HOW CAN I WRITE A GOOD LITERATURE REVIEW?

	Remember the purpose: it should answer the questions we looked at above. Look at how published writers review the literature. You'll see that you should use the literature to explain your research - after all, you are not writing a literature review just to tell your reader what other researchers have done. You aim should be to show why your research needs to be carried out, how you came to choose certain methodologies or theories to work with, how your work adds to the research already carried out, etc.
	Read with a purpose: you need to summarize the work you read but you must also decide which ideas or information are important to your research (so you can emphasize them), and which are less important and can be covered briefly or left out of your review. You should also look for the major concepts, conclusions, theories, arguments etc. that underlie the work, and look for similarities and differences with closely related work. This is difficult when you first start reading, but should become easier the more you read in your area.
	Write with a purpose: your aim should be to evaluate and show relationships between the work already done (Is Researcher Y's theory more convincing than Researcher X's? Did Researcher X build on the work of Researcher Y?) and between this work and your own. In order to do this effectively you should carefully plan how you are going to organize your work.

A lot of people like to organize their work chronologically (using time as their organizing system). Unless developments over time are crucial to explain the context of your research problem, using a chronological system will not be an effective way to organize your work. Some people choose to organize their work alphabetically by author name: this system will not allow you to show the relationships between the work of different researchers, and your work, and should be avoided!

For more information about writing, access The Basics of Good Writing.

When you read for your literature review, you are actually doing two things at the same time (which makes things more difficult for you!):

1.  you are trying to define your research problem: finding a gap, asking a question, continuing previous research, counter-claiming (see the introductions page);
2. you are trying to read every source relevant to your research problem.

Naturally, until you have defined your problem, you will find that there are hundreds of sources that seem relevant. However, you cannot define your problem until you read around your research area. This seems a vicious circle, but what should happen is that as you read you define your problem, andas you define your problem you will more easily be able to decide what to read and what to ignore.

TRAPS

Some traps to avoid:

	Trying to read everything! As you might already have discovered, if you try to be comprehensive you will never be able to finish the reading! The idea of the literature review is not to provide a summary of all the published work that relates to your research, but a survey of the most relevant and significant work.
	Reading but not writing! It's easier to read than to write: given the choice, most of us would rather sit down with a cup of coffee and read yet another article instead of putting ourselves in front of the computer to write about what we have already read! Writing takes much more effort, doesn't it? However, writing can help you to understand and find relationships between the work you've read, so don't put writing off until you've "finished" reading - after all, you will probably still be doing some reading all the way through to the end of your research project. Also, don't think of what you first write as being the final or near-final version. Writing is a way of thinking, so allow yourself to write as many drafts as you need, changing your ideas and information as you learn more about the context of your research problem.
	Not keeping bibliographic information! The moment will come when you have to write your references page . . . and then you realize you have forgotten to keep the information you need, and that you never got around to putting references into your work. The only solution is to spend a lot of time in the library tracking down all those sources that you read, and going through your writing to find which information came from which source. If you're lucky, maybe you can actually do this before your defence - more likely, you will unable to find all your sources, a big headache for you and your committee. To avoid this nightmare, always keep this information in your notes. Always put references into your writing. Notice how on this course we have referenced the works that we have referred to - you should do the same. (Access our How to Reference page for more information about why and how to do reference).