It is a particular genre with its own goals and purpose (which you can read about on the prompt). Do not make the mistake of writing this paper in the same fashion as other basic research papers you may have written in high school or other courses. The distinguishing feature of a literature review is that it focuses on the qualities of each source as well as the key information each asserts, and then compares the sources against one another to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge on the topic in the field as a whole.
Think of it this way: when individual researchers or institutions conduct a study or research project, they are working as individual entities. They have a question they’re trying to answer or idea they’re trying to prove. This requires them to focus on a very narrow idea, which is only a tiny piece of all there is to know about that subject. Each individual article or study that someone publishes is like a single puzzle piece. Each contains important information, but it’s only a small part of the bigger story. This is where you, the writer of a literature review comes in. It’s your job to take all these individual puzzle pieces – the published articles or studies – and put the puzzle together. You take all the pieces and connect them in the right way, so that someone who reads your literature review can see the whole picture.
This is why literature reviews are so important – they pull together the important knowledge from multiple sources into a bigger picture, so we, the readers, can see the larger pattern. Think about how different it is to look at a finished jigsaw puzzle compared to looking at a pile of mixed up pieces! All of the pieces are there, but it’s difficult to understand what they mean until they’re connected in the right way. Once they are, you can see the big, beautiful picture that they compose.
In order to do this as a writer, you’ll need to briefly explain each piece of the puzzle, so we can “see” it, then connect all those pieces together so we can see that bigger picture. You’ll do this by introducing each source clearly, summarizing its main points and key contributions efficiently, and then explaining how it connects to the conclusions of the other sources. Did some of your sources reach the same conclusions on the research subject? Did any of them contradict one another? Did some of your sources focus on slightly different aspects of the topic, and how do those different aspects influence each other, or help us form a larger understanding of the subject? You’ll do much of this work in the “Current Research” section of the paper.
In the “Discussion” section of the paper, you’ll explain the big picture of the finished jigsaw puzzle. Tell us what the finished puzzle looks like. A finished puzzle is more than just the sum of its parts – we see something bigger than each individual piece. So, tell us what we can learn from looking at all your sources together, as a collective, in the right way. What is the current state of knowledge on this topic? Is there consensus? Disagreement? Do experts seem to have discovered everything important on the topic and settled any questions? Or is the subject new and mostly undiscovered; is there much more that researchers still need to investigate? Based on your answers to these questions, you should recommend where experts should focus future research. What questions are still unanswered? What is the most important or promising area that we should focus our attention on? ( I have papers with sources that might help)
