Literature Reviews

Getting Started with Writing a Literature Review

Cycle of the research journey of literature review: question, search, manage, synthesize, write

Image from: Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Literature Review: A Research Journey instructional video.

The steps and journey for writing a literature review are different for different researchers, but here is one potential path to follow. 

  • Discover questions about your area of study
  • Search the relevant scholarly literature and sources
  • Evaluate your sources on authority, accuracy, currency, documentation, and relevance to your research questions
  • Manage your sources through cloud methods and citation management software like Zotero
  • Synthesize the literature to match with themes of your research
  • Write the literature review and be sure to integrate your sources in your writing in text citations and a bibliography or reference list

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