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Students entering a graduate program often encounter a new type of assignment that differs from the papers they had to write in high school or as college undergraduates: the literature review (also known as a critical review essay). Put briefly, a literature review summarizes and evaluates a body of writings about a specific topic. The need to conduct such reviews is by no means limited to graduate students; scholarly researchers generally carry out literature reviews throughout their research careers. In a world where the Internet has broadened the range of potentially relevant sources, however, doing a literature review can pose challenges even to an experienced researcher.
In recent years, I have taught a course designed to help students in a policy-oriented Master's program draft thesis proposals. In looking for readings to assign to guide their literature reviews for these proposals, I discovered a paucity of appropriate published sources.1 The vast majority of methods textbooks written for students in political science or public policy contain no discussion whatsoever of the literature review.2 Some general methods texts contain sections on the literature review (for example, Cresswell 2003; Patten 2005), but these turned out not to be very helpful in meeting the needs of the student population I was teaching. Finally, there are a few books devoted solely to preparing a literature review (Fink 2005; Galvan 2005; Pan 2004), but these were too long to be a viable reading assignment for the course. In the end, I drafted my own "how to" handout on doing a literature review. In the hope that my observations might be helpful to others, I have adapted my handout for publication here.
In general, a literature review has two key elements. First, it should concisely summarize the findings or claims that have emerged from prior research efforts on a subject. second, a literature review should reach a conclusion about how accurate and complete that knowledge is; it should present your considered judgments about what's right, what's wrong, what's inconclusive, and what's missing in the existing literature. In contrast to some other ways of surveying a body of literature, such as an annotated bibliography, the literature review is a work of synthesis. For this reason, it is important not to simply write a summary...