How can i write a great literature review?

Like any other scientific paper, you may first need to define your topic and audience. You really need to be well prepared for writing a review paper. Here are some general tips which I can think of:

(1) First, try to define the scope of your paper. Make an outline. Think and decide what topics should be and should not be within your scope. Make sure that you understand what question(s) you are going to answer by writing this review paper.

(2) Now that you have your topic, start searching for relevant articles. Never give up searching for new papers. Be creative, and not use the same key words every time you search. Use different keywords and different search engines and different databases. It is also good to read the list of references for every paper you read to find new papers.

(3) You are going to have so many references in your paper. So, it is better to organize all your references with a software and not manually! You are doing a professional job and you should use professional stuff. Take a look at to get an idea of the list of digital tools for researchers. There are several good software available for organizing papers like EndNote, Mendeley, Sente, Zotero, Paperpile, etc.

(4) You may find some published review articles related to your topic. You need to clarify this thing first that how your review paper differs from previous ones. If you can’t find any differences, or you can find a good and updated review paper from other researchers in your filed then you may probably should not waste your time and write another one unless you try to find different approaches to modify your topic!

(5) You may find some papers which you don’t have access to download them at the time you are searching. Make a list of those papers and think of other alternative ways to get access to them at another time.

(6) You need to take note of every paper you read. Yes! That might be tough. But think about this aspect of taking notes that you are saving a huge amount of time when you want to start writing your paper. In other words, you are not going to start from a blank document!

(7) Reading papers and summarizing them is not the only way you need to do to write a review paper. Your lab mates, your supervisor, your collaborators, and anybody else can be an invaluable resource for you. Chat with them every so often to get their idea. Talk about your progress. If you are on the right track and doing a good job, they might get really interested in what you are doing and will be eager to help you.

While reading papers, you need to find a logical structure for your review paper and modify your outline. You are going to talk about previous published works in your review paper. It is really good to think about having a structure. Find the similarities and differences between your resources. If you can, define some metrics to easily compare the results of other researchers. Think of the ways you are going to present all those papers you read. Tables, figures, and diagrams are the best tools to organize your resources.

(8) Criticize papers by mentioning their main achievements and the areas which were not fully covered and answered that may cause ambiguity.

(9) Make sure that you know all the information and instructions for submitting your paper to the journal you want. The journal might have some instruction on review paper including minimum and maximum number of pages, number of references, etc.

(10) Sometimes it is better to just forget your laptop and phone. Print some of your resources, have a notebook and go to a cozy cafe and start thinking about the structure of your review paper while all your PDFs and web browsers are closed. It really works!

(11)And don’t forget, like any other academic paper, write your abstract last!

Source

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-ways-to-write-a-literature-review

Sadanand Pandey

A literature review can offer a brief analysis of evidence for your chosen topic. The very essence of writing a literature review is to show that you have command over your research. When you don’t showcase that you have performed the background work, you cannot go further in recommending future research.

Kenneth Lui-ming Ngie

The following publications and links (please refer to some more discussions/recommended publications) may further help:

Booth, A., Papaioannou, D. and Sutton, A. (2012) Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Callahan, J. L. (2014) Writing Literature Reviews: A Reprise and Update, Human Resource Development Review, 13, 3, pp. 271-275.
Cronin, P., Ryan, F. and Coughlan, M. (2008) Undertaking a literature review: a step-by-step approach, British journal of nursing, 17, 1, pp. 38-43.
Hart, C. (2007) Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Knopf, J. W. (2006) Doing a literature review, Political Science and Politics, 39, 1, pp. 127-132.
Lingard, L. (2018) Writing an eﬀective literature review - Part I : Mapping the gap, Perspectives on medical education, 7, 1, pp. 47-49.
Oxman, A. D. and Guyatt, G. H. (1988) Guidelines for reading literature reviews, Canadian Medical Association journal, 138, 8, pp. 697-703.
How to do effective literature review?: https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_to_do_effective_literature_review
Can you give me a good example of literature review article?: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_you_give_me_a_good_example_of_literature_review_article

Reema Ahmad

The literature review is a sequence of experiments and previous work of the same work that you work on or the your research talks about

you can write the literature view in the best way when you take the previous work from three or four years ago and try to bind the events together not each event alone as separated paragraphs

you can also visit this following link:

https://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/get-assistance/writing/specific-types-papers/writing-literature-review

Surya B. Parajuli

Dear Farkhanda Ijaz

Thank you for your question.

Literature review is the one of the important initial step of any research/project work. You can follow the pattern as known-unknown-gap-response for literature review writing.

1. What is known for your proposed research work?

2. What Is unknown for your proposed research worK?

3. What is/are the gaps?

4. How do your research work address to fulfill this gap?

Best Regards,

Dr Surya B Parajuli

http://suryaparajuli.com.np/index.php/about-me

Aristidis Matsoukis Popular answer

Dear @Farkhanda Ijaz,

Please take a look at https://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/get-assistance/writing/specific-types-papers/writing-literature-review.