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Literature Reviews: Steps for Conducting a Lit Review

1. Plan

Determine your purpose, scope, and audience. Write a review question and set your review's criteria for the sources that are to be included.

  • How long and comprehensive does your literature review need to be?
  • What discipline(s) will you be exploring?
  • What kinds of publications are expected? Peer-reviewed scholarly articles only, or are other kinds of authoritative sources expected?
  • How current does the literature need to be?

2. Exploratory Searching

Your review question might be broad, particularly if you are still learning about the topic. Exploratory searching helps you to map out topics and subtopics within an area of research. Then, you will be better able to scope your review. 

  • Conduct broad searches and skim. Use Library Search or disciplinary databases recommended on Research Guides.
  • For the humanities and social sciences, reference resources like handbooks, annual reviews, and bibliographies can offer a topic's big picture, significant authors, and key words.

As you explore, try a concept map to help you discover themes and connections and find a question that interests you.

3. Refined Searching

Because a literature review is somewhat comprehensive, you need a specific review question to guide choices about what belongs in your review. A review question is not the same as your research question (which needs to be very specific and original) but should encompass the scholarship that lays the groundwork for your research question.

Once you have a review question, you are ready to start collecting possible citations. Discovering a gap in the literature requires persistence and systematic searching such as subject searching and citation tracing.

Subject Searching in Disciplinary Databases

Subject terms describe what the content is about. Searching with subjects will retrieve fewer results than keyword searching, but they are potentially more relevant. They also bring together sources that use varying terms for the same subject. This is a more systematic way of searching than using only keywords.

Citation Tracing

Often when you find one very relevant article, you want to find citing and cited articles. This is called citation tracing, or forward and backward searching (see video).

  • Backward searching: Review the References or Works Cited list. These articles can show how the author developed their ideas and which older articles influenced them.
  • Forward searching: Review newer articles that developed or built on the author's ideas. With "cited by" searching you are finding newer articles that cited that work.

4. Choose the Best Sources

As you search, try to select the most impactful sources by looking at factors such as: 

  • Author impact: How many times has a study been cited by other researchers?
  • Core publications: What are the most noteworthy journals in your field of study?
  • Bias: Be aware of your own possible biases and try to treat research even-handedly.  

5. Organize Citations and Synthesize Sources

Keep track of ALL your sources from the earliest stages, since you often won't know which ones you'll use in your final literature review. Citation management is highly recommended

Literature reviews are arranged by theme or topic, rather than listed by date or author (as in a bibliography). In your notes, document recurring themes and areas of disagreement. A synthesis matrix or synthesis table can help.