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Literature Reviews: What is it?

What Is a Literature Review?

A literature review synthesizes and critically analyzes the state of the research on a topic. It is useful to help you understand the history, significant developments, potential gaps, and current direction of research in a field. Sometimes you are verifying that your own research is new and original.

Sometimes it is a clearly labeled section within a larger paper, like this: 

section of an article, highlighting the Review of LIterature section

 

Sometimes, literature reviews are not labeled as a separate section, but are part of the introduction. A good clue that it's a literature review is if it includes multiple citations of other significant works in the field:

screenshot of text from a scholarly article, not labeled as literature review, but with multiple citations to other works, thus clearly indicating it is a literature review

 

Other times, an entire published paper consists of just a literature review, as in the examples below.