The Literature Review

Learning Objectives

  • Describe a literature review and explain its purpose;
  • Describe the steps in undertaking a literature review
  • Demonstrate how to write a literature review
  • Identify acceptable sources to include in your literature review;
  • List of the five ‘C’s of writing a literature review.
  • Compare a literature review, an essay and an annotated bibliography.
  • Explain the importance of APA referencing and list some of the sources for getting assistance with APA referencing.

In this chapter, we will focus on writing a literature review. As part of this focus we concentrate on four key aspects, as follows: 1) explaining the purpose behind a literature review and where it fits in the research process; 2) explaining how a literature review is different from an essay and an annotated bibliography, 3) describing the special aspects that distinguish a literature review from other styles of academic writing, and 4) explaining how to conduct a literature review and why it is important to review previous research studies. If you have never written a literature review, and even if you have, this chapter will provide valuable information for you.  Understanding how to write a literature review is important because it is quite likely that you will have to do another one at some point in your academic and/or professional career.

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An Introduction to Research Methods in Sociology Copyright © 2019 by Valerie A. Sheppard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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