Submission deadline: November 14

Assignment instructions

Your task is to write a short but well-written critical literature review that will become part of thesis research. It is suggested that you elaborate and extend your annotated bibliography into a literature review. The literature review should include:

 ·         a brief introduction (100-200 words)

·         a summary and critical evaluation of the 6-8 source articles in your own words (700-800 words)

·         a brief conclusion (100-200 words)

·         a reference list in APA style 

You shall write 900-1000 words in total (excluding references).

Use this template for writing:

Purpose of a literature review

Writing the literature review requires you to read the selected texts in detail so you can present a fair and reasonable evaluation of the current knowledge. Conducting a literature review should enable you to find out what research has already been done and identify what is unknown within your topic. 

A literature review is an overview of the topic, an explanation of how publications differ from one another, and an examination of how each publication contributes to the discussion and understanding of the topic.

What is meant by critical?

At university, to be critical does not mean to criticise in a negative manner. Rather, it requires you to question the information and opinions in a text and present your evaluation or judgement of the text. To do this well, you should attempt to understand the topic from different perspectives (i.e. read related texts), and in relation to the theories and materials covered in your courses.

The structure of a literature review

A literature review follows the format of any other essay—Introduction, Body, and Conclusion.

1. Introduction

The literature review starts with the problem statement. The problem statement should address the relevance of the research. To make it clear why your research problem matters, you can ask yourself: Why do we need to know more about this? Why is this an important problem to study? Where and when does the problem arise? How many people are affected by the problem? Is the problem limited to a certain time period or geographical area?

At minimum, the introduction should define or identify the general topic, issue, or area of concern. You might consider presenting historical background, mentioning the results of a seminal study, or providing definitions of important terms. 

2. Literature review

The body of your literature review is where you demonstrate your synthesis and analysis of the literature on your topic, so be sure that you are doing more than just summarizing the facts you’ve found. I would also caution against organizing your literature review by source—that is, one paragraph for source A, one paragraph for source B, etc. That structure will provide a mediocre summary of the information but will not provide the synthesis that we are aiming for in this section. It also fails to demonstrate the relationships among facts, potential disagreements among research findings, and how each study builds on the work of another. In short, summarization does not demonstrate critical thinking.

Here are some additional tips for writing the body of your literature review:

• Start broad and then narrow down to more specific information.
• When appropriate, cite two or more sources for a single point.
• Use quotes (direct citation) at least once in the text. Quotations for definitions are okay, but reserve quotes for when an author says something so well that you couldn’t possibly phrase it differently. Never use quotes for statistics.
• Paraphrase when you need to relate the specific details within an article, and try to paraphrase it in a way that is understandable to your audience.
• Include only the aspects of the study that are relevant to your literature review. Don’t insert extra facts about a study just to take up space.
• Avoid using informal language like contractions, idioms, and rhetorical questions.
  
• Support your arguments with specific empirical or theoretical facts. 
• Point out consistent findings and emphasize stronger studies over weaker ones.
  
• Point out important strengths and weaknesses of research studies, as well as contradictions and inconsistent findings.
• You can use first-person language like “I” to distinguish your ideas from your sources

Use APA style for in-text citations, see video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7XVOf-uIpA

3. Conclusion

The conclusion should summarize your literature review, discuss implications, and create a space for future or further research needed in this area. Your conclusion, like the rest of your literature review, should have a point that you are trying to make. What are the important implications of your literature review? How do they inform the question you are trying to answer? 

4. Reference list

Order references alphabetically and make sure that your references are complete and consistent.

Use APA style for reference list, see video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ4kAsgAzzM

You can use citation manager to produce the reference list in APA style (e.g. https://www.zotero.org/https://www.citacepro.com/en/) 

How To Use Zotero (A Complete Beginner's Guide): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG7Uq_JFDzE

Submission 

Submissions by email are ignored. Submit your literature review as a Microsoft Word document (preferred) or as pdf. Other document formats will be ignored. 

Literature review examples

Writing tools you can use

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