to view and print this example .

Intro to Chapter 2

The second chapter of my research project focuses on the identity of the controversial character Antoinette in the 1966 - postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea. While investigating the reasons that make Rhys’ masterpiece a rewriting of the canonical novel of Jane Eyre, I will also examine the intertextual relationship between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea in order to explain how the Caribbean author managed to comply with her intention of restoring Antoinette’s identity; in fact, ‘remaining faithful to Brontë's plot line, Rhys exhibits the differences between the two sides of the Atlantic, the differences across the Sargasso Sea.

Furthermore, aided by Spivak’s and Lacan’s theorisations of the Other in relation to the Self, I will delve into the challenging task of comprehending the affirmation of an in-between identity such as that of Antoinette. This unit will, thus, lay the foundation for the analysis of subjectivity in letters which will be presented in the third chapter of this dissertation.

Conclusion to Chapter 2

The second chapter of the present research has offered an unusual interpretation of the construction of Antoinette’s identity in contrast to the latest critics of the impossible affirmation of the mad woman’s Self over the Other. Drawing on James’s and Sarup’s theorisations of the identity together with the Hegelian contribution to the subject, this chapter has demonstrated how Rhys has successfully accomplished her original aim of giving a life and an identity to Antoinette through the deconstruction of the oppressed character of Jane Eyre’s Bertha. The final chapter of this piece of research will attempt to prove the same through the analysis of the primary resource of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Intro to Chapter 3

If the second chapter of my piece of research tried to defend Rhys against her fierce critics who maintain that her attempt of Antoinette’s identity construction in the post- colonial novel of Wide Sargasso Sea is unsuccessful, the third one will aim to outlining the literary devices used by the author to construct Antoinette’s identity. While bearing in mind Lacan’s and Hegel’s approaches to the Self/ Other couplet, introduced in the previous chapter, this unit will analyse the relationship of power between Antoinette and Rochester in the heroine’s appropriation of the Self and it will give proof of Antoinette’s construction of subjectivity through the linguistic analysis of letters in Wide Sargasso Sea.

Click below to highlight areas of this introduction commented on by a tutor:

• The student provides a short introduction to this chapter by referring back to themes they have introduced in the previous chapter, and then then detailing how these will be explored more specifically in this chapter
• At the end of the chapter the student provides a brief conclusion which provides a recap on the main themes covered and then links forward to the next chapter
• Here the student makes a very clear connection for the reader between the previous chapter and current chapter. They provide an explanation of how the ideas connect, and what the reader can expect from reading this chapter

Table of Contents Example 1

The following table of contents is from a School of Law undergraduate dissertation entitled 'The potential effects of reduced street lighting on crime: an empirical study of the 'selective part-night street lighting' scheme in Leeds'.

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: background.

• Leeds City Council’s ‘selective part-night street lighting’ scheme
• Selective part-night street lighting’s potential impacts on crime
• Reductions in street lighting and crime displacement

Chapter 2: Empirical study

• Preliminary concerns
• Research methods

Chapter 3: Summary of results

• Primary data: street level crime trends
• Secondary data: ward level crime trends

Chapter 4: Discussion

• Research limitations
• Appendix 1: Supplementary evidence
• Appendix 2: Raw primary research data
• Appendix 3: SPNSL site maps
• Appendix 4: Raw secondary research data

Table of Contents Example 2

The following table of contents is from a School of Mathematics undergraduate project entitled 'The dynamics of accretion discs'.

General introduction

Physical preliminaries.

• Position, velocity and acceleration
• Cylindrical polar coordinates
• Newton's laws of motion
• Linear and angular moment
• Newton’s law of gravity and gravitational field
• Equations of envy

The motion of particles in space

• Two body problem
• Reduction to a one body problem
• Minimum energy state

Further dissipation of energy

• Angular momentum transportation
• Mass transportation
• Summary of discrete particle analysis

Astrophysical fluid dynamics equations

• Introduction to a fluid element
• Lagrangian description of fluids
• Conservation of mass
• Forces on a fluid
• Equation of a motion
• Conservation of mass analysis
• Equation of motion analysis
• Derivation of the surface density diffusion equation
• Analysis of the diffusion equation
• Discussion of solution and steady state disc
• Keplerian assumption validation
• Accretion rates and luminosities of a steady disc
• Confrontation with observations

Magnetohydrodynamics equations

• Introduction to MHD
• The induction equation
• Ideal MHD equation of motion
• Summary of ideal MHD equation

Magnetised accretion disc

• Linear perturbation analysis
• MHD Waves and the origin of instability
• Discussion of linear stability analysis

Conclusion of the dynamics of accretion discs

Expressions in cylindrical coordinates, vector calculus identites, table of contents example 3.

The following table of contents is from a School of History undergraduate dissertation entitled 'Celebrities of an Age of War, 1739-1815'.

Chapter 1: The Martial Hero as a Celebrity

Chapter 2: structuralism and celebrity in eighteenth-century britain, chapter 3: context, character, and the importance of the public image, table of contents example 4.

The following table of contents is from a School of Civil Engineering undergraduate research project entitled 'The Effects of Cement Prehydration on Engineering Properties'.

• Prehydration of Cement
• Manufacture of Cement
• Hydration of Ordinary Portland Cement
• Hydration of C3S/C2S
• Hydration of C3A
• Hydration of C4AF
• Mechanism of Hydration
• Carbonation
• Properties of Fresh Cement
• Properties of Hardened Cement

Laboratory work

• Specimen preparation
• Thermogravimetric Analysis
• Conduction Calorimetry
• Compressive Strength Test
• X-Ray Diffraction
• Fourier Transform Infrared - Attenuated Total Reflectance (FTIR-ATR)
• Scanning Electron Microscope
• VICAT Penetration Test
• Standard Consistency
• Setting Time
• Flow Table Test

Results and Discussion

Abstract example 1.

The following abstract is from a School of Politics and International Studies student journal entitled 'Does corruption create additional challenges for Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in their partnership work with the Cambodian government (in education)?'.

Both ‘corruption in education’ and ‘partnership work’ have been given increased attention in international development sector over the last 20 years. This dissertation brings these issues together with a focus on the impact of corruption on NGO-government partnership work in Cambodia. This paper outlines challenges to NGO-government partnerships work under four key themes - definition, authority and legitimacy, advocacy and identity, and effectiveness. Cambodia is then put forward as a case study as it suffers from widespread systematic corruption in the education sector. The country has also had significant input to rebuild its education system through outside organisations, including significant support from NGOs. This dissertation draws on academic work, grey literature and eight interviews with NGOs manages to discuss “Does corruption create additional challenges for Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in their partnership work with the Cambodian government (in education)?”. It concludes that numerous additional challenges can be identified when looking at NGO-government partnerships through the ‘lens of corruption’ and partnership may not be the most appropriate model for addressing issues of corruption in education.

Abstract Example 2

The following abstract is from a School of Physics and Astronomy undergraduate dissertation entitled 'Quantum effects in biology'.

Recently, there has been a growing interest and controversy about the role that quantum effects might play in some biological processes. Here, two heavily studied examples of such effects are discussed: The impact of quantum coherence in the efficiency of energy transport in photosynthesis and the radical pair mechanism in the magnetic compass of birds. In this study, a review of theoretical and experimental work that has aided understanding these effects, provides the ground for discussion regarding their biological relevance. The findings of this work suggest that quantum coherence might be crucial for the efficiency of energy transfer in photosynthetic systems, whereas more evidence are needed to support the idea of a magnetic compass based on the radical pair mechanism. In addition, gaps in the current research in these two fields are identified and recommendations for further work are made.

Abstract Example 3

The following abstract is from a School of Languages, Cultures and Societies master's dissertation entitled 'An Investigation into Language and Cultural Planning in the Basque Country'.

This dissertation explores the efficacy of language and cultural policy in the Basque Country. It explores how Catalonia succeeded in reviving the Catalan language and culture after decades of oppression under General Franco’s dictatorship and whether a similar framework would be suitable for the Basque Country. The weaknesses in the administrative departments of the Basque government are exposed in addition to the inconsistencies of legislation in different Basque Provinces. The central issue concerns a lack of ideological agreement among political parties and members of the community which has hindered progress in increasing the number of speakers of the Basque language and encouraging interest in the Basque culture. The models of language and cultural policy used in Quebec and Wales are used as further comparisons to the Basque Country in order to establish whether it would be appropriate to explore policy outside of the Spanish context. Finally, the conclusion discusses how several separate problems have slowed the development of adequate policy in the Basque Country.

Executive Summary Example

The following executive summary is from a Leeds University Business School undergraduate report.

With recent budget concerns in the health service, the need to assess performance and accountability in regional hospitals has become even more important. This report was commissioned to assess whether a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach to performance management could be used in Eastham Hospital. The BSC tool was seen to be appropriate as it provides an overview of the risks and benefits of strategic and operational decisions. The information gathered from scorecard results will provide a means of accountability and support the health planning process. Based on the willingness of the board and employee attitude, it was also concluded that the BSC could be successfully used if the following recommendations are met:

• strengthening communication between senior management and hospital ward teams
• ensuring management are committed to the use of the BSC
• coordinating a target setting and reward system for staff

Introduction Example

The following introduction is from a School of History undergraduate research project entitled '“Uganda’s children are being sodomised left and right!”: change and continuity in perceptions of homosexuality in uganda, 1876-2014'.

On the 24th February 2014, President Yoweri Museveni signed The Anti - Homosexuality Act, an act prohibiting the occurrence, recognition or promotion of same-sex relations in Uganda. This is the apex of a state-driven, religion-endorsed homophobia which, since the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference, 1998, has swept across the nation and embedded itself within public consciousness. Taxi drivers decorate their bumpers with stickers proudly proclaiming diatribes instructing people to ‘Say No 2 Sodomy’ whilst leading clergy implore citizens to ‘stand firm’ in their opposition to homosexuality. Across the rest of Africa these messages are the norm, not the exception; thirty-seven other African countries have anti-homosexuality laws. In 1995, two weeks after refusing to allow the organisation Gay and Lesbian Zimbabwe (GALZ) from taking part in a book fair, Robert Mugabe declared that homosexuality was ‘sub-human behaviour’, ‘worse than [that of] dogs and pigs’. More recently, in Zambia, Bishop Joshua Banda has claimed that same-sex couples ‘are doing it the wrong way’. With Museveni pronouncing that the Act was incited by ‘arrogant [...] Western groups [...] coming into our schools and recruiting young children’, it is clear that there are three major tropes within African perceptions of homosexuality; that it is (i) unnatural; (ii) un-Christian; and (iii) un-African.

Homosexuality has been presented as foreign to the African continent, since the late eighteenth century. However, it was not until the arrival of Christian missionaries in Buganda in the late 1870s, that this perception became cemented with their condemnation of Kabaka Mwanga’s homosexual relations. The Christian anthropologist, John Roscoe, had soon defined the sexuality of both the Banyoro and the Baganda as exclusively heterosexual. For the rest of the twentieth century, this presumption went largely unchallenged by anthropologists, and when homosexuality was mentioned, it was passed over swiftly or clarified as an anomaly. This continuing silence was punctuated only by the accounts of historians, who whilst writing about the pre-colonial Buganda, left the foreign assumptions of the missionaries unchallenged. Although the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) had been seen as a homosexual pandemic in the West, it was, and still is, seen as exclusively heterosexual in Africa. This silence was finally broken by T. Dunbar Moodie in 1994, who revealed that homosexual mine marriages were an integral part of a distinctly patriarchal microcosm in South Africa’s gold mines in the 1970s. This neatly coincided with the African National Congress including ‘sexual orientation’ in the equality clause of their new constitution.

With this barrier now broken, scholarship has been primarily focused on refuting the alienating claims of the increasingly homophobic rhetoric of African leaders. Marc Epprecht has been at the forefront of this research, perceiving homophobia, not homosexuality, as un-African. Recently, scholars have focused on trying to explain why virulent homophobia has emerged now; pointing their proverbial fingers at a multitude of factors ranging from fears of neo-imperialism, to the influence of the US evangelical Christian Right, and perceived threats to patriarchal heteronormative norms. While scholars may have answered the question of why now, they have been guilty of not delving deep enough into the past to explain why, a society they contend as traditionally having rather fluid notions of sexuality, has now unified behind homophobic principles.

Apart from being dismissed as the source of ‘un-African’ perceptions, little has been done to show how the Christian morality instilled by the European missionaries in pre-colonial Uganda is connected with the anti-homosexual sentiment of today. This is likely resulting from the fact that there is a distinct lack of African “voices” discussing homosexuality in the pre-colonial period. Outside of the unreliable quotes included in the plentiful accounts of the missionaries, the earliest mention of homosexuality by Baganda sources is within two histories written in the early 1900s. Although, they were written by two prominent converts, and as such repeat the moral language of the missionaries, by looking at their silences and using them alongside Luganda proverbs, we are able to explore how Christian mores transposed traditional notions of sexuality. Like anthropological research, colonial records are mostly devoid of reference to irregular sexualities. However, records relating to a series of disturbances at King’s College, Budo in 1942, reveal that homosexuality was prevalent amongst the students. Again, while authentic African opinion is limited, perceptions can be ascertained through careful analysis of the correspondence and reports of colonial officials. In direct contrast, the explosion of social media in recent years means that today’s “voices” are now easily accessible. Nevertheless, must remember that with homosexuality now a rather controversial topic, much of what Uganda’s leaders say deliberately creates or upholds certain perceptions.

With this in mind, it is important to define what ‘homosexuality’ means in this essay to avoid any confusion. Whilst Epprecht sees the term ‘homosexuality’ as embodying a wide variety of sexualities, it is defined by The Anti-Homosexuality Act as ‘same gender or same sex sexual acts’. However, it is clearly understood within Ugandan society as male-male relations, with current rhetoric distinguishing it from ‘lesbianism’. Therefore, although the male ‘homosexual’ relations discussed by the missionaries were not described as such, the term has been used throughout the essay in the interests of continuity.

This dissertation will attempt to provide a new insight into why perceptions of homosexuality are so adverse in Uganda today. In doing so, it will highlight how these perceptions have been marked by continuity and change over the past one hundred and forty years. We begin by exploring how the Baganda reacted to the Christian morality of the missionaries. Even though their narratives are limited, it is clear that this morality created an inflexible mesh of sexual virtues. This led to homosexuality becoming identified as a dangerous foreign immorality. Chapter II traces how, by the 1940s, this identity had developed, becoming associated with criminality and focuses on a period of disturbances which occurred within the grounds of the prestigious boarding school, King’s College, Budo. The final chapter explores how this multifaceted perception of abnormality forms a significant basis for the homophobic torrent espoused by Uganda’s leaders today.

• The student draws on legislation, journal articles, published reports and websites to set the context of the dissertation. They go straight into explaining relevant background about Uganda so it is clear to the reader why the student has focused on Uganda when researching this topic
• They also include relevant historic background about the recognition of homosexuality in Africa
• The student discusses and refers to current scholarship and where research is currently focussed. They reveal the gaps and weaknesses in this research
• The student continues to analyse in more depth the gaps in the current scholarly debates in this area
• The student uses the literature to provide a definition for homosexuality that will be used throughout the dissertation
• In the last paragraph the writer summarises how they are attempting to fill this research gap, outlining clearly the structure for the rest of the dissertation

Themed Chapters Example

The following is from a School of History undergraduate research project entitled '“Uganda’s children are being sodomised left and right!”: change and continuity in perceptions of homosexuality in uganda, 1876-2014'.

By characterising homosexual Ugandans as ‘mercenaries’, they become an embodiment of Western sexual immorality, prostituting themselves for a ‘gay agenda’.

With homosexuality foreign to cultural values, there is an assumption that NGOs are recruiting their “army” financially; Martin Ssempa has claimed that over $48 million had been invested into the ‘homosexual agenda’ over the past year. Although characteristically hyperbolic, Sssempa’s claim reflects a long-standing assumption within Ugandan society which connects homosexuality with financial transactions.

In 2003, after publicly defending homosexuality, a Ugandan academic received a text message from a friend congratulating her, stating that she was now ‘on [her] way to becoming a millionaire’ with all the money she was going to receive from the West.

One woman from Kumi District congratulated Museveni for having ‘served our people of’ Uganda, whilst signs at an organised celebratory event thanked the Government whilst declaring ‘Museveni, we the children thank you for saving our future’. This does nothing but enhance the perception that homosexuality is foreign, as with homosexuals now forced to go underground to survive, focus has begun to shift to the fight against ‘Obama, [...] the American Ambassador [and] Ban Ki-Moon’.

Homophobia thus forms part of a political discourse proliferated by both state and religious leaders in an attempt to assert the moral authority of Uganda’s postcolonial identity over a neo-imperialistic West.

The present incumbent, Rev. Simon Lokodo and his predecessor, James Buturo, have appeared frequently in mass media over the past decade, always presenting homosexuality as a foreign, aggressive malevolence within society. These public denouncements have become common place in a number of media outlets helping to construct a heavily sexualised ‘moral panic’ within Ugandan society.

Click below to highlight areas of this example commented on by a tutor:

• The student uses primary evidence (legislation) to put forward their argument that legislation led to homosexuality being perceived as a western concept and that financial gain and homosexual activity were inextricably linked
• Here the student is using primary evidence (appearance on a TV show) to expand upon this argument further. She does not just summarise what Ssempa had said but analyses it to reveal the significance of what he said
• The student then uses an example from a secondary source to illustrate their point further (an article from a journal article)
• Overall, in this paragraph the student has synthesised primary evidence and secondary literature to provide an analysis of their argument. This makes they have shown why they think what they think. They haven’t just presented the thoughts of others
• The student then evaluates this argument in more detail. Using literature (journal article) to show the significance of the argument being made in the previous paragraph
• The student ends by again drawing from the secondary literature to move their argument forward

Literature Review - Subheadings Example

The following is from a School of Geography undergraduate research project entitled 'Second homes: Investigating local perceptions and impact on communities in Cornwall'.

Literature Review (Chapter 2)

2.1 introduction, 2.2 the growth of second homes, 2.3 the emergence of british second homes in literature, 2.4 defining second homes, 2.5 the impacts of second-home ownership, 2.5.1 housing demand and local housing markets, 2.5.2 local services, employment and economic demand, 2.5.3 community interactions, 2.6 conclusion and gaps for further study, literature review - introduction example 1.

The following is an introduction to a literature review from a research project entitled 'An area based or a people based approach to measuring social deprivation within a national park? The case of Copeland'.

This review will examine the literature available on the main approaches towards measuring rural deprivation, with the view that literature overemphasises material deprivation at the expense of social deprivation. The review is comprised of two parts. The first focuses on the conceptualisation of rural deprivation, assuming that in order for it to be measured it first needs to be understood in terms of its absence from policy. The second focuses on ways of measuring rural deprivation and has three sections. Firstly, indicators of deprivation will be summarised and criticised in terms of their overrepresentation of the urban. Secondly two methodological approaches in measuring rural deprivation are reviewed; conventional area based approaches against recent people based approaches. Finally the policy implications of the two differing approaches towards measuring deprivation are examined with relation to a current inclusion of social capital in policy.

Click below to highlight the different areas of this introduction:

• Gaps in research
• Scope of the review
• Structure of the review

Literature Review - Introduction Example 2

The following is an introduction to a literature review from a research project entitled 'Life changes and experiences of international postgraduate student dependents: a feminist perspective'.

There has been very little academic or governmental re-search concerning female dependents of international students. Scholarship on migrant dependents concentrates on women with low human capital (Fechter, 2010; George, 2005; Yeoh & Willis, 2005) or the partners of elite migrants, including ex-pats and global businessmen (Walsh, 2006). The highly skilled, educated women who pause their careers to migrate as dependents rarely appear in the highly skilled migration field. (Purkayastha, 2005). Thus, this review will draw upon literature concerning a diverse range of migrant women who shaped my ideas of the issues a female international student dependent may negotiate.

Literature Review - Introduction Example 3

The following is an introduction to a literature review from a research project entitled 'BMI and Health: a u-shaped relationship?'.

More difficult to find is literature relating low BMI to health i.e. underweight and the health problems that are associated with underweight. This literature review aims to evaluate the information that is available regarding the u-shaped relationship between BMI and health, looking at both ends of the BMI scale. It also aims to discuss the use of BMI as an indicator of health and debate whether or not it deserves the high regard by which it is held by both national and international health organisations In order to overcome the lack of information about the relationship between BMI and health, this literature review will not limit itself by simply investigating studies that have linked BMI and health. It will explore research that has looked at the factors that influence BMI as well as factors (including BMI) that influence health.

Literature Review - Conclusion Example

Three principal inadequacies have been identified, illustrating the need for further investigation. Firstly, the amount of literature on second homes is very limited; widely neglected as a focus by a number of academics. The varied and dispersed nature of second-home literature means that it has not been able to develop as a mature literary realm (Haldrup, 2009; Hogart, 2001; McIntyre et al. 2006).

Secondly, research on the second-home impacts is widely based on assumption. Hypotheses are one-dimensional, assuming a simplistic relationship between second homes and host communities that can be summarised in a universal theory. The need for context and studies on individual communities is extensive; “actual impacts...should be seen as an empirical question rather than assumed to result from a standard cause-effect relationship” (Paris, 2009, p.306). Thirdly, second homes are often blamed entirely for negative impacts; in reality there are other factors that come into play. These include retirement migration, globalisation, inadequate housing, internet shopping and supermarkets, low wages, and the decline of ‘traditional’ industries (CRC, 2010; Gallent et al., 2001; 2005; Oram et al., 2003; Shucksmith, 2000).

The content of many previous studies can also be identified as insufficient: a number of academics still focus too heavily on profiling second-home owners, mapping distributions, and finding universal trends (Thornton, 1996). Field research on the impacts of second homes on host communities is almost non-existent. Local knowledge is very important to understand the complexities of such a phenomenon, but many researchers have not used this as a resource. The studies that do look at host communities have tended to aggregate ‘locals’ and ‘second-homers’ into categories regardless of their interests or opinions (Paris, 2009). Others ignore assessing the attitudes of second-home owners all together (Girard and Gartner, 1993).

Although a number of contemporary studies attempt to develop new theories about the implications of second-home ownership, there does not seem to be much progression away from ‘traditional’ studies discussed in Section 2.3. Many realms remain unexplored and questions go unanswered; this provides an agenda for my own research.

Findings / Results and Discussion Example 1

The following is a School of Psychology master's dissertation entitled 'An Investigation into the Representation of Muslims in The Sun Newspaper and its Effects'.

Findings / Results and Discussion Example 2

The following is a School of Media and Communication undergraduate project entitled 'An Investigation into the Relationship between Early Exposure and Brand Loyalty'.

Conclusion Example 1

The following is from a Leeds University Business School undergraduate research project entitled 'Dressed to Disrupt: Motivations Behind Millennial Women Consuming Feminist Fashion'.

This thesis answers the research question set out at the beginning: to understand the underlying values that are driving the surge in millennials consuming feminist fashion. Using laddered interviews, this research extracted eight value chains that revealed seven underlying values, fulfilling Research Objective 4 (R.O.4). These underlying values have been used as a basis to identifying consumer segments within the feminist fashion market.

The most dominant underlying value (based on the sum of direct and indirect links) is ‘Educating others/Raising awareness’ of feminism, suggesting an opportunity for successful marketing campaigns targeting educators. This finding achieves Research Objective 3.

Respondents noted their preferences for social media platforms with a more accepting cohort of users (such as Instagram), thus addressing Research Objective 2 (R.O.2). Despite literature debate that millennials are paying virtual lip-service to feminism (Schuster, 2013), this research finds that these young women are actually driven by their underlying value of educating others and raising awareness of feminism, through their visible (and sometimes costly) fashion consumption choices. Previously researched prosocial behaviours (Kristofferson et al., 2014) were found to be driven by the desire to present a positive image to others and to remain consistent with one’s values. This research extends Kristofferson et al.’s (2014) framework to include the fact that the consumption of feminist fashion is also driven by the underlying desire to disrupt the status quo.

• Here the student reminds the reader of the research problem and the research they carried out.
• The student emphasises the main finding from their research.
• The student highlights how their conclusions links with existing literature and frameworks. They could have also included some recommendations for future research to further understanding of this area.

Conclusion Example 2

The following is from a Leeds University Business School undergraduate research project entitled 'Exploring Social Perceptions of Women Leaders at Work: How does the Double Bind of Appearance and Personality Impact Women's Opportunities to make it to the Top?'.

The methods employed to facilitate this research have generated a deeper understanding of how the ‘double bind’ impacts women’s opportunities to make it to the top. Not only this, but enabled an exploration of the social perceptions of women leaders. Findings have indicated that authentic leadership, which is growing in popularity amongst organisations, may help women’s career progression.

The first aspect of the ‘double bind’, personality, was confirmed as women who adopted ‘masculine’ leadership styles such as: assertiveness and confidence were valued in executive positions. This supported existing theory that feminine styles of leadership are undesirable in organisations. However, this may change as women leaders reported the growing popularity of ‘authentic leadership.’ It appears that authentic leadership may improve women’s representation in executive positions, as organisations become more educated about its benefits.

The objective of comparing and contrasting viewpoints of women was also established during interviews. Both groups indicated a desire for authentic leadership. Despite this, massive contrasts between the two emerged, as many women at the lower end of the organisation held negative opinions on women leaders. This was due to leaders adhering to stereotypical forms of masculine leadership, which caused resentment. However, women leaders who adhered to stereotypical feminine forms of leadership were positively perceived by other women.

Establishment of barriers beyond the ‘double bind’ were also discussed. Motherhood and a lack of ‘real models’ in organisations contributed as barriers. Without the ‘double bind’, the above barriers would still hinder women’s progression, thus equality for parental rights and rewarding more working mothers would be an adequate response to this problem.

The research has mainly proven existing theory that the ‘double bind’ exists in organisations. However, this is statement is extremely difficult to generalise to all organisations, in particular industries. Although this research has contributed in identifying existing barriers to career progression, as well as a more covert form of the ‘double bind’, industries and sectors must be analysed separately to understand whether the perceptions of the ‘double bind’ are equally applicable to all industries.

• The student reminds the reader of their research area, and the main finding from their research.
• Here the student highlights their findings, and explains how these relate to the literature.
• The student highlights how their research has contributed to the academic debate in this area, and makes suggestions for further research to be carried out.

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How to Write Literature Review for your Final Year Project (Chapter 2)

Steps on How to Write Literature Review for Your Final Year Project

After writing the introduction , which is chapter one or section one, the next most critical part of thesis writing is the literature review, known as chapter two or section two. The literature review is critical of thesis writing since it reveals what has been done in the extant literature. A literature review examines publications , research papers , and any other source materials pertaining to a specific concern, the field of knowledge, or concept and formed the basis, overview, and analysis of a research subject concerning the research gap under consideration. A literature review gives a detailed or comprehensive summary of major works and other publications on a specific subject. Academic peer-reviewed journals , publications, government reports, internet sites, and other sources may be included in the review. Each source is described, summarized, and evaluated in the literature review.

A literature review is divided into three major parts: conceptual review, theoretical review, and empirical review. The following subheadings show a step-by-step analysis and provide a detailed understanding of how a literature review should be written.

• The literature should be broad enough to cover all of the necessary knowledge on the topic.
• It must locate research and concepts that bolster a research question.
•  it must be narrow enough to exclude unimportant information from the research topic
• It must be carried out using credible sources.
• The literature must also be relevant, recent and adequately referenced.

Step 1: Preambles

it is essential to state or give a little introduction in chapter two. This preamble introduces the reader to what should be expected in the chapter. A preamble is an opening summary, a foreword, an overview of the component of a statute, obligation, or the like that states the reasons for and the purpose of what following sections.  A preamble is an introductory and expressive statement in a thesis that outlines the intent and underpinning concept of the research. When introduced to the first research paragraphs, it narrates essential evidence relevant to the researcher’s intention.

Step 2: Conceptual Review

A comprehensive and detailed conceptual review necessitates the author identifying all conceivably essential and relevant papers (both empirical and conceptual) applicable to the realm under consideration. Conceptual review is seen as a methodology in which research is carried out by studying and interpreting previously available information about a particular topic . Conceptual research does not include any practical experiments. It has something to do with abstract concepts or ideas. For instance, while writing on the topic “ Branding and Firm Performance “, the following steps should be taken:

• Determine the specific variables identified in this study and how they are connected. Some academic papers include the variables, and the key points may therefore serve a purpose. If these aren’t available, look for a summary of the research paper . If the variables are not explicitly stated in summary, return to the research methods or findings and discussion of the study to accurately identify the variables in this study and needed information. Here, the key variables are “Branding” and “Firm Performance.”
• Explain what branding is about by looking at what different authors have said. Discuss various scholars opinions on the concept of “branding.” The first step here is to look at the meaning. Make sure current and relevant literature are used. This is 2021. It is expected that 80% of your literature cited must be between 2015-2021.
• The dimensions of branding. Here, the measurement of branding or the components of branding should be discussed. The author should state how the study intends to measure branding and why those measures were adopted.
• Write on “Firm Performance”. Consider what different studies have said about firm performance. Look at the different measures of firm performance, explain the different factors affecting firm performance and indicate how performance is used in the study.
• Provide a link between your independent variable (Branding) and dependent variable (firm performance)
• Create your conceptualization by combining the variables from the research papers you’ve read. Your statement of the problem or purpose of the study provides a starting point for writing it. In essence, your investigation will be sought to address a query that other investigators have not yet addressed. Your study should fill a knowledge gap.

Step 3: Theoretical Review

The theoretical review examines theoretical models (philosophies or entire theories), their interactions, the extent to which the theories have been investigated, and the development of new assumptions. The theoretical review consists of theories and models appropriate to the knowledge being considered and how they relate to the broader areas of knowledge. In this section, it is expected that the researcher will reveal all the theories relating to Branding and Firm Performance. It is also imperative that the author reveal the theories or theory on which the study is anchored from all the examined theories. The underpinning theory should be relevant to the discussion and gap the author seeks to address.

The theoretical framework enhances the research in the following areas.

• An affirmative statement of fundamental propositions evaluates a study’s overall review of them.
• The theoretical framework links the researcher to previously known information. You are provided with a foundation for your research objective and methods based on an existing theoretical view.
• Conveying a study’s underlying concepts compels you to answer how and why questions. It enables you to progress from merely stating an existing behaviour to making assumptions about various facets of that phenomenon.
• I am having a theory aids in identifying the limitations of those assumptions. A theoretical review specifies which key variables influence an exciting phenomenon. It informs you to investigate under what and how conditions those critical points could deviate.

Step 4: Empirical Literature Review

An empirical literature review investigates previous studies to answer a specific research question. The empirical review simply discusses the various studies research and recommendations for the future on your topic or people’s relevant literature comparable to your research work . Various researchers’ identities must be connected to their observations or statements. An empirical literature review, also known as a literature review, explores previous studies to answer a specific research question. The goal of the empirical review is to identify gaps in the literature. The empirical review is divided into three.

• Developed Economies (Advanced Economies). Here the author is expected to examine all the literature done in the advanced countries on the topic in focus. The advanced countries include Canada, France, U.S.A, Britain and Italy.
• Emerging Economies (Developing Countries): The literature from developing countries such as Brazil, India, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. should be considered in the study
• The country where the study is carried out: For instance, Nigeria. Various studies carried out on the researches area of study in the country of origin should be considered.

It is critical to state here that the Literature review will provide the author and the reader with what variables and theories the author intends to use or has used. Hence, relevant literature should be considered and various arguments examined in this section.

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Instructions for writing the Literature Review of your Final year project

• Kush Tripathi
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How to write a literature review for your final year thesis project

• How many papers should I read?
• How long should the literature review be?
• Should I read books, articles, or …?
• Is it OK to reference websites such as Wikipedia ?
• Who will read my literature review and what can I assume about their knowledge of the area?
• When should I start the literature review and when should it be finished?

These questions crop up frequently and will be familiar to any readers who are starting their own project. However, when you fully understand the purpose of the literature and how to go about writing one, you begin to realise that these questions are actually not that important. This post is designed to help students make that transition, from not yet understanding what the literature review is for, to having a thorough understanding of its purpose and a clear idea of how to write it up.

The meaning of a final year project

A lot of students starting off their projects talk about writing a “report” at the end of their “project” and doing some “research” as part of their literature review. This is where the subtleties of the English language tend to cause a lot of confusion. “Research” can have many different meanings, and to complete a really successful final year project the first thing to do it to understand fully what is expected of you in an academic context. Even if your final year at University is the last experience you have of academic work , remember that your work will be marked according to academic criteria, and academia has quite different aims to industry.

So, to be clear:  research , in an academic context, means adding something new to the body of knowledge that humans have gathered in your area of interest. Your project as a whole will be a piece of research because you will be creating something new that has not been created before. What that is exactly will depend on the field you are studying. It might be a new perspective on a piece of literature, a new proof of a theorem, a new application of a particular technology, or something else. Since you are still an undergraduate it is likely (although not necessary) that your work will be a small step forward. It is unlikely that you will produce something completely ground breaking, so don’t be intimidated by fact that your work has to be novel. That said, it may be that you produce an excellent piece of work and your supervisor may want to turn that into a technical report or conference paper with you, which would be great for your CV (or resume).

A  thesis  is a statement of belief that is central to your research. Your  dissertation  will be a piece of writing that defends your thesis, based on your research. So, for example, if your thesis is regular,  online tests help University students to learn new material  then you will need to implement some sort of online tests for new material, design and run an experiment to test your thesis, and write it up in your dissertation. Equally, if your thesis is  water causes cancer in mice  then you will need to plan and run an experiment to determine whether or not this is true and write it up. Notice that you may disprove your thesis in your work. It may be that online tests do not help students learn, or that water doesn’t cause cancer in mice. This is absolutely fine, so long as your experiments give a clear answer to the question and you can show that your experiments were performed fairly it doesn’t matter whether your thesis turns out to be incorrect or correct (in so far as you have tested it). It may also be that your evaluation is inconclusive, which is also acceptable, so long as your experimental method is good and you can say exactly what further work is necessary to produce a definite result, you will be fine.

Alternatively, you might phrase your thesis as a  research question . In which case, instead of having a thesis such as water causes cancer in mice you would ask the question  does water cause cancer in mice  and your dissertation would describe your efforts to answer that question.

The shape of your dissertation and where the literature fits in

Every dissertation is slightly different, but good dissertations will all contain the same elements. I should say that the advice given in this sections is likely only relevant to science based projects. If you are working in the arts or some areas in the humanities then the expectations of you may well be very different. Still, a good dissertation in the sciences will contain roughly the elements listed below. I say “roughly” because, depending on the exact nature of your work, it may be sensible to expand some sections into two chapters rather than one, or to coalesce some elements into a single chapter. Your supervisor can give you more specific advice on this.

• Introduction:  should introduce the reader to the broad context of the research and explain why this is an interesting area to work in. So, if your thesis is something to do with mobile computing, you might say something here about why mobile phones are important, why mobile computing is an interesting and important area, and broadly what other researchers are working on. At the end of the chapter you will want to introduce your specific research question, having said why the area you are working in (and therefore your question) is important.
• Literature review:  Now you have introduced the reader (who will likely not be an expert in your exact area) to the broad research agenda in the field, and your research question, you can start writing more specifically about your own project. In this chapter you will survey the work that other researchers have done to answer your research question, or related questions. At the end of the chapter you should briefly explain how your own work builds on and differs from the work that has gone before it.
• Method:  this chapter should describe what you did to answer your research question (or to support your thesis, if you think of it that way), and how you went about it. You should describe your work in sufficient detail that another researcher could recreate your work to check your results.
• Evaluation:  here, you should evaluate what you have done, and say what answer (to your research question) you have arrived at. It may be that in your method you describe some experiments, and this section records your results and analysis of those results. This is an important section — most students gain or lose marks in either their literature review or evaluation. Key to producing a convincing evaluation is to plan very early in the project what information you will need to write this section. More on that in another blog post.
• Conclusions:  should summarise what you have done and how you answered the research question. It may be that your work produced a very clear answer to the question, or it may be that your work points to a need for further research to clarify or confirm your answer. You should refer back to the literature review and summarise how your research differs from (hopefully improves on) the work described in the literature. Make sure you also say what research you would do if you were to continue working on your project.
• References:  a list of publications cited in the main text, in Harvard style or similar format.

It is likely that most chapters will be roughly the same size, although the introductory chapter and conclusions are usually slightly shorter than the others. Try to let the lengths of each chapter be guided by the amount of useful and important information you have to convey to the reader, don’t impose artificial word limits on yourself.

Practical matters: how to start, how to finish and how to do the bit in the middle

Reading and understanding the work of others is a lifetimes work for professional researchers, it is not something that starts and stops on particular dates, according to a Gantt chart. Your final year project will have a hand in deadline, so you need to be a little more circumscribed about how work.

Now you know what a literature review is for, how it fits into your dissertation and how to go about writing your own, it would probably be useful to see an example of (part of) an example review. The paragraphs below give such an example and the text [in italics] is some commentary to explain how each part of the writing contributes towards the start of a good thesis chapter. When you read this, don’t worry too much about the subject matter, just try to concentrate on the style of writing and the structure of the text.

The area of pervasive, or ubiquitous, computing was founded by Wieser (1991)  [ referenced]  who predicted that computers would one day be integrated into everyday objects and interact with people seamlessly. Although few such products are available today Weiser’s work has led to the creation of a number of research areas, including ambient intelligence (Eli and Epstein 1998), smart dust (Khan et al, 1999) and the Internet of Things (Brickley et al, 2001).  [Sets the historical context of the area and defines related areas.]

An early application of pervasive computing was the active badge location system, described by Want et al (1992), in which users and objects were tagged with an “active” badge which could locate and identify them. This system was based on ultrasound locationing, whereas later systems might use RFID technology to achieve the same effect.  [describes how the field has changed over time]  Uses of the active badge system included routing phone calls, email alerts and so on to the physical location of the receiver.  [contextualises the fundamental research]

Related articles

• The Secret of the Literature Review (teesdiary.wordpress.com)
• How to review a research paper (cmeforum.wordpress.com)
• Dissertation Literature Reviews (ukdissertations.wordpress.com)
• Preparing For Your Dissertation (ihumanresources.wordpress.com)

McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets in a slower era

At a glance, macroeconomic challenges continued.

McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets: A slower era

If 2022 was a tale of two halves, with robust fundraising and deal activity in the first six months followed by a slowdown in the second half, then 2023 might be considered a tale of one whole. Macroeconomic headwinds persisted throughout the year, with rising financing costs, and an uncertain growth outlook taking a toll on private markets. Full-year fundraising continued to decline from 2021’s lofty peak, weighed down by the “denominator effect” that persisted in part due to a less active deal market. Managers largely held onto assets to avoid selling in a lower-multiple environment, fueling an activity-dampening cycle in which distribution-starved limited partners (LPs) reined in new commitments.

About the authors

This article is a summary of a larger report, available as a PDF, that is a collaborative effort by Fredrik Dahlqvist , Alastair Green , Paul Maia, Alexandra Nee , David Quigley , Aditya Sanghvi , Connor Mangan, John Spivey, Rahel Schneider, and Brian Vickery , representing views from McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investors Practice.

Performance in most private asset classes remained below historical averages for a second consecutive year. Decade-long tailwinds from low and falling interest rates and consistently expanding multiples seem to be things of the past. As private market managers look to boost performance in this new era of investing, a deeper focus on revenue growth and margin expansion will be needed now more than ever.

Perspectives on a slower era in private markets

Global fundraising contracted.

Fundraising fell 22 percent across private market asset classes globally to just over $1 trillion, as of year-end reported data—the lowest total since 2017. Fundraising in North America, a rare bright spot in 2022, declined in line with global totals, while in Europe, fundraising proved most resilient, falling just 3 percent. In Asia, fundraising fell precipitously and now sits 72 percent below the region’s 2018 peak.

Despite difficult fundraising conditions, headwinds did not affect all strategies or managers equally. Private equity (PE) buyout strategies posted their best fundraising year ever, and larger managers and vehicles also fared well, continuing the prior year’s trend toward greater fundraising concentration.

The numerator effect persisted

Despite a marked recovery in the denominator—the 1,000 largest US retirement funds grew 7 percent in the year ending September 2023, after falling 14 percent the prior year, for example 1 “U.S. retirement plans recover half of 2022 losses amid no-show recession,” Pensions and Investments , February 12, 2024. —many LPs remain overexposed to private markets relative to their target allocations. LPs started 2023 overweight: according to analysis from CEM Benchmarking, average allocations across PE, infrastructure, and real estate were at or above target allocations as of the beginning of the year. And the numerator grew throughout the year, as a lack of exits and rebounding valuations drove net asset values (NAVs) higher. While not all LPs strictly follow asset allocation targets, our analysis in partnership with global private markets firm StepStone Group suggests that an overallocation of just one percentage point can reduce planned commitments by as much as 10 to 12 percent per year for five years or more.

Despite these headwinds, recent surveys indicate that LPs remain broadly committed to private markets. In fact, the majority plan to maintain or increase allocations over the medium to long term.

Investors fled to known names and larger funds

Fundraising concentration reached its highest level in over a decade, as investors continued to shift new commitments in favor of the largest fund managers. The 25 most successful fundraisers collected 41 percent of aggregate commitments to closed-end funds (with the top five managers accounting for nearly half that total). Closed-end fundraising totals may understate the extent of concentration in the industry overall, as the largest managers also tend to be more successful in raising non-institutional capital.

While the largest funds grew even larger—the largest vehicles on record were raised in buyout, real estate, infrastructure, and private debt in 2023—smaller and newer funds struggled. Fewer than 1,700 funds of less than $1 billion were closed during the year, half as many as closed in 2022 and the fewest of any year since 2012. New manager formation also fell to the lowest level since 2012, with just 651 new firms launched in 2023.

Whether recent fundraising concentration and a spate of M&A activity signals the beginning of oft-rumored consolidation in the private markets remains uncertain, as a similar pattern developed in each of the last two fundraising downturns before giving way to renewed entrepreneurialism among general partners (GPs) and commitment diversification among LPs. Compared with how things played out in the last two downturns, perhaps this movie really is different, or perhaps we’re watching a trilogy reusing a familiar plotline.

Dry powder inventory spiked (again)

Private markets assets under management totaled $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023, and have grown nearly 20 percent per annum since 2018. Dry powder reserves—the amount of capital committed but not yet deployed—increased to $3.7 trillion, marking the ninth consecutive year of growth. Dry powder inventory—the amount of capital available to GPs expressed as a multiple of annual deployment—increased for the second consecutive year in PE, as new commitments continued to outpace deal activity. Inventory sat at 1.6 years in 2023, up markedly from the 0.9 years recorded at the end of 2021 but still within the historical range. NAV grew as well, largely driven by the reluctance of managers to exit positions and crystallize returns in a depressed multiple environment.

Private equity strategies diverged

Buyout and venture capital, the two largest PE sub-asset classes, charted wildly different courses over the past 18 months. Buyout notched its highest fundraising year ever in 2023, and its performance improved, with funds posting a (still paltry) 5 percent net internal rate of return through September 30. And although buyout deal volumes declined by 19 percent, 2023 was still the third-most-active year on record. In contrast, venture capital (VC) fundraising declined by nearly 60 percent, equaling its lowest total since 2015, and deal volume fell by 36 percent to the lowest level since 2019. VC funds returned –3 percent through September, posting negative returns for seven consecutive quarters. VC was the fastest-growing—as well as the highest-performing—PE strategy by a significant margin from 2010 to 2022, but investors appear to be reevaluating their approach in the current environment.

Private equity entry multiples contracted

PE buyout entry multiples declined by roughly one turn from 11.9 to 11.0 times EBITDA, slightly outpacing the decline in public market multiples (down from 12.1 to 11.3 times EBITDA), through the first nine months of 2023. For nearly a decade leading up to 2022, managers consistently sold assets into a higher-multiple environment than that in which they had bought those assets, providing a substantial performance tailwind for the industry. Nowhere has this been truer than in technology. After experiencing more than eight turns of multiple expansion from 2009 to 2021 (the most of any sector), technology multiples have declined by nearly three turns in the past two years, 50 percent more than in any other sector. Overall, roughly two-thirds of the total return for buyout deals that were entered in 2010 or later and exited in 2021 or before can be attributed to market multiple expansion and leverage. Now, with falling multiples and higher financing costs, revenue growth and margin expansion are taking center stage for GPs.

Real estate receded

Demand uncertainty, slowing rent growth, and elevated financing costs drove cap rates higher and made price discovery challenging, all of which weighed on deal volume, fundraising, and investment performance. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent year over year, and funds returned −4 percent in the first nine months of the year, losing money for the first time since the 2007–08 global financial crisis. Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity via redemptions in open-end vehicles, from which net outflows reached their highest level in at least two decades. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, with investors focusing on capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive. Rising interest rates widened bid–ask spreads and impaired deal volume across food groups, including in what were formerly hot sectors: multifamily and industrial.

Private debt pays dividends

Debt again proved to be the most resilient private asset class against a turbulent market backdrop. Fundraising declined just 13 percent, largely driven by lower commitments to direct lending strategies, for which a slower PE deal environment has made capital deployment challenging. The asset class also posted the highest returns among all private asset classes through September 30. Many private debt securities are tied to floating rates, which enhance returns in a rising-rate environment. Thus far, managers appear to have successfully navigated the rising incidence of default and distress exhibited across the broader leveraged-lending market. Although direct lending deal volume declined from 2022, private lenders financed an all-time high 59 percent of leveraged buyout transactions last year and are now expanding into additional strategies to drive the next era of growth.

Infrastructure took a detour

After several years of robust growth and strong performance, infrastructure and natural resources fundraising declined by 53 percent to the lowest total since 2013. Supply-side timing is partially to blame: five of the seven largest infrastructure managers closed a flagship vehicle in 2021 or 2022, and none of those five held a final close last year. As in real estate, investors shied away from core and core-plus investments in a higher-yield environment. Yet there are reasons to believe infrastructure’s growth will bounce back. Limited partners (LPs) surveyed by McKinsey remain bullish on their deployment to the asset class, and at least a dozen vehicles targeting more than $10 billion were actively fundraising as of the end of 2023. Multiple recent acquisitions of large infrastructure GPs by global multi-asset-class managers also indicate marketwide conviction in the asset class’s potential.

Private markets still have work to do on diversity

Private markets firms are slowly improving their representation of females (up two percentage points over the prior year) and ethnic and racial minorities (up one percentage point). On some diversity metrics, including entry-level representation of women, private markets now compare favorably with corporate America. Yet broad-based parity remains elusive and too slow in the making. Ethnic, racial, and gender imbalances are particularly stark across more influential investing roles and senior positions. In fact, McKinsey’s research  reveals that at the current pace, it would take several decades for private markets firms to reach gender parity at senior levels. Increasing representation across all levels will require managers to take fresh approaches to hiring, retention, and promotion.

Artificial intelligence generating excitement

The transformative potential of generative AI was perhaps 2023’s hottest topic (beyond Taylor Swift). Private markets players are excited about the potential for the technology to optimize their approach to thesis generation, deal sourcing, investment due diligence, and portfolio performance, among other areas. While the technology is still nascent and few GPs can boast scaled implementations, pilot programs are already in flight across the industry, particularly within portfolio companies. Adoption seems nearly certain to accelerate throughout 2024.

Private markets in a slower era

If private markets investors entered 2023 hoping for a return to the heady days of 2021, they likely left the year disappointed. Many of the headwinds that emerged in the latter half of 2022 persisted throughout the year, pressuring fundraising, dealmaking, and performance. Inflation moderated somewhat over the course of the year but remained stubbornly elevated by recent historical standards. Interest rates started high and rose higher, increasing the cost of financing. A reinvigorated public equity market recovered most of 2022’s losses but did little to resolve the valuation uncertainty private market investors have faced for the past 18 months.

Within private markets, the denominator effect remained in play, despite the public market recovery, as the numerator continued to expand. An activity-dampening cycle emerged: higher cost of capital and lower multiples limited the ability or willingness of general partners (GPs) to exit positions; fewer exits, coupled with continuing capital calls, pushed LP allocations higher, thereby limiting their ability or willingness to make new commitments. These conditions weighed on managers’ ability to fundraise. Based on data reported as of year-end 2023, private markets fundraising fell 22 percent from the prior year to just over $1 trillion, the largest such drop since 2009 (Exhibit 1).

The impact of the fundraising environment was not felt equally among GPs. Continuing a trend that emerged in 2022, and consistent with prior downturns in fundraising, LPs favored larger vehicles and the scaled GPs that typically manage them. Smaller and newer managers struggled, and the number of sub–$1 billion vehicles and new firm launches each declined to its lowest level in more than a decade.

Despite the decline in fundraising, private markets assets under management (AUM) continued to grow, increasing 12 percent to $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023. 2023 fundraising was still the sixth-highest annual haul on record, pushing dry powder higher, while the slowdown in deal making limited distributions.

Investment performance across private market asset classes fell short of historical averages. Private equity (PE) got back in the black but generated the lowest annual performance in the past 15 years, excluding 2022. Closed-end real estate produced negative returns for the first time since 2009, as capitalization (cap) rates expanded across sectors and rent growth dissipated in formerly hot sectors, including multifamily and industrial. The performance of infrastructure funds was less than half of its long-term average and even further below the double-digit returns generated in 2021 and 2022. Private debt was the standout performer (if there was one), outperforming all other private asset classes and illustrating the asset class’s countercyclical appeal.

Private equity down but not out

Higher financing costs, lower multiples, and an uncertain macroeconomic environment created a challenging backdrop for private equity managers in 2023. Fundraising declined for the second year in a row, falling 15 percent to $649 billion, as LPs grappled with the denominator effect and a slowdown in distributions. Managers were on the fundraising trail longer to raise this capital: funds that closed in 2023 were open for a record-high average of 20.1 months, notably longer than 18.7 months in 2022 and 14.1 months in 2018. VC and growth equity strategies led the decline, dropping to their lowest level of cumulative capital raised since 2015. Fundraising in Asia fell for the fourth year of the last five, with the greatest decline in China.

Despite the difficult fundraising context, a subset of strategies and managers prevailed. Buyout managers collectively had their best fundraising year on record, raising more than $400 billion. Fundraising in Europe surged by more than 50 percent, resulting in the region’s biggest haul ever. The largest managers raised an outsized share of the total for a second consecutive year, making 2023 the most concentrated fundraising year of the last decade (Exhibit 2).

Despite the drop in aggregate fundraising, PE assets under management increased 8 percent to $8.2 trillion. Only a small part of this growth was performance driven: PE funds produced a net IRR of just 2.5 percent through September 30, 2023. Buyouts and growth equity generated positive returns, while VC lost money. PE performance, dating back to the beginning of 2022, remains negative, highlighting the difficulty of generating attractive investment returns in a higher interest rate and lower multiple environment. As PE managers devise value creation strategies to improve performance, their focus includes ensuring operating efficiency and profitability of their portfolio companies.

Deal activity volume and count fell sharply, by 21 percent and 24 percent, respectively, which continued the slower pace set in the second half of 2022. Sponsors largely opted to hold assets longer rather than lock in underwhelming returns. While higher financing costs and valuation mismatches weighed on overall deal activity, certain types of M&A gained share. Add-on deals, for example, accounted for a record 46 percent of total buyout deal volume last year.

Real estate recedes

For real estate, 2023 was a year of transition, characterized by a litany of new and familiar challenges. Pandemic-driven demand issues continued, while elevated financing costs, expanding cap rates, and valuation uncertainty weighed on commercial real estate deal volumes, fundraising, and investment performance.

Managers faced one of the toughest fundraising environments in many years. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent to $125 billion. While fundraising challenges were widespread, they were not ubiquitous across strategies. Dollars continued to shift to large, multi-asset class platforms, with the top five managers accounting for 37 percent of aggregate closed-end real estate fundraising. In April, the largest real estate fund ever raised closed on a record $30 billion.

Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity through redemptions in open-end vehicles and reduced gross contributions to the lowest level since 2009. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, as investors turned their attention toward capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive.

In the United States, for instance, open-end funds, as represented by the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries Fund Index—Open-End Equity (NFI-OE), recorded $13 billion in net outflows in 2023, reversing the trend of positive net inflows throughout the 2010s. The negative flows mainly reflected $9 billion in core outflows, with core-plus funds accounting for the remaining outflows, which reversed a 20-year run of net inflows.

As a result, the NAV in US open-end funds fell roughly 16 percent year over year. Meanwhile, global assets under management in closed-end funds reached a new peak of $1.7 trillion as of June 2023, growing 14 percent between June 2022 and June 2023.

Real estate underperformed historical averages in 2023, as previously high-performing multifamily and industrial sectors joined office in producing negative returns caused by slowing demand growth and cap rate expansion. Closed-end funds generated a pooled net IRR of −3.5 percent in the first nine months of 2023, losing money for the first time since the global financial crisis. The lone bright spot among major sectors was hospitality, which—thanks to a rush of postpandemic travel—returned 10.3 percent in 2023. 2 Based on NCREIFs NPI index. Hotels represent 1 percent of total properties in the index. As a whole, the average pooled lifetime net IRRs for closed-end real estate funds from 2011–20 vintages remained around historical levels (9.8 percent).

Global deal volume declined 47 percent in 2023 to reach a ten-year low of $650 billion, driven by widening bid–ask spreads amid valuation uncertainty and higher costs of financing (Exhibit 3). 3 CBRE, Real Capital Analytics Deal flow in the office sector remained depressed, partly as a result of continued uncertainty in the demand for space in a hybrid working world.

During a turbulent year for private markets, private debt was a relative bright spot, topping private markets asset classes in terms of fundraising growth, AUM growth, and performance.

Fundraising for private debt declined just 13 percent year over year, nearly ten percentage points less than the private markets overall. Despite the decline in fundraising, AUM surged 27 percent to $1.7 trillion. And private debt posted the highest investment returns of any private asset class through the first three quarters of 2023.

Private debt’s risk/return characteristics are well suited to the current environment. With interest rates at their highest in more than a decade, current yields in the asset class have grown more attractive on both an absolute and relative basis, particularly if higher rates sustain and put downward pressure on equity returns (Exhibit 4). The built-in security derived from debt’s privileged position in the capital structure, moreover, appeals to investors that are wary of market volatility and valuation uncertainty.

Direct lending continued to be the largest strategy in 2023, with fundraising for the mostly-senior-debt strategy accounting for almost half of the asset class’s total haul (despite declining from the previous year). Separately, mezzanine debt fundraising hit a new high, thanks to the closings of three of the largest funds ever raised in the strategy.

Over the longer term, growth in private debt has largely been driven by institutional investors rotating out of traditional fixed income in favor of private alternatives. Despite this growth in commitments, LPs remain underweight in this asset class relative to their targets. In fact, the allocation gap has only grown wider in recent years, a sharp contrast to other private asset classes, for which LPs’ current allocations exceed their targets on average. According to data from CEM Benchmarking, the private debt allocation gap now stands at 1.4 percent, which means that, in aggregate, investors must commit hundreds of billions in net new capital to the asset class just to reach current targets.

Private debt was not completely immune to the macroeconomic conditions last year, however. Fundraising declined for the second consecutive year and now sits 23 percent below 2021’s peak. Furthermore, though private lenders took share in 2023 from other capital sources, overall deal volumes also declined for the second year in a row. The drop was largely driven by a less active PE deal environment: private debt is predominantly used to finance PE-backed companies, though managers are increasingly diversifying their origination capabilities to include a broad new range of companies and asset types.

Infrastructure and natural resources take a detour

For infrastructure and natural resources fundraising, 2023 was an exceptionally challenging year. Aggregate capital raised declined 53 percent year over year to $82 billion, the lowest annual total since 2013. The size of the drop is particularly surprising in light of infrastructure’s recent momentum. The asset class had set fundraising records in four of the previous five years, and infrastructure is often considered an attractive investment in uncertain markets.

While there is little doubt that the broader fundraising headwinds discussed elsewhere in this report affected infrastructure and natural resources fundraising last year, dynamics specific to the asset class were at play as well. One issue was supply-side timing: nine of the ten largest infrastructure GPs did not close a flagship fund in 2023. Second was the migration of investor dollars away from core and core-plus investments, which have historically accounted for the bulk of infrastructure fundraising, in a higher rate environment.

The asset class had some notable bright spots last year. Fundraising for higher-returning opportunistic strategies more than doubled the prior year’s total (Exhibit 5). AUM grew 18 percent, reaching a new high of $1.5 trillion. Infrastructure funds returned a net IRR of 3.4 percent in 2023; this was below historical averages but still the second-best return among private asset classes. And as was the case in other asset classes, investors concentrated commitments in larger funds and managers in 2023, including in the largest infrastructure fund ever raised.

The outlook for the asset class, moreover, remains positive. Funds targeting a record amount of capital were in the market at year-end, providing a robust foundation for fundraising in 2024 and 2025. A recent spate of infrastructure GP acquisitions signal multi-asset managers’ long-term conviction in the asset class, despite short-term headwinds. Global megatrends like decarbonization and digitization, as well as revolutions in energy and mobility, have spurred new infrastructure investment opportunities around the world, particularly for value-oriented investors that are willing to take on more risk.

Private markets make measured progress in DEI

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become an important part of the fundraising, talent, and investing landscape for private market participants. Encouragingly, incremental progress has been made in recent years, including more diverse talent being brought to entry-level positions, investing roles, and investment committees. The scope of DEI metrics provided to institutional investors during fundraising has also increased in recent years: more than half of PE firms now provide data across investing teams, portfolio company boards, and portfolio company management (versus investment team data only). 4 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023.

In 2023, McKinsey surveyed 66 global private markets firms that collectively employ more than 60,000 people for the second annual State of diversity in global private markets report. 5 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023. The research offers insight into the representation of women and ethnic and racial minorities in private investing as of year-end 2022. In this chapter, we discuss where the numbers stand and how firms can bring a more diverse set of perspectives to the table.

The statistics indicate signs of modest advancement. Overall representation of women in private markets increased two percentage points to 35 percent, and ethnic and racial minorities increased one percentage point to 30 percent (Exhibit 6). Entry-level positions have nearly reached gender parity, with female representation at 48 percent. The share of women holding C-suite roles globally increased 3 percentage points, while the share of people from ethnic and racial minorities in investment committees increased 9 percentage points. There is growing evidence that external hiring is gradually helping close the diversity gap, especially at senior levels. For example, 33 percent of external hires at the managing director level were ethnic or racial minorities, higher than their existing representation level (19 percent).

Yet, the scope of the challenge remains substantial. Women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in senior positions and investing roles. They also experience uneven rates of progress due to lower promotion and higher attrition rates, particularly at smaller firms. Firms are also navigating an increasingly polarized workplace today, with additional scrutiny and a growing number of lawsuits against corporate diversity and inclusion programs, particularly in the US, which threatens to impact the industry’s pace of progress.

Fredrik Dahlqvist is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Stockholm office; Alastair Green  is a senior partner in the Washington, DC, office, where Paul Maia and Alexandra Nee  are partners; David Quigley  is a senior partner in the New York office, where Connor Mangan is an associate partner and Aditya Sanghvi  is a senior partner; Rahel Schneider is an associate partner in the Bay Area office; John Spivey is a partner in the Charlotte office; and Brian Vickery  is a partner in the Boston office.

The authors wish to thank Jonathan Christy, Louis Dufau, Vaibhav Gujral, Graham Healy-Day, Laura Johnson, Ryan Luby, Tripp Norton, Alastair Rami, Henri Torbey, and Alex Wolkomir for their contributions

The authors would also like to thank CEM Benchmarking and the StepStone Group for their partnership in this year's report.

This article was edited by Arshiya Khullar, an editor in the Gurugram office.

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