Conducting a Literature Review

A literature review for FIRE is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries. 

Besides enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a literature review lets you gain and demonstrate skills in two areas: 

1. Information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of academic articles. Only peer reviewed, scholarly sources and guidelines will be included. You will not be using newspapers, magazines, blogs, conference proceedings or grey literature.
2. Critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies. 

A literature review must do these things: 

a) be organized around and related directly to a research question you are developing 

b) synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known 

c) identify areas of controversy in the literature 

d) formulate questions that need further research