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How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

  • Search for relevant literature
  • Evaluate sources
  • Identify themes, debates, and gaps
  • Outline the structure
  • Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

  • Quick Run-through
  • Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

  • Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
  • Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
  • Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
  • Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
  • Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Literature review guide

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

  • Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
  • Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
  • Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
  • Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

  • Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
  • Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
  • Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

  • Your university’s library catalogue
  • Google Scholar
  • Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
  • Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
  • EconLit (economics)
  • Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

  • What question or problem is the author addressing?
  • What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
  • What are the key theories, models, and methods?
  • Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
  • What are the results and conclusions of the study?
  • How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

  • Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
  • Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
  • Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
  • Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
  • Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

  • Most research has focused on young women.
  • There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
  • But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

  • Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
  • Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
  • Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

  • Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
  • Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
  • Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
  • Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

  • Sampling methods
  • Simple random sampling
  • Stratified sampling
  • Cluster sampling
  • Likert scales
  • Reproducibility

 Statistics

  • Null hypothesis
  • Statistical power
  • Probability distribution
  • Effect size
  • Poisson distribution

Research bias

  • Optimism bias
  • Cognitive bias
  • Implicit bias
  • Hawthorne effect
  • Anchoring bias
  • Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

  • To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
  • To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
  • To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
  • To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
  • To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

  • An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
  • A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
  • Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
  • Summarize and synthesize: Give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
  • Analyze and interpret: Don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
  • Critically Evaluate: Mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
  • Write in well-structured paragraphs: Use transition words and topic sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

  • Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
  • Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

  • Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
  • Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
  • Qualitative versus quantitative research
  • Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
  • Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
  • Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

  • It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
  • Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
  • Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
  • Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

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How To Write A Literature Review - A Complete Guide

Deeptanshu D

Table of Contents

A literature review is much more than just another section in your research paper. It forms the very foundation of your research. It is a formal piece of writing where you analyze the existing theoretical framework, principles, and assumptions and use that as a base to shape your approach to the research question.

Curating and drafting a solid literature review section not only lends more credibility to your research paper but also makes your research tighter and better focused. But, writing literature reviews is a difficult task. It requires extensive reading, plus you have to consider market trends and technological and political changes, which tend to change in the blink of an eye.

Now streamline your literature review process with the help of SciSpace Copilot. With this AI research assistant, you can efficiently synthesize and analyze a vast amount of information, identify key themes and trends, and uncover gaps in the existing research. Get real-time explanations, summaries, and answers to your questions for the paper you're reviewing, making navigating and understanding the complex literature landscape easier.

Perform Literature reviews using SciSpace Copilot

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore everything from the definition of a literature review, its appropriate length, various types of literature reviews, and how to write one.

What is a literature review?

A literature review is a collation of survey, research, critical evaluation, and assessment of the existing literature in a preferred domain.

Eminent researcher and academic Arlene Fink, in her book Conducting Research Literature Reviews , defines it as the following:

“A literature review surveys books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by so doing, provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem being investigated.

Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have explored while researching a particular topic, and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within a larger field of study.”

Simply put, a literature review can be defined as a critical discussion of relevant pre-existing research around your research question and carving out a definitive place for your study in the existing body of knowledge. Literature reviews can be presented in multiple ways: a section of an article, the whole research paper itself, or a chapter of your thesis.

A literature review paper

A literature review does function as a summary of sources, but it also allows you to analyze further, interpret, and examine the stated theories, methods, viewpoints, and, of course, the gaps in the existing content.

As an author, you can discuss and interpret the research question and its various aspects and debate your adopted methods to support the claim.

What is the purpose of a literature review?

A literature review is meant to help your readers understand the relevance of your research question and where it fits within the existing body of knowledge. As a researcher, you should use it to set the context, build your argument, and establish the need for your study.

What is the importance of a literature review?

The literature review is a critical part of research papers because it helps you:

  • Gain an in-depth understanding of your research question and the surrounding area
  • Convey that you have a thorough understanding of your research area and are up-to-date with the latest changes and advancements
  • Establish how your research is connected or builds on the existing body of knowledge and how it could contribute to further research
  • Elaborate on the validity and suitability of your theoretical framework and research methodology
  • Identify and highlight gaps and shortcomings in the existing body of knowledge and how things need to change
  • Convey to readers how your study is different or how it contributes to the research area

How long should a literature review be?

Ideally, the literature review should take up 15%-40% of the total length of your manuscript. So, if you have a 10,000-word research paper, the minimum word count could be 1500.

Your literature review format depends heavily on the kind of manuscript you are writing — an entire chapter in case of doctoral theses, a part of the introductory section in a research article, to a full-fledged review article that examines the previously published research on a topic.

Another determining factor is the type of research you are doing. The literature review section tends to be longer for secondary research projects than primary research projects.

What are the different types of literature reviews?

All literature reviews are not the same. There are a variety of possible approaches that you can take. It all depends on the type of research you are pursuing.

Here are the different types of literature reviews:

Argumentative review

It is called an argumentative review when you carefully present literature that only supports or counters a specific argument or premise to establish a viewpoint.

Integrative review

It is a type of literature review focused on building a comprehensive understanding of a topic by combining available theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence.

Methodological review

This approach delves into the ''how'' and the ''what" of the research question —  you cannot look at the outcome in isolation; you should also review the methodology used.

Systematic review

This form consists of an overview of existing evidence pertinent to a clearly formulated research question, which uses pre-specified and standardized methods to identify and critically appraise relevant research and collect, report, and analyze data from the studies included in the review.

Meta-analysis review

Meta-analysis uses statistical methods to summarize the results of independent studies. By combining information from all relevant studies, meta-analysis can provide more precise estimates of the effects than those derived from the individual studies included within a review.

Historical review

Historical literature reviews focus on examining research throughout a period, often starting with the first time an issue, concept, theory, or phenomenon emerged in the literature, then tracing its evolution within the scholarship of a discipline. The purpose is to place research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the-art developments and identify future research's likely directions.

Theoretical Review

This form aims to examine the corpus of theory accumulated regarding an issue, concept, theory, and phenomenon. The theoretical literature review helps to establish what theories exist, the relationships between them, the degree the existing approaches have been investigated, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested.

Scoping Review

The Scoping Review is often used at the beginning of an article, dissertation, or research proposal. It is conducted before the research to highlight gaps in the existing body of knowledge and explains why the project should be greenlit.

State-of-the-Art Review

The State-of-the-Art review is conducted periodically, focusing on the most recent research. It describes what is currently known, understood, or agreed upon regarding the research topic and highlights where there are still disagreements.

Can you use the first person in a literature review?

When writing literature reviews, you should avoid the usage of first-person pronouns. It means that instead of "I argue that" or "we argue that," the appropriate expression would be "this research paper argues that."

Do you need an abstract for a literature review?

Ideally, yes. It is always good to have a condensed summary that is self-contained and independent of the rest of your review. As for how to draft one, you can follow the same fundamental idea when preparing an abstract for a literature review. It should also include:

  • The research topic and your motivation behind selecting it
  • A one-sentence thesis statement
  • An explanation of the kinds of literature featured in the review
  • Summary of what you've learned
  • Conclusions you drew from the literature you reviewed
  • Potential implications and future scope for research

Here's an example of the abstract of a literature review

Abstract-of-a-literature-review

Is a literature review written in the past tense?

Yes, the literature review should ideally be written in the past tense. You should not use the present or future tense when writing one. The exceptions are when you have statements describing events that happened earlier than the literature you are reviewing or events that are currently occurring; then, you can use the past perfect or present perfect tenses.

How many sources for a literature review?

There are multiple approaches to deciding how many sources to include in a literature review section. The first approach would be to look level you are at as a researcher. For instance, a doctoral thesis might need 60+ sources. In contrast, you might only need to refer to 5-15 sources at the undergraduate level.

The second approach is based on the kind of literature review you are doing — whether it is merely a chapter of your paper or if it is a self-contained paper in itself. When it is just a chapter, sources should equal the total number of pages in your article's body. In the second scenario, you need at least three times as many sources as there are pages in your work.

Quick tips on how to write a literature review

To know how to write a literature review, you must clearly understand its impact and role in establishing your work as substantive research material.

You need to follow the below-mentioned steps, to write a literature review:

  • Outline the purpose behind the literature review
  • Search relevant literature
  • Examine and assess the relevant resources
  • Discover connections by drawing deep insights from the resources
  • Structure planning to write a good literature review

1. Outline and identify the purpose of  a literature review

As a first step on how to write a literature review, you must know what the research question or topic is and what shape you want your literature review to take. Ensure you understand the research topic inside out, or else seek clarifications. You must be able to the answer below questions before you start:

  • How many sources do I need to include?
  • What kind of sources should I analyze?
  • How much should I critically evaluate each source?
  • Should I summarize, synthesize or offer a critique of the sources?
  • Do I need to include any background information or definitions?

Additionally, you should know that the narrower your research topic is, the swifter it will be for you to restrict the number of sources to be analyzed.

2. Search relevant literature

Dig deeper into search engines to discover what has already been published around your chosen topic. Make sure you thoroughly go through appropriate reference sources like books, reports, journal articles, government docs, and web-based resources.

You must prepare a list of keywords and their different variations. You can start your search from any library’s catalog, provided you are an active member of that institution. The exact keywords can be extended to widen your research over other databases and academic search engines like:

  • Google Scholar
  • Microsoft Academic
  • Science.gov

Besides, it is not advisable to go through every resource word by word. Alternatively, what you can do is you can start by reading the abstract and then decide whether that source is relevant to your research or not.

Additionally, you must spend surplus time assessing the quality and relevance of resources. It would help if you tried preparing a list of citations to ensure that there lies no repetition of authors, publications, or articles in the literature review.

3. Examine and assess the sources

It is nearly impossible for you to go through every detail in the research article. So rather than trying to fetch every detail, you have to analyze and decide which research sources resemble closest and appear relevant to your chosen domain.

While analyzing the sources, you should look to find out answers to questions like:

  • What question or problem has the author been describing and debating?
  • What is the definition of critical aspects?
  • How well the theories, approach, and methodology have been explained?
  • Whether the research theory used some conventional or new innovative approach?
  • How relevant are the key findings of the work?
  • In what ways does it relate to other sources on the same topic?
  • What challenges does this research paper pose to the existing theory
  • What are the possible contributions or benefits it adds to the subject domain?

Be always mindful that you refer only to credible and authentic resources. It would be best if you always take references from different publications to validate your theory.

Always keep track of important information or data you can present in your literature review right from the beginning. It will help steer your path from any threats of plagiarism and also make it easier to curate an annotated bibliography or reference section.

4. Discover connections

At this stage, you must start deciding on the argument and structure of your literature review. To accomplish this, you must discover and identify the relations and connections between various resources while drafting your abstract.

A few aspects that you should be aware of while writing a literature review include:

  • Rise to prominence: Theories and methods that have gained reputation and supporters over time.
  • Constant scrutiny: Concepts or theories that repeatedly went under examination.
  • Contradictions and conflicts: Theories, both the supporting and the contradictory ones, for the research topic.
  • Knowledge gaps: What exactly does it fail to address, and how to bridge them with further research?
  • Influential resources: Significant research projects available that have been upheld as milestones or perhaps, something that can modify the current trends

Once you join the dots between various past research works, it will be easier for you to draw a conclusion and identify your contribution to the existing knowledge base.

5. Structure planning to write a good literature review

There exist different ways towards planning and executing the structure of a literature review. The format of a literature review varies and depends upon the length of the research.

Like any other research paper, the literature review format must contain three sections: introduction, body, and conclusion. The goals and objectives of the research question determine what goes inside these three sections.

Nevertheless, a good literature review can be structured according to the chronological, thematic, methodological, or theoretical framework approach.

Literature review samples

1. Standalone

Standalone-Literature-Review

2. As a section of a research paper

Literature-review-as-a-section-of-a-research-paper

How SciSpace Discover makes literature review a breeze?

SciSpace Discover is a one-stop solution to do an effective literature search and get barrier-free access to scientific knowledge. It is an excellent repository where you can find millions of only peer-reviewed articles and full-text PDF files. Here’s more on how you can use it:

Find the right information

Find-the-right-information-using-SciSpace

Find what you want quickly and easily with comprehensive search filters that let you narrow down papers according to PDF availability, year of publishing, document type, and affiliated institution. Moreover, you can sort the results based on the publishing date, citation count, and relevance.

Assess credibility of papers quickly

Assess-credibility-of-papers-quickly-using-SciSpace

When doing the literature review, it is critical to establish the quality of your sources. They form the foundation of your research. SciSpace Discover helps you assess the quality of a source by providing an overview of its references, citations, and performance metrics.

Get the complete picture in no time

SciSpace's-personalized-informtion-engine

SciSpace Discover’s personalized suggestion engine helps you stay on course and get the complete picture of the topic from one place. Every time you visit an article page, it provides you links to related papers. Besides that, it helps you understand what’s trending, who are the top authors, and who are the leading publishers on a topic.

Make referring sources super easy

Make-referring-pages-super-easy-with-SciSpace

To ensure you don't lose track of your sources, you must start noting down your references when doing the literature review. SciSpace Discover makes this step effortless. Click the 'cite' button on an article page, and you will receive preloaded citation text in multiple styles — all you've to do is copy-paste it into your manuscript.

Final tips on how to write a literature review

A massive chunk of time and effort is required to write a good literature review. But, if you go about it systematically, you'll be able to save a ton of time and build a solid foundation for your research.

We hope this guide has helped you answer several key questions you have about writing literature reviews.

Would you like to explore SciSpace Discover and kick off your literature search right away? You can get started here .

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. how to start a literature review.

• What questions do you want to answer?

• What sources do you need to answer these questions?

• What information do these sources contain?

• How can you use this information to answer your questions?

2. What to include in a literature review?

• A brief background of the problem or issue

• What has previously been done to address the problem or issue

• A description of what you will do in your project

• How this study will contribute to research on the subject

3. Why literature review is important?

The literature review is an important part of any research project because it allows the writer to look at previous studies on a topic and determine existing gaps in the literature, as well as what has already been done. It will also help them to choose the most appropriate method for their own study.

4. How to cite a literature review in APA format?

To cite a literature review in APA style, you need to provide the author's name, the title of the article, and the year of publication. For example: Patel, A. B., & Stokes, G. S. (2012). The relationship between personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis of longitudinal research. Personality and Individual Differences, 53(1), 16-21

5. What are the components of a literature review?

• A brief introduction to the topic, including its background and context. The introduction should also include a rationale for why the study is being conducted and what it will accomplish.

• A description of the methodologies used in the study. This can include information about data collection methods, sample size, and statistical analyses.

• A presentation of the findings in an organized format that helps readers follow along with the author's conclusions.

6. What are common errors in writing literature review?

• Not spending enough time to critically evaluate the relevance of resources, observations and conclusions.

• Totally relying on secondary data while ignoring primary data.

• Letting your personal bias seep into your interpretation of existing literature.

• No detailed explanation of the procedure to discover and identify an appropriate literature review.

7. What are the 5 C's of writing literature review?

• Cite - the sources you utilized and referenced in your research.

• Compare - existing arguments, hypotheses, methodologies, and conclusions found in the knowledge base.

• Contrast - the arguments, topics, methodologies, approaches, and disputes that may be found in the literature.

• Critique - the literature and describe the ideas and opinions you find more convincing and why.

• Connect - the various studies you reviewed in your research.

8. How many sources should a literature review have?

When it is just a chapter, sources should equal the total number of pages in your article's body. if it is a self-contained paper in itself, you need at least three times as many sources as there are pages in your work.

9. Can literature review have diagrams?

• To represent an abstract idea or concept

• To explain the steps of a process or procedure

• To help readers understand the relationships between different concepts

10. How old should sources be in a literature review?

Sources for a literature review should be as current as possible or not older than ten years. The only exception to this rule is if you are reviewing a historical topic and need to use older sources.

11. What are the types of literature review?

• Argumentative review

• Integrative review

• Methodological review

• Systematic review

• Meta-analysis review

• Historical review

• Theoretical review

• Scoping review

• State-of-the-Art review

12. Is a literature review mandatory?

Yes. Literature review is a mandatory part of any research project. It is a critical step in the process that allows you to establish the scope of your research, and provide a background for the rest of your work.

But before you go,

  • Six Online Tools for Easy Literature Review
  • Evaluating literature review: systematic vs. scoping reviews
  • Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review
  • Writing Integrative Literature Reviews: Guidelines and Examples

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  • 04 December 2020
  • Correction 09 December 2020

How to write a superb literature review

Andy Tay is a freelance writer based in Singapore.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Literature reviews are important resources for scientists. They provide historical context for a field while offering opinions on its future trajectory. Creating them can provide inspiration for one’s own research, as well as some practice in writing. But few scientists are trained in how to write a review — or in what constitutes an excellent one. Even picking the appropriate software to use can be an involved decision (see ‘Tools and techniques’). So Nature asked editors and working scientists with well-cited reviews for their tips.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03422-x

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Updates & Corrections

Correction 09 December 2020 : An earlier version of the tables in this article included some incorrect details about the programs Zotero, Endnote and Manubot. These have now been corrected.

Hsing, I.-M., Xu, Y. & Zhao, W. Electroanalysis 19 , 755–768 (2007).

Article   Google Scholar  

Ledesma, H. A. et al. Nature Nanotechnol. 14 , 645–657 (2019).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Brahlek, M., Koirala, N., Bansal, N. & Oh, S. Solid State Commun. 215–216 , 54–62 (2015).

Choi, Y. & Lee, S. Y. Nature Rev. Chem . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-020-00221-w (2020).

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  • What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

Published on 22 February 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 7 June 2022.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

  • Search for relevant literature
  • Evaluate sources
  • Identify themes, debates and gaps
  • Outline the structure
  • Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

Why write a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1: search for relevant literature, step 2: evaluate and select sources, step 3: identify themes, debates and gaps, step 4: outline your literature review’s structure, step 5: write your literature review, frequently asked questions about literature reviews, introduction.

  • Quick Run-through
  • Step 1 & 2

When you write a dissertation or thesis, you will have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

  • Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
  • Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
  • Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
  • Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.

The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Literature review guide

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

  • Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
  • Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
  • Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
  • Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research objectives and questions .

If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

  • Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
  • Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
  • Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some databases to search for journals and articles include:

  • Your university’s library catalogue
  • Google Scholar
  • Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
  • Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
  • EconLit (economics)
  • Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:

Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

To identify the most important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.

You probably won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic – you’ll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.

For each publication, ask yourself:

  • What question or problem is the author addressing?
  • What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
  • What are the key theories, models and methods? Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
  • What are the results and conclusions of the study?
  • How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
  • How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.

The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).

Remember that you can use our template to summarise and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using!

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It’s important to keep track of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full reference information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

You can use our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations.

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To begin organising your literature review’s argument and structure, you need to understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

  • Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
  • Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
  • Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
  • Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
  • Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

  • Most research has focused on young women.
  • There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
  • But there is still a lack of robust research on highly-visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organising the body of a literature review. You should have a rough idea of your strategy before you start writing.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarising sources in order.

Try to analyse patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organise your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

  • Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
  • Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
  • Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic (“many recent studies have focused on the problem of x”) or highlight a gap in the literature (“while there has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration”).

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, make sure to follow these tips:

  • Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
  • Analyse and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole.
  • Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources.
  • Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.

In the conclusion, you should summarise the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.

If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This can lead directly into your methodology section.

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a dissertation , thesis, research paper , or proposal .

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

  • To familiarise yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
  • To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
  • To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
  • To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
  • To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your  dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

McCombes, S. (2022, June 07). What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 15 February 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/thesis-dissertation/literature-review/

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How to Write a Literature Review

An introduction to and a guide on how to write your next literature review

Become a Visual Thinker

how to write a literature review on an article

Preparing for a Literature Review

Clearly define the topic of your research, this is the basis of picking what articles you'll be reading, analyzing and summarizing, and subsequently including in your research topic. Narrowing down the topic allows you to have a more specific base of literature to read, analyze, and review.

how to write a literature review on an article

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a portion of a research paper that compiles, describes, and analyzes different sources of information relevant to a given research topic, and then draws connections between each source to one another and the research of the author writing the review. Rather than simply describing each of the sources, critical reviews of the sources should be made.

Literature Review Purpose

A literature review is important for a variety of reasons, beyond just providing a background for your research topic. The purpose of the literature review is to:

Discuss current questions and debates that exist in the research topic

Provide a summary of the relevant aspects of the sources reviewed

Show how your research paper is placed chronologically in the research topic

Provide an overall understanding and introduction to the topic, building credibility

Prevent the author from researching a topic or area that has already been done

how to write a literature review on an article

How to Develop a Literature Review for Theses and Dissertations

The first step in developing the literature review for theses and dissertations is to collect information and sources that are related to the topic area you are researching.

1. Keyword search

There are a variety of different places to find relevant further research for your topic. University or public library catalogs are a good place to search, as well as online databases such as Google Scholar. When searching for relevant sources, try to use keywords that are related to your topic. When you find a few really good sources, look at their literature reviews and bibliographies to find other literature in the field.

2. Snowballing

Read as many sources in your field as possible to fully understand what work has been done in the past and where the current status of the topic lies. This could be journal articles, publications, books, and interviews, to name just a few.

Take notes as you are reading the different sources. I personally like to download my sources in my theses as pdfs and then highlight relevant information and annotate in the margins, using Adobe Acrobat Reader.

how to write a literature review on an article

Once you have read and annotated bibliography of the relevant sources, then analyze the collected works and categorize them from most and least relevant to the subject you are discussing. One effective method for doing this is by utilizing a reading grid.

A reading grid can be broken down by source information individually for each source included in the theses or dissertation literature review, such as the research question, methodology, findings, limitations, and areas for future research. This allows you to easily see the most relevant information within each piece of literature. An example of this can be seen below, provided by OpenAcademics and adapted from Auckland University of Technology.

how to write a literature review on an article

View this example in greater detail here .

3. Citations 

Citing a source means giving the credit for the source used in your research paper. This includes the information that you get from books or scholarly articles, and even pictures, charts or graphs. It is essential to give credit where it is due, so that you do not plagiarize another person's work.

You will need to include citations when you are using specific information from a single source, or when you are paraphrasing an idea from a single source. Citations can help avoid any confusion that would arise if someone else reads your work, and they can help direct readers to further resources on your topic.

When writing a literature review it is essential to keep track of all of the sources that you use. You should compile all of the sources into one document so that you can refer back to them easily and know what information came from which source. This will make it easier for you when you are ready to write your paper and insert citations.

There is a citation style that is specific to each discipline, and you should always follow the standards for your field. Check with your instructor or supervisor if you have any questions about the citation style you should use.

How to format citations

To make sure your paper is as perfect as it can be, let's take a look at how to format citations. If you're using Microsoft Word to write your literature review, you can use the "References" tab to organize your citations. If you want more control over the formatting, or if you're using another type of word processing program, you can do it manually.

Starting with a few basics

Double space everything, including block quotes and bibliography entries. If you're using a citation tool like Zotero or EndNote, make sure the formatting preferences are set for double spacing.For citations, you can use a standard font (like Times New Roman or Arial) in size 12. Using 1-inch margins all around for citations is common practice. To make sure your citations look good, indenting each new citation by half an inch is a good practice. (if you press Tab at the beginning of a paragraph, that should work).

Literature Review Length

The number of concepts explored and the number of sources incorporated into the literature review will determine its length. The number of sources included depend on how narrow or broad the topic is, the level of agreement among researchers in the topic, and the desired depth of analysis.

If the topic of your research is incredibly specific, there may only be a limited number of sources to choose from for your review, whereas if it is a really broad topic, you may need to include a variety of sources to paint a full picture of the topic background. Additionally, if there is a lot of disagreement within the research topic, you may need to include more sources to show the varying opinion that exists.

how to write a literature review on an article

Introduction to the Literature Review

This section should describe how your research topic is placed in the context of the existing literature in the field, and provide a reasoning for reviewing the literature that has been selected. Additionally the methodology for finding these sources should be discussed, and the order of the selected literature should be explained — whether it is running chronologically, based on theme of sources, or some other methodological manner.

Body of the Literature Review

The best approach for the body of the literature review is to break it down into sections or paragraphs for each of the sources reviewed. Within each literature source discussion, there should be the following components:

Description of the context of the literature and a summary of the most important concepts and aspects

Explanations of theories, equations, and terminology, relevant to the topic

Discussion of aspects of the literature that connect to your research topic

Conclusion of the Literature Review

Within the conclusion of the literature review, the entire section should be summarized and connected together in a methodical manner. To achieve this, the conclusion should provide the following:

A summarized overview of the important concepts, flaws, and gaps in each of the reviewed sources.

A description of how the literature is tied together, and a discussion of how the topic being written about also contributes to the overall field of knowledge.

You should show that the sources provided in the literature review relate to the work that is to be discussed in your research topic. Directly discuss different aspects of the literature review that contributed to the concepts, ideas, methodology, results, and conclusions in your research. If your research addresses potential gaps in past literature, you can also highlight this here.

An effective method for meeting this conclusion is to first synthesize the works with a brief introduction, a comparison of agreeing and disagreeing points of view, and stating the research findings impact. Then finalize the conclusion by pointing out the limitations of the topic, its impact, and discussing the contribution of your own work to this field.

An example of this synthesis and contribution discussion can be seen below, provided by OpenAcademics and adapted from Auckland University of Technology.

how to write a literature review on an article

You can view this example in greater detail here .

If you need additional insight into creating a literature review, I highly recommend checking out this video created by Wordvice Editing Service, which provides a detailed explanation of what to include, what not to include, how to structure, and how to compose a literature review from start to finish.

Thank you for reading!

If you’re looking for a tool to aid in your literature review, check out Scrintal — a web application designed to gather, organize & visually connect your thoughts, files & insights.

how to write a literature review on an article

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What is a literature review?

A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area. Often part of the introduction to an essay, research report or thesis, the literature review is literally a "re" view or "look again" at what has already been written about the topic, wherein the author analyzes a segment of a published body of knowledge through summary, classification, and comparison of prior research studies, reviews of literature, and theoretical articles. Literature reviews provide the reader with a bibliographic history of the scholarly research in any given field of study. As such,  as new information becomes available, literature reviews grow in length or become focused on one specific aspect of the topic.

A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but usually contains an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, whereas a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. The literature review might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. Depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

A literature review is NOT:

  • An annotated bibliography – a list of citations to books, articles and documents that includes a brief description and evaluation for each citation. The annotations inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy and quality of the sources cited.
  • A literary review – a critical discussion of the merits and weaknesses of a literary work.
  • A book review – a critical discussion of the merits and weaknesses of a particular book.
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What is the difference between a literature review and a research paper?

The focus of a literature review is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions, whereas academic research papers present and develop new arguments that build upon the previously available body of literature.

How do I write a literature review?

There are many resources that offer step-by-step guidance for writing a literature review, and you can find some of them under Other Resources in the menu to the left. Writing the Literature Review: A Practical Guide suggests these steps:

  • Chose a review topic and develop a research question
  • Locate and organize research sources
  • Select, analyze and annotate sources
  • Evaluate research articles and other documents
  • Structure and organize the literature review
  • Develop arguments and supporting claims
  • Synthesize and interpret the literature
  • Put it all together

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What is the purpose of writing a literature review?

Literature reviews serve as a guide to a particular topic: professionals can use literature reviews to keep current on their field; scholars can determine credibility of the writer in his or her field by analyzing the literature review.

As a writer, you will use the literature review to:

  • See what has, and what has not, been investigated about your topic
  • Identify data sources that other researches have used
  • Learn how others in the field have defined and measured key concepts
  • Establish context, or background, for the argument explored in the rest of a paper
  • Explain what the strengths and weaknesses of that knowledge and ideas might be
  • Contribute to the field by moving research forward
  • To keep the writer/reader up to date with current developments in a particular field of study
  • Develop alternative research projects
  • Put your work in perspective
  • Demonstrate your understanding and your ability to critically evaluate research in the field
  • Provide evidence that may support your own findings
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What is a literature review?

A literature review is an integrated analysis -- not just a summary-- of scholarly writings and other relevant evidence related directly to your research question.  That is, it represents a synthesis of the evidence that provides background information on your topic and shows a association between the evidence and your research question.

A literature review may be a stand alone work or the introduction to a larger research paper, depending on the assignment.  Rely heavily on the guidelines your instructor has given you.

Why is it important?

A literature review is important because it:

  • Explains the background of research on a topic.
  • Demonstrates why a topic is significant to a subject area.
  • Discovers relationships between research studies/ideas.
  • Identifies major themes, concepts, and researchers on a topic.
  • Identifies critical gaps and points of disagreement.
  • Discusses further research questions that logically come out of the previous studies.

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1. Choose a topic. Define your research question.

Your literature review should be guided by your central research question.  The literature represents background and research developments related to a specific research question, interpreted and analyzed by you in a synthesized way.

  • Make sure your research question is not too broad or too narrow.  Is it manageable?
  • Begin writing down terms that are related to your question. These will be useful for searches later.
  • If you have the opportunity, discuss your topic with your professor and your class mates.

2. Decide on the scope of your review

How many studies do you need to look at? How comprehensive should it be? How many years should it cover? 

  • This may depend on your assignment.  How many sources does the assignment require?

3. Select the databases you will use to conduct your searches.

Make a list of the databases you will search. 

Where to find databases:

  • use the tabs on this guide
  • Find other databases in the Nursing Information Resources web page
  • More on the Medical Library web page
  • ... and more on the Yale University Library web page

4. Conduct your searches to find the evidence. Keep track of your searches.

  • Use the key words in your question, as well as synonyms for those words, as terms in your search. Use the database tutorials for help.
  • Save the searches in the databases. This saves time when you want to redo, or modify, the searches. It is also helpful to use as a guide is the searches are not finding any useful results.
  • Review the abstracts of research studies carefully. This will save you time.
  • Use the bibliographies and references of research studies you find to locate others.
  • Check with your professor, or a subject expert in the field, if you are missing any key works in the field.
  • Ask your librarian for help at any time.
  • Use a citation manager, such as EndNote as the repository for your citations. See the EndNote tutorials for help.

Review the literature

Some questions to help you analyze the research:

  • What was the research question of the study you are reviewing? What were the authors trying to discover?
  • Was the research funded by a source that could influence the findings?
  • What were the research methodologies? Analyze its literature review, the samples and variables used, the results, and the conclusions.
  • Does the research seem to be complete? Could it have been conducted more soundly? What further questions does it raise?
  • If there are conflicting studies, why do you think that is?
  • How are the authors viewed in the field? Has this study been cited? If so, how has it been analyzed?

Tips: 

  • Review the abstracts carefully.  
  • Keep careful notes so that you may track your thought processes during the research process.
  • Create a matrix of the studies for easy analysis, and synthesis, across all of the studies.
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  • Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide
  • Introduction

Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide — Introduction

  • Getting Started
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  • Evaluating Sources & Lit. Reviews
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What are Literature Reviews?

So, what is a literature review? "A literature review 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." Taylor, D.  The literature review: A few tips on conducting it . University of Toronto Health Sciences Writing Centre.

Goals of Literature Reviews

What are the goals of creating a Literature Review?  A literature could be written to accomplish different aims:

  • To develop a theory or evaluate an existing theory
  • To summarize the historical or existing state of a research topic
  • Identify a problem in a field of research 

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1997). Writing narrative literature reviews .  Review of General Psychology , 1 (3), 311-320.

What kinds of sources require a Literature Review?

  • A research paper assigned in a course
  • A thesis or dissertation
  • A grant proposal
  • An article intended for publication in a journal

All these instances require you to collect what has been written about your research topic so that you can demonstrate how your own research sheds new light on the topic.

Types of Literature Reviews

What kinds of literature reviews are written?

Narrative review: The purpose of this type of review is to describe the current state of the research on a specific topic/research and to offer a critical analysis of the literature reviewed. Studies are grouped by research/theoretical categories, and themes and trends, strengths and weakness, and gaps are identified. The review ends with a conclusion section which summarizes the findings regarding the state of the research of the specific study, the gaps identify and if applicable, explains how the author's research will address gaps identify in the review and expand the knowledge on the topic reviewed.

  • Example : Predictors and Outcomes of U.S. Quality Maternity Leave: A Review and Conceptual Framework:  10.1177/08948453211037398  

Systematic review : "The authors of a systematic review use a specific procedure to search the research literature, select the studies to include in their review, and critically evaluate the studies they find." (p. 139). Nelson, L. K. (2013). Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders . Plural Publishing.

  • Example : The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review:  10.1057/s41599-022-01270-w

Meta-analysis : "Meta-analysis is a method of reviewing research findings in a quantitative fashion by transforming the data from individual studies into what is called an effect size and then pooling and analyzing this information. The basic goal in meta-analysis is to explain why different outcomes have occurred in different studies." (p. 197). Roberts, M. C., & Ilardi, S. S. (2003). Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology . Blackwell Publishing.

  • Example : Employment Instability and Fertility in Europe: A Meta-Analysis:  10.1215/00703370-9164737

Meta-synthesis : "Qualitative meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative study that uses as data the findings from other qualitative studies linked by the same or related topic." (p.312). Zimmer, L. (2006). Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts .  Journal of Advanced Nursing , 53 (3), 311-318.

  • Example : Women’s perspectives on career successes and barriers: A qualitative meta-synthesis:  10.1177/05390184221113735

Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences

  • UConn Health subject guide on systematic reviews Explanation of the different review types used in health sciences literature as well as tools to help you find the right review type
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Literature Reviews

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What is a literature review?

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  • 1. Define your research question
  • 2. Plan your search
  • 3. Search the literature
  • 4. Organize your results
  • 5. Synthesize your findings
  • 6. Write the review
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how to write a literature review on an article

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how to write a literature review on an article

Definition: A literature review is a systematic examination and synthesis of existing scholarly research on a specific topic or subject.

Purpose: It serves to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge within a particular field.

Analysis: Involves critically evaluating and summarizing key findings, methodologies, and debates found in academic literature.

Identifying Gaps: Aims to pinpoint areas where there is a lack of research or unresolved questions, highlighting opportunities for further investigation.

Contextualization: Enables researchers to understand how their work fits into the broader academic conversation and contributes to the existing body of knowledge.

how to write a literature review on an article

tl;dr  A literature review critically examines and synthesizes existing scholarly research and publications on a specific topic to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of knowledge in the field.

What is a literature review NOT?

❌ An annotated bibliography

❌ Original research

❌ A summary

❌ Something to be conducted at the end of your research

❌ An opinion piece

❌ A chronological compilation of studies

The reason for conducting a literature review is to:

how to write a literature review on an article

Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students

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A literature review surveys prior research published in books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by so doing, provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem being investigated. Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have used in researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within existing scholarship about the topic.

Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . Fourth edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2014.

Importance of a Good Literature Review

A literature review may consist of simply a summary of key sources, but in the social sciences, a literature review usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis, often within specific conceptual categories . A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information in a way that informs how you are planning to investigate a research problem. The analytical features of a literature review might:

  • Give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations,
  • Trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates,
  • Depending on the situation, evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant research, or
  • Usually in the conclusion of a literature review, identify where gaps exist in how a problem has been researched to date.

Given this, the purpose of a literature review is to:

  • Place each work in the context of its contribution to understanding the research problem being studied.
  • Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration.
  • Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
  • Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature.
  • Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies.
  • Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.
  • Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research.
  • Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important].

Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Jesson, Jill. Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2011; Knopf, Jeffrey W. "Doing a Literature Review." PS: Political Science and Politics 39 (January 2006): 127-132; Ridley, Diana. The Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide for Students . 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2012.

Types of Literature Reviews

It is important to think of knowledge in a given field as consisting of three layers. First, there are the primary studies that researchers conduct and publish. Second are the reviews of those studies that summarize and offer new interpretations built from and often extending beyond the primary studies. Third, there are the perceptions, conclusions, opinion, and interpretations that are shared informally among scholars that become part of the body of epistemological traditions within the field.

In composing a literature review, it is important to note that it is often this third layer of knowledge that is cited as "true" even though it often has only a loose relationship to the primary studies and secondary literature reviews. Given this, while literature reviews are designed to provide an overview and synthesis of pertinent sources you have explored, there are a number of approaches you could adopt depending upon the type of analysis underpinning your study.

Argumentative Review This form examines literature selectively in order to support or refute an argument, deeply embedded assumption, or philosophical problem already established in the literature. The purpose is to develop a body of literature that establishes a contrarian viewpoint. Given the value-laden nature of some social science research [e.g., educational reform; immigration control], argumentative approaches to analyzing the literature can be a legitimate and important form of discourse. However, note that they can also introduce problems of bias when they are used to make summary claims of the sort found in systematic reviews [see below].

Integrative Review Considered a form of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated. The body of literature includes all studies that address related or identical hypotheses or research problems. A well-done integrative review meets the same standards as primary research in regard to clarity, rigor, and replication. This is the most common form of review in the social sciences.

Historical Review Few things rest in isolation from historical precedent. Historical literature reviews focus on examining research throughout a period of time, often starting with the first time an issue, concept, theory, phenomena emerged in the literature, then tracing its evolution within the scholarship of a discipline. The purpose is to place research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the-art developments and to identify the likely directions for future research.

Methodological Review A review does not always focus on what someone said [findings], but how they came about saying what they say [method of analysis]. Reviewing methods of analysis provides a framework of understanding at different levels [i.e. those of theory, substantive fields, research approaches, and data collection and analysis techniques], how researchers draw upon a wide variety of knowledge ranging from the conceptual level to practical documents for use in fieldwork in the areas of ontological and epistemological consideration, quantitative and qualitative integration, sampling, interviewing, data collection, and data analysis. This approach helps highlight ethical issues which you should be aware of and consider as you go through your own study.

Systematic Review This form consists of an overview of existing evidence pertinent to a clearly formulated research question, which uses pre-specified and standardized methods to identify and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect, report, and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review. The goal is to deliberately document, critically evaluate, and summarize scientifically all of the research about a clearly defined research problem . Typically it focuses on a very specific empirical question, often posed in a cause-and-effect form, such as "To what extent does A contribute to B?" This type of literature review is primarily applied to examining prior research studies in clinical medicine and allied health fields, but it is increasingly being used in the social sciences.

Theoretical Review The purpose of this form is to examine the corpus of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue, concept, theory, phenomena. The theoretical literature review helps to establish what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what degree the existing theories have been investigated, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested. Often this form is used to help establish a lack of appropriate theories or reveal that current theories are inadequate for explaining new or emerging research problems. The unit of analysis can focus on a theoretical concept or a whole theory or framework.

NOTE : Most often the literature review will incorporate some combination of types. For example, a review that examines literature supporting or refuting an argument, assumption, or philosophical problem related to the research problem will also need to include writing supported by sources that establish the history of these arguments in the literature.

Baumeister, Roy F. and Mark R. Leary. "Writing Narrative Literature Reviews."  Review of General Psychology 1 (September 1997): 311-320; Mark R. Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Kennedy, Mary M. "Defining a Literature." Educational Researcher 36 (April 2007): 139-147; Petticrew, Mark and Helen Roberts. Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006; Torracro, Richard. "Writing Integrative Literature Reviews: Guidelines and Examples." Human Resource Development Review 4 (September 2005): 356-367; Rocco, Tonette S. and Maria S. Plakhotnik. "Literature Reviews, Conceptual Frameworks, and Theoretical Frameworks: Terms, Functions, and Distinctions." Human Ressource Development Review 8 (March 2008): 120-130; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016.

Structure and Writing Style

I.  Thinking About Your Literature Review

The structure of a literature review should include the following in support of understanding the research problem :

  • An overview of the subject, issue, or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review,
  • Division of works under review into themes or categories [e.g. works that support a particular position, those against, and those offering alternative approaches entirely],
  • An explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others,
  • Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research.

The critical evaluation of each work should consider :

  • Provenance -- what are the author's credentials? Are the author's arguments supported by evidence [e.g. primary historical material, case studies, narratives, statistics, recent scientific findings]?
  • Methodology -- were the techniques used to identify, gather, and analyze the data appropriate to addressing the research problem? Was the sample size appropriate? Were the results effectively interpreted and reported?
  • Objectivity -- is the author's perspective even-handed or prejudicial? Is contrary data considered or is certain pertinent information ignored to prove the author's point?
  • Persuasiveness -- which of the author's theses are most convincing or least convincing?
  • Validity -- are the author's arguments and conclusions convincing? Does the work ultimately contribute in any significant way to an understanding of the subject?

II.  Development of the Literature Review

Four Basic Stages of Writing 1.  Problem formulation -- which topic or field is being examined and what are its component issues? 2.  Literature search -- finding materials relevant to the subject being explored. 3.  Data evaluation -- determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic. 4.  Analysis and interpretation -- discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature.

Consider the following issues before writing the literature review: Clarify If your assignment is not specific about what form your literature review should take, seek clarification from your professor by asking these questions: 1.  Roughly how many sources would be appropriate to include? 2.  What types of sources should I review (books, journal articles, websites; scholarly versus popular sources)? 3.  Should I summarize, synthesize, or critique sources by discussing a common theme or issue? 4.  Should I evaluate the sources in any way beyond evaluating how they relate to understanding the research problem? 5.  Should I provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history? Find Models Use the exercise of reviewing the literature to examine how authors in your discipline or area of interest have composed their literature review sections. Read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or to identify ways to organize your final review. The bibliography or reference section of sources you've already read, such as required readings in the course syllabus, are also excellent entry points into your own research. Narrow the Topic The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to obtain a good survey of relevant resources. Your professor will probably not expect you to read everything that's available about the topic, but you'll make the act of reviewing easier if you first limit scope of the research problem. A good strategy is to begin by searching the USC Libraries Catalog for recent books about the topic and review the table of contents for chapters that focuses on specific issues. You can also review the indexes of books to find references to specific issues that can serve as the focus of your research. For example, a book surveying the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may include a chapter on the role Egypt has played in mediating the conflict, or look in the index for the pages where Egypt is mentioned in the text. Consider Whether Your Sources are Current Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. This is particularly true in disciplines in medicine and the sciences where research conducted becomes obsolete very quickly as new discoveries are made. However, when writing a review in the social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be required. In other words, a complete understanding the research problem requires you to deliberately examine how knowledge and perspectives have changed over time. Sort through other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to explore what is considered by scholars to be a "hot topic" and what is not.

III.  Ways to Organize Your Literature Review

Chronology of Events If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials according to when they were published. This approach should only be followed if a clear path of research building on previous research can be identified and that these trends follow a clear chronological order of development. For example, a literature review that focuses on continuing research about the emergence of German economic power after the fall of the Soviet Union. By Publication Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend. For instance, you could order a review of literature on environmental studies of brown fields if the progression revealed, for example, a change in the soil collection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies. Thematic [“conceptual categories”] A thematic literature review is the most common approach to summarizing prior research in the social and behavioral sciences. Thematic reviews are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time, although the progression of time may still be incorporated into a thematic review. For example, a review of the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics could focus on the development of online political satire. While the study focuses on one topic, the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics, it would still be organized chronologically reflecting technological developments in media. The difference in this example between a "chronological" and a "thematic" approach is what is emphasized the most: themes related to the role of the Internet in presidential politics. Note that more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. A review organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point being made. Methodological A methodological approach focuses on the methods utilized by the researcher. For the Internet in American presidential politics project, one methodological approach would be to look at cultural differences between the portrayal of American presidents on American, British, and French websites. Or the review might focus on the fundraising impact of the Internet on a particular political party. A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed.

Other Sections of Your Literature Review Once you've decided on the organizational method for your literature review, the sections you need to include in the paper should be easy to figure out because they arise from your organizational strategy. In other words, a chronological review would have subsections for each vital time period; a thematic review would have subtopics based upon factors that relate to the theme or issue. However, sometimes you may need to add additional sections that are necessary for your study, but do not fit in the organizational strategy of the body. What other sections you include in the body is up to you. However, only include what is necessary for the reader to locate your study within the larger scholarship about the research problem.

Here are examples of other sections, usually in the form of a single paragraph, you may need to include depending on the type of review you write:

  • Current Situation : Information necessary to understand the current topic or focus of the literature review.
  • Sources Used : Describes the methods and resources [e.g., databases] you used to identify the literature you reviewed.
  • History : The chronological progression of the field, the research literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
  • Selection Methods : Criteria you used to select (and perhaps exclude) sources in your literature review. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed [i.e., scholarly] sources.
  • Standards : Description of the way in which you present your information.
  • Questions for Further Research : What questions about the field has the review sparked? How will you further your research as a result of the review?

IV.  Writing Your Literature Review

Once you've settled on how to organize your literature review, you're ready to write each section. When writing your review, keep in mind these issues.

Use Evidence A literature review section is, in this sense, just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence [citations] that demonstrates that what you are saying is valid. Be Selective Select only the most important points in each source to highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to mention should relate directly to the research problem, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological. Related items that provide additional information, but that are not key to understanding the research problem, can be included in a list of further readings . Use Quotes Sparingly Some short quotes are appropriate if you want to emphasize a point, or if what an author stated cannot be easily paraphrased. Sometimes you may need to quote certain terminology that was coined by the author, is not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. Do not use extensive quotes as a substitute for using your own words in reviewing the literature. Summarize and Synthesize Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each thematic paragraph as well as throughout the review. Recapitulate important features of a research study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study's significance and relating it to your own work and the work of others. Keep Your Own Voice While the literature review presents others' ideas, your voice [the writer's] should remain front and center. For example, weave references to other sources into what you are writing but maintain your own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with your own ideas and wording. Use Caution When Paraphrasing When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be sure to represent the author's information or opinions accurately and in your own words. Even when paraphrasing an author’s work, you still must provide a citation to that work.

V.  Common Mistakes to Avoid

These are the most common mistakes made in reviewing social science research literature.

  • Sources in your literature review do not clearly relate to the research problem;
  • You do not take sufficient time to define and identify the most relevant sources to use in the literature review related to the research problem;
  • Relies exclusively on secondary analytical sources rather than including relevant primary research studies or data;
  • Uncritically accepts another researcher's findings and interpretations as valid, rather than examining critically all aspects of the research design and analysis;
  • Does not describe the search procedures that were used in identifying the literature to review;
  • Reports isolated statistical results rather than synthesizing them in chi-squared or meta-analytic methods; and,
  • Only includes research that validates assumptions and does not consider contrary findings and alternative interpretations found in the literature.

Cook, Kathleen E. and Elise Murowchick. “Do Literature Review Skills Transfer from One Course to Another?” Psychology Learning and Teaching 13 (March 2014): 3-11; Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Jesson, Jill. Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques . London: SAGE, 2011; Literature Review Handout. Online Writing Center. Liberty University; Literature Reviews. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J. and Rebecca Frels. Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2016; Ridley, Diana. The Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide for Students . 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2012; Randolph, Justus J. “A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review." Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation. vol. 14, June 2009; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016; Taylor, Dena. The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Writing a Literature Review. Academic Skills Centre. University of Canberra.

Writing Tip

Break Out of Your Disciplinary Box!

Thinking interdisciplinarily about a research problem can be a rewarding exercise in applying new ideas, theories, or concepts to an old problem. For example, what might cultural anthropologists say about the continuing conflict in the Middle East? In what ways might geographers view the need for better distribution of social service agencies in large cities than how social workers might study the issue? You don’t want to substitute a thorough review of core research literature in your discipline for studies conducted in other fields of study. However, particularly in the social sciences, thinking about research problems from multiple vectors is a key strategy for finding new solutions to a problem or gaining a new perspective. Consult with a librarian about identifying research databases in other disciplines; almost every field of study has at least one comprehensive database devoted to indexing its research literature.

Frodeman, Robert. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Another Writing Tip

Don't Just Review for Content!

While conducting a review of the literature, maximize the time you devote to writing this part of your paper by thinking broadly about what you should be looking for and evaluating. Review not just what scholars are saying, but how are they saying it. Some questions to ask:

  • How are they organizing their ideas?
  • What methods have they used to study the problem?
  • What theories have been used to explain, predict, or understand their research problem?
  • What sources have they cited to support their conclusions?
  • How have they used non-textual elements [e.g., charts, graphs, figures, etc.] to illustrate key points?

When you begin to write your literature review section, you'll be glad you dug deeper into how the research was designed and constructed because it establishes a means for developing more substantial analysis and interpretation of the research problem.

Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1 998.

Yet Another Writing Tip

When Do I Know I Can Stop Looking and Move On?

Here are several strategies you can utilize to assess whether you've thoroughly reviewed the literature:

  • Look for repeating patterns in the research findings . If the same thing is being said, just by different people, then this likely demonstrates that the research problem has hit a conceptual dead end. At this point consider: Does your study extend current research?  Does it forge a new path? Or, does is merely add more of the same thing being said?
  • Look at sources the authors cite to in their work . If you begin to see the same researchers cited again and again, then this is often an indication that no new ideas have been generated to address the research problem.
  • Search Google Scholar to identify who has subsequently cited leading scholars already identified in your literature review [see next sub-tab]. This is called citation tracking and there are a number of sources that can help you identify who has cited whom, particularly scholars from outside of your discipline. Here again, if the same authors are being cited again and again, this may indicate no new literature has been written on the topic.

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J. and Rebecca Frels. Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach . Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2016; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016.

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  • J Grad Med Educ
  • v.8(3); 2016 Jul

The Literature Review: A Foundation for High-Quality Medical Education Research

a  These are subscription resources. Researchers should check with their librarian to determine their access rights.

Despite a surge in published scholarship in medical education 1 and rapid growth in journals that publish educational research, manuscript acceptance rates continue to fall. 2 Failure to conduct a thorough, accurate, and up-to-date literature review identifying an important problem and placing the study in context is consistently identified as one of the top reasons for rejection. 3 , 4 The purpose of this editorial is to provide a road map and practical recommendations for planning a literature review. By understanding the goals of a literature review and following a few basic processes, authors can enhance both the quality of their educational research and the likelihood of publication in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education ( JGME ) and in other journals.

The Literature Review Defined

In medical education, no organization has articulated a formal definition of a literature review for a research paper; thus, a literature review can take a number of forms. Depending on the type of article, target journal, and specific topic, these forms will vary in methodology, rigor, and depth. Several organizations have published guidelines for conducting an intensive literature search intended for formal systematic reviews, both broadly (eg, PRISMA) 5 and within medical education, 6 and there are excellent commentaries to guide authors of systematic reviews. 7 , 8

  • A literature review forms the basis for high-quality medical education research and helps maximize relevance, originality, generalizability, and impact.
  • A literature review provides context, informs methodology, maximizes innovation, avoids duplicative research, and ensures that professional standards are met.
  • Literature reviews take time, are iterative, and should continue throughout the research process.
  • Researchers should maximize the use of human resources (librarians, colleagues), search tools (databases/search engines), and existing literature (related articles).
  • Keeping organized is critical.

Such work is outside the scope of this article, which focuses on literature reviews to inform reports of original medical education research. We define such a literature review as a synthetic review and summary of what is known and unknown regarding the topic of a scholarly body of work, including the current work's place within the existing knowledge . While this type of literature review may not require the intensive search processes mandated by systematic reviews, it merits a thoughtful and rigorous approach.

Purpose and Importance of the Literature Review

An understanding of the current literature is critical for all phases of a research study. Lingard 9 recently invoked the “journal-as-conversation” metaphor as a way of understanding how one's research fits into the larger medical education conversation. As she described it: “Imagine yourself joining a conversation at a social event. After you hang about eavesdropping to get the drift of what's being said (the conversational equivalent of the literature review), you join the conversation with a contribution that signals your shared interest in the topic, your knowledge of what's already been said, and your intention.” 9

The literature review helps any researcher “join the conversation” by providing context, informing methodology, identifying innovation, minimizing duplicative research, and ensuring that professional standards are met. Understanding the current literature also promotes scholarship, as proposed by Boyer, 10 by contributing to 5 of the 6 standards by which scholarly work should be evaluated. 11 Specifically, the review helps the researcher (1) articulate clear goals, (2) show evidence of adequate preparation, (3) select appropriate methods, (4) communicate relevant results, and (5) engage in reflective critique.

Failure to conduct a high-quality literature review is associated with several problems identified in the medical education literature, including studies that are repetitive, not grounded in theory, methodologically weak, and fail to expand knowledge beyond a single setting. 12 Indeed, medical education scholars complain that many studies repeat work already published and contribute little new knowledge—a likely cause of which is failure to conduct a proper literature review. 3 , 4

Likewise, studies that lack theoretical grounding or a conceptual framework make study design and interpretation difficult. 13 When theory is used in medical education studies, it is often invoked at a superficial level. As Norman 14 noted, when theory is used appropriately, it helps articulate variables that might be linked together and why, and it allows the researcher to make hypotheses and define a study's context and scope. Ultimately, a proper literature review is a first critical step toward identifying relevant conceptual frameworks.

Another problem is that many medical education studies are methodologically weak. 12 Good research requires trained investigators who can articulate relevant research questions, operationally define variables of interest, and choose the best method for specific research questions. Conducting a proper literature review helps both novice and experienced researchers select rigorous research methodologies.

Finally, many studies in medical education are “one-offs,” that is, single studies undertaken because the opportunity presented itself locally. Such studies frequently are not oriented toward progressive knowledge building and generalization to other settings. A firm grasp of the literature can encourage a programmatic approach to research.

Approaching the Literature Review

Considering these issues, journals have a responsibility to demand from authors a thoughtful synthesis of their study's position within the field, and it is the authors' responsibility to provide such a synthesis, based on a literature review. The aforementioned purposes of the literature review mandate that the review occurs throughout all phases of a study, from conception and design, to implementation and analysis, to manuscript preparation and submission.

Planning the literature review requires understanding of journal requirements, which vary greatly by journal ( table 1 ). Authors are advised to take note of common problems with reporting results of the literature review. Table 2 lists the most common problems that we have encountered as authors, reviewers, and editors.

Sample of Journals' Author Instructions for Literature Reviews Conducted as Part of Original Research Article a

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Common Problem Areas for Reporting Literature Reviews in the Context of Scholarly Articles

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Locating and Organizing the Literature

Three resources may facilitate identifying relevant literature: human resources, search tools, and related literature. As the process requires time, it is important to begin searching for literature early in the process (ie, the study design phase). Identifying and understanding relevant studies will increase the likelihood of designing a relevant, adaptable, generalizable, and novel study that is based on educational or learning theory and can maximize impact.

Human Resources

A medical librarian can help translate research interests into an effective search strategy, familiarize researchers with available information resources, provide information on organizing information, and introduce strategies for keeping current with emerging research. Often, librarians are also aware of research across their institutions and may be able to connect researchers with similar interests. Reaching out to colleagues for suggestions may help researchers quickly locate resources that would not otherwise be on their radar.

During this process, researchers will likely identify other researchers writing on aspects of their topic. Researchers should consider searching for the publications of these relevant researchers (see table 3 for search strategies). Additionally, institutional websites may include curriculum vitae of such relevant faculty with access to their entire publication record, including difficult to locate publications, such as book chapters, dissertations, and technical reports.

Strategies for Finding Related Researcher Publications in Databases and Search Engines

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Search Tools and Related Literature

Researchers will locate the majority of needed information using databases and search engines. Excellent resources are available to guide researchers in the mechanics of literature searches. 15 , 16

Because medical education research draws on a variety of disciplines, researchers should include search tools with coverage beyond medicine (eg, psychology, nursing, education, and anthropology) and that cover several publication types, such as reports, standards, conference abstracts, and book chapters (see the box for several information resources). Many search tools include options for viewing citations of selected articles. Examining cited references provides additional articles for review and a sense of the influence of the selected article on its field.

Box Information Resources

  • Web of Science a
  • Education Resource Information Center (ERIC)
  • Cumulative Index of Nursing & Allied Health (CINAHL) a
  • Google Scholar

Once relevant articles are located, it is useful to mine those articles for additional citations. One strategy is to examine references of key articles, especially review articles, for relevant citations.

Getting Organized

As the aforementioned resources will likely provide a tremendous amount of information, organization is crucial. Researchers should determine which details are most important to their study (eg, participants, setting, methods, and outcomes) and generate a strategy for keeping those details organized and accessible. Increasingly, researchers utilize digital tools, such as Evernote, to capture such information, which enables accessibility across digital workspaces and search capabilities. Use of citation managers can also be helpful as they store citations and, in some cases, can generate bibliographies ( table 4 ).

Citation Managers

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Knowing When to Say When

Researchers often ask how to know when they have located enough citations. Unfortunately, there is no magic or ideal number of citations to collect. One strategy for checking coverage of the literature is to inspect references of relevant articles. As researchers review references they will start noticing a repetition of the same articles with few new articles appearing. This can indicate that the researcher has covered the literature base on a particular topic.

Putting It All Together

In preparing to write a research paper, it is important to consider which citations to include and how they will inform the introduction and discussion sections. The “Instructions to Authors” for the targeted journal will often provide guidance on structuring the literature review (or introduction) and the number of total citations permitted for each article category. Reviewing articles of similar type published in the targeted journal can also provide guidance regarding structure and average lengths of the introduction and discussion sections.

When selecting references for the introduction consider those that illustrate core background theoretical and methodological concepts, as well as recent relevant studies. The introduction should be brief and present references not as a laundry list or narrative of available literature, but rather as a synthesized summary to provide context for the current study and to identify the gap in the literature that the study intends to fill. For the discussion, citations should be thoughtfully selected to compare and contrast the present study's findings with the current literature and to indicate how the present study moves the field forward.

To facilitate writing a literature review, journals are increasingly providing helpful features to guide authors. For example, the resources available through JGME include several articles on writing. 17 The journal Perspectives on Medical Education recently launched “The Writer's Craft,” which is intended to help medical educators improve their writing. Additionally, many institutions have writing centers that provide web-based materials on writing a literature review, and some even have writing coaches.

The literature review is a vital part of medical education research and should occur throughout the research process to help researchers design a strong study and effectively communicate study results and importance. To achieve these goals, researchers are advised to plan and execute the literature review carefully. The guidance in this editorial provides considerations and recommendations that may improve the quality of literature reviews.

What is a Literature Review? How to Write It (with Examples)

literature review

A literature review is a critical analysis and synthesis of existing research on a particular topic. It provides an overview of the current state of knowledge, identifies gaps, and highlights key findings in the literature. 1 The purpose of a literature review is to situate your own research within the context of existing scholarship, demonstrating your understanding of the topic and showing how your work contributes to the ongoing conversation in the field. Learning how to write a literature review is a critical tool for successful research. Your ability to summarize and synthesize prior research pertaining to a certain topic demonstrates your grasp on the topic of study, and assists in the learning process. 

Table of Contents

  • What is the purpose of literature review? 
  • a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction: 
  • b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes: 
  • c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs: 
  • d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts: 
  • How to write a good literature review 
  • Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question: 
  • Decide on the Scope of Your Review: 
  • Select Databases for Searches: 
  • Conduct Searches and Keep Track: 
  • Review the Literature: 
  • Organize and Write Your Literature Review: 
  • Frequently asked questions 

What is a literature review?

A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with the existing literature, establishes the context for their own research, and contributes to scholarly conversations on the topic. One of the purposes of a literature review is also to help researchers avoid duplicating previous work and ensure that their research is informed by and builds upon the existing body of knowledge.

how to write a literature review on an article

What is the purpose of literature review?

A literature review serves several important purposes within academic and research contexts. Here are some key objectives and functions of a literature review: 2  

  • Contextualizing the Research Problem: The literature review provides a background and context for the research problem under investigation. It helps to situate the study within the existing body of knowledge. 
  • Identifying Gaps in Knowledge: By identifying gaps, contradictions, or areas requiring further research, the researcher can shape the research question and justify the significance of the study. This is crucial for ensuring that the new research contributes something novel to the field. 
  • Understanding Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks: Literature reviews help researchers gain an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in previous studies. This aids in the development of a theoretical framework for the current research. 
  • Providing Methodological Insights: Another purpose of literature reviews is that it allows researchers to learn about the methodologies employed in previous studies. This can help in choosing appropriate research methods for the current study and avoiding pitfalls that others may have encountered. 
  • Establishing Credibility: A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with existing scholarship, establishing their credibility and expertise in the field. It also helps in building a solid foundation for the new research. 
  • Informing Hypotheses or Research Questions: The literature review guides the formulation of hypotheses or research questions by highlighting relevant findings and areas of uncertainty in existing literature. 

Literature review example

Let’s delve deeper with a literature review example: Let’s say your literature review is about the impact of climate change on biodiversity. You might format your literature review into sections such as the effects of climate change on habitat loss and species extinction, phenological changes, and marine biodiversity. Each section would then summarize and analyze relevant studies in those areas, highlighting key findings and identifying gaps in the research. The review would conclude by emphasizing the need for further research on specific aspects of the relationship between climate change and biodiversity. The following literature review template provides a glimpse into the recommended literature review structure and content, demonstrating how research findings are organized around specific themes within a broader topic. 

Literature Review on Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity:

Climate change is a global phenomenon with far-reaching consequences, including significant impacts on biodiversity. This literature review synthesizes key findings from various studies: 

a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction:

Climate change-induced alterations in temperature and precipitation patterns contribute to habitat loss, affecting numerous species (Thomas et al., 2004). The review discusses how these changes increase the risk of extinction, particularly for species with specific habitat requirements. 

b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes:

Observations of range shifts and changes in the timing of biological events (phenology) are documented in response to changing climatic conditions (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003). These shifts affect ecosystems and may lead to mismatches between species and their resources. 

c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs:

The review explores the impact of climate change on marine biodiversity, emphasizing ocean acidification’s threat to coral reefs (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007). Changes in pH levels negatively affect coral calcification, disrupting the delicate balance of marine ecosystems. 

d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts:

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the literature review discusses various adaptive strategies adopted by species and conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change on biodiversity (Hannah et al., 2007). It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for effective conservation planning. 

how to write a literature review on an article

How to write a good literature review

Writing a literature review involves summarizing and synthesizing existing research on a particular topic. A good literature review format should include the following elements. 

Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your literature review, providing context and introducing the main focus of your review. 

  • Opening Statement: Begin with a general statement about the broader topic and its significance in the field. 
  • Scope and Purpose: Clearly define the scope of your literature review. Explain the specific research question or objective you aim to address. 
  • Organizational Framework: Briefly outline the structure of your literature review, indicating how you will categorize and discuss the existing research. 
  • Significance of the Study: Highlight why your literature review is important and how it contributes to the understanding of the chosen topic. 
  • Thesis Statement: Conclude the introduction with a concise thesis statement that outlines the main argument or perspective you will develop in the body of the literature review. 

Body: The body of the literature review is where you provide a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, grouping studies based on themes, methodologies, or other relevant criteria. 

  • Organize by Theme or Concept: Group studies that share common themes, concepts, or methodologies. Discuss each theme or concept in detail, summarizing key findings and identifying gaps or areas of disagreement. 
  • Critical Analysis: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each study. Discuss the methodologies used, the quality of evidence, and the overall contribution of each work to the understanding of the topic. 
  • Synthesis of Findings: Synthesize the information from different studies to highlight trends, patterns, or areas of consensus in the literature. 
  • Identification of Gaps: Discuss any gaps or limitations in the existing research and explain how your review contributes to filling these gaps. 
  • Transition between Sections: Provide smooth transitions between different themes or concepts to maintain the flow of your literature review. 

Conclusion: The conclusion of your literature review should summarize the main findings, highlight the contributions of the review, and suggest avenues for future research. 

  • Summary of Key Findings: Recap the main findings from the literature and restate how they contribute to your research question or objective. 
  • Contributions to the Field: Discuss the overall contribution of your literature review to the existing knowledge in the field. 
  • Implications and Applications: Explore the practical implications of the findings and suggest how they might impact future research or practice. 
  • Recommendations for Future Research: Identify areas that require further investigation and propose potential directions for future research in the field. 
  • Final Thoughts: Conclude with a final reflection on the importance of your literature review and its relevance to the broader academic community. 

what is a literature review

Conducting a literature review

Conducting a literature review is an essential step in research that involves reviewing and analyzing existing literature on a specific topic. It’s important to know how to do a literature review effectively, so here are the steps to follow: 1  

Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question:

  • Select a topic that is relevant to your field of study. 
  • Clearly define your research question or objective. Determine what specific aspect of the topic do you want to explore? 

Decide on the Scope of Your Review:

  • Determine the timeframe for your literature review. Are you focusing on recent developments, or do you want a historical overview? 
  • Consider the geographical scope. Is your review global, or are you focusing on a specific region? 
  • Define the inclusion and exclusion criteria. What types of sources will you include? Are there specific types of studies or publications you will exclude? 

Select Databases for Searches:

  • Identify relevant databases for your field. Examples include PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. 
  • Consider searching in library catalogs, institutional repositories, and specialized databases related to your topic. 

Conduct Searches and Keep Track:

  • Develop a systematic search strategy using keywords, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and other search techniques. 
  • Record and document your search strategy for transparency and replicability. 
  • Keep track of the articles, including publication details, abstracts, and links. Use citation management tools like EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley to organize your references. 

Review the Literature:

  • Evaluate the relevance and quality of each source. Consider the methodology, sample size, and results of studies. 
  • Organize the literature by themes or key concepts. Identify patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing research. 
  • Summarize key findings and arguments from each source. Compare and contrast different perspectives. 
  • Identify areas where there is a consensus in the literature and where there are conflicting opinions. 
  • Provide critical analysis and synthesis of the literature. What are the strengths and weaknesses of existing research? 

Organize and Write Your Literature Review:

  • Literature review outline should be based on themes, chronological order, or methodological approaches. 
  • Write a clear and coherent narrative that synthesizes the information gathered. 
  • Use proper citations for each source and ensure consistency in your citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). 
  • Conclude your literature review by summarizing key findings, identifying gaps, and suggesting areas for future research. 

The literature review sample and detailed advice on writing and conducting a review will help you produce a well-structured report. But remember that a literature review is an ongoing process, and it may be necessary to revisit and update it as your research progresses. 

Frequently asked questions

A literature review is a critical and comprehensive analysis of existing literature (published and unpublished works) on a specific topic or research question and provides a synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a particular field. A well-conducted literature review is crucial for researchers to build upon existing knowledge, avoid duplication of efforts, and contribute to the advancement of their field. It also helps researchers situate their work within a broader context and facilitates the development of a sound theoretical and conceptual framework for their studies.

Literature review is a crucial component of research writing, providing a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. The aim is to keep professionals up to date by providing an understanding of ongoing developments within a specific field, including research methods, and experimental techniques used in that field, and present that knowledge in the form of a written report. Also, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the scholar in his or her field.  

Before writing a literature review, it’s essential to undertake several preparatory steps to ensure that your review is well-researched, organized, and focused. This includes choosing a topic of general interest to you and doing exploratory research on that topic, writing an annotated bibliography, and noting major points, especially those that relate to the position you have taken on the topic. 

Literature reviews and academic research papers are essential components of scholarly work but serve different purposes within the academic realm. 3 A literature review aims to provide a foundation for understanding the current state of research on a particular topic, identify gaps or controversies, and lay the groundwork for future research. Therefore, it draws heavily from existing academic sources, including books, journal articles, and other scholarly publications. In contrast, an academic research paper aims to present new knowledge, contribute to the academic discourse, and advance the understanding of a specific research question. Therefore, it involves a mix of existing literature (in the introduction and literature review sections) and original data or findings obtained through research methods. 

Literature reviews are essential components of academic and research papers, and various strategies can be employed to conduct them effectively. If you want to know how to write a literature review for a research paper, here are four common approaches that are often used by researchers.  Chronological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the chronological order of publication. It helps to trace the development of a topic over time, showing how ideas, theories, and research have evolved.  Thematic Review: Thematic reviews focus on identifying and analyzing themes or topics that cut across different studies. Instead of organizing the literature chronologically, it is grouped by key themes or concepts, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of various aspects of the topic.  Methodological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the research methods employed in different studies. It helps to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies and allows the reader to evaluate the reliability and validity of the research findings.  Theoretical Review: A theoretical review examines the literature based on the theoretical frameworks used in different studies. This approach helps to identify the key theories that have been applied to the topic and assess their contributions to the understanding of the subject.  It’s important to note that these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and a literature review may combine elements of more than one approach. The choice of strategy depends on the research question, the nature of the literature available, and the goals of the review. Additionally, other strategies, such as integrative reviews or systematic reviews, may be employed depending on the specific requirements of the research.

The literature review format can vary depending on the specific publication guidelines. However, there are some common elements and structures that are often followed. Here is a general guideline for the format of a literature review:  Introduction:   Provide an overview of the topic.  Define the scope and purpose of the literature review.  State the research question or objective.  Body:   Organize the literature by themes, concepts, or chronology.  Critically analyze and evaluate each source.  Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the studies.  Highlight any methodological limitations or biases.  Identify patterns, connections, or contradictions in the existing research.  Conclusion:   Summarize the key points discussed in the literature review.  Highlight the research gap.  Address the research question or objective stated in the introduction.  Highlight the contributions of the review and suggest directions for future research.

Both annotated bibliographies and literature reviews involve the examination of scholarly sources. While annotated bibliographies focus on individual sources with brief annotations, literature reviews provide a more in-depth, integrated, and comprehensive analysis of existing literature on a specific topic. The key differences are as follows: 

References 

  • Denney, A. S., & Tewksbury, R. (2013). How to write a literature review.  Journal of criminal justice education ,  24 (2), 218-234. 
  • Pan, M. L. (2016).  Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches . Taylor & Francis. 
  • Cantero, C. (2019). How to write a literature review.  San José State University Writing Center . 

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Open Access

Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), CNRS, Montpellier, France, Centre for Biodiversity Synthesis and Analysis (CESAB), FRB, Aix-en-Provence, France

  • Marco Pautasso

PLOS

Published: July 18, 2013

  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149
  • Reader Comments

Figure 1

Citation: Pautasso M (2013) Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review. PLoS Comput Biol 9(7): e1003149. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149

Editor: Philip E. Bourne, University of California San Diego, United States of America

Copyright: © 2013 Marco Pautasso. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1] . For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2] . Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3] . Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read [4] . For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [5] .

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6] . However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7] . In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8] . The topic must at least be:

  • interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
  • an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
  • a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9] , but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

  • keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10] ),
  • keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
  • use a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
  • define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the review to help define its scope), and
  • do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a literature review ( Figure 1 ), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

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The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33] .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149.g001

  • discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
  • trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
  • incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules apply:

  • be thorough,
  • use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
  • look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11] , but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12] . A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13] , [14] . When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15] .

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice to keep it focused 16 , 17 . Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [18] . If you are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19] . After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

  • the major achievements in the reviewed field,
  • the main areas of debate, and
  • the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20] .

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21] . This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22] .

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers, and rightly so [23] . As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24] .

Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25] ? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies (“sleeping beauties” [26] )). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27] – [32] . I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to M. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, M. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

  • 1. Rapple C (2011) The role of the critical review article in alleviating information overload. Annual Reviews White Paper. Available: http://www.annualreviews.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1300384004941/Annual_Reviews_WhitePaper_Web_2011.pdf . Accessed May 2013.
  • View Article
  • Google Scholar
  • 7. Budgen D, Brereton P (2006) Performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering. Proc 28th Int Conf Software Engineering, ACM New York, NY, USA, pp. 1051–1052. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/1134285.1134500 .
  • 16. Eco U (1977) Come si fa una tesi di laurea. Milan: Bompiani.
  • 17. Hart C (1998) Doing a literature review: releasing the social science research imagination. London: SAGE.
  • 21. Ridley D (2008) The literature review: a step-by-step guide for students. London: SAGE.
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Grad Coach

How To Structure Your Literature Review

3 options to help structure your chapter.

By: Amy Rommelspacher (PhD) | Reviewer: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | November 2020 (Updated May 2023)

Writing the literature review chapter can seem pretty daunting when you’re piecing together your dissertation or thesis. As  we’ve discussed before , a good literature review needs to achieve a few very important objectives – it should:

  • Demonstrate your knowledge of the research topic
  • Identify the gaps in the literature and show how your research links to these
  • Provide the foundation for your conceptual framework (if you have one)
  • Inform your own  methodology and research design

To achieve this, your literature review needs a well-thought-out structure . Get the structure of your literature review chapter wrong and you’ll struggle to achieve these objectives. Don’t worry though – in this post, we’ll look at how to structure your literature review for maximum impact (and marks!).

The function of the lit review

But wait – is this the right time?

Deciding on the structure of your literature review should come towards the end of the literature review process – after you have collected and digested the literature, but before you start writing the chapter. 

In other words, you need to first develop a rich understanding of the literature before you even attempt to map out a structure. There’s no use trying to develop a structure before you’ve fully wrapped your head around the existing research.

Equally importantly, you need to have a structure in place before you start writing , or your literature review will most likely end up a rambling, disjointed mess. 

Importantly, don’t feel that once you’ve defined a structure you can’t iterate on it. It’s perfectly natural to adjust as you engage in the writing process. As we’ve discussed before , writing is a way of developing your thinking, so it’s quite common for your thinking to change – and therefore, for your chapter structure to change – as you write. 

Need a helping hand?

how to write a literature review on an article

Like any other chapter in your thesis or dissertation, your literature review needs to have a clear, logical structure. At a minimum, it should have three essential components – an  introduction , a  body   and a  conclusion . 

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

1: The Introduction Section

Just like any good introduction, the introduction section of your literature review should introduce the purpose and layout (organisation) of the chapter. In other words, your introduction needs to give the reader a taste of what’s to come, and how you’re going to lay that out. Essentially, you should provide the reader with a high-level roadmap of your chapter to give them a taste of the journey that lies ahead.

Here’s an example of the layout visualised in a literature review introduction:

Example of literature review outline structure

Your introduction should also outline your topic (including any tricky terminology or jargon) and provide an explanation of the scope of your literature review – in other words, what you  will   and  won’t   be covering (the delimitations ). This helps ringfence your review and achieve a clear focus . The clearer and narrower your focus, the deeper you can dive into the topic (which is typically where the magic lies). 

Depending on the nature of your project, you could also present your stance or point of view at this stage. In other words, after grappling with the literature you’ll have an opinion about what the trends and concerns are in the field as well as what’s lacking. The introduction section can then present these ideas so that it is clear to examiners that you’re aware of how your research connects with existing knowledge .

Free Webinar: Literature Review 101

2: The Body Section

The body of your literature review is the centre of your work. This is where you’ll present, analyse, evaluate and synthesise the existing research. In other words, this is where you’re going to earn (or lose) the most marks. Therefore, it’s important to carefully think about how you will organise your discussion to present it in a clear way. 

The body of your literature review should do just as the description of this chapter suggests. It should “review” the literature – in other words, identify, analyse, and synthesise it. So, when thinking about structuring your literature review, you need to think about which structural approach will provide the best “review” for your specific type of research and objectives (we’ll get to this shortly).

There are (broadly speaking)  three options  for organising your literature review.

The body section of your literature review is the where you'll present, analyse, evaluate and synthesise the existing research.

Option 1: Chronological (according to date)

Organising the literature chronologically is one of the simplest ways to structure your literature review. You start with what was published first and work your way through the literature until you reach the work published most recently. Pretty straightforward.

The benefit of this option is that it makes it easy to discuss the developments and debates in the field as they emerged over time. Organising your literature chronologically also allows you to highlight how specific articles or pieces of work might have changed the course of the field – in other words, which research has had the most impact . Therefore, this approach is very useful when your research is aimed at understanding how the topic has unfolded over time and is often used by scholars in the field of history. That said, this approach can be utilised by anyone that wants to explore change over time .

Adopting the chronological structure allows you to discuss the developments and debates in the field as they emerged over time.

For example , if a student of politics is investigating how the understanding of democracy has evolved over time, they could use the chronological approach to provide a narrative that demonstrates how this understanding has changed through the ages.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help you structure your literature review chronologically.

  • What is the earliest literature published relating to this topic?
  • How has the field changed over time? Why?
  • What are the most recent discoveries/theories?

In some ways, chronology plays a part whichever way you decide to structure your literature review, because you will always, to a certain extent, be analysing how the literature has developed. However, with the chronological approach, the emphasis is very firmly on how the discussion has evolved over time , as opposed to how all the literature links together (which we’ll discuss next ).

Option 2: Thematic (grouped by theme)

The thematic approach to structuring a literature review means organising your literature by theme or category – for example, by independent variables (i.e. factors that have an impact on a specific outcome).

As you’ve been collecting and synthesising literature , you’ll likely have started seeing some themes or patterns emerging. You can then use these themes or patterns as a structure for your body discussion. The thematic approach is the most common approach and is useful for structuring literature reviews in most fields.

For example, if you were researching which factors contributed towards people trusting an organisation, you might find themes such as consumers’ perceptions of an organisation’s competence, benevolence and integrity. Structuring your literature review thematically would mean structuring your literature review’s body section to discuss each of these themes, one section at a time.

The thematic structure allows you to organise your literature by theme or category  – e.g. by independent variables.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when structuring your literature review by themes:

  • Are there any patterns that have come to light in the literature?
  • What are the central themes and categories used by the researchers?
  • Do I have enough evidence of these themes?

PS – you can see an example of a thematically structured literature review in our literature review sample walkthrough video here.

Option 3: Methodological

The methodological option is a way of structuring your literature review by the research methodologies used . In other words, organising your discussion based on the angle from which each piece of research was approached – for example, qualitative , quantitative or mixed  methodologies.

Structuring your literature review by methodology can be useful if you are drawing research from a variety of disciplines and are critiquing different methodologies. The point of this approach is to question  how  existing research has been conducted, as opposed to  what  the conclusions and/or findings the research were.

The methodological structure allows you to organise your chapter by the analysis method  used - e.g. qual, quant or mixed.

For example, a sociologist might centre their research around critiquing specific fieldwork practices. Their literature review will then be a summary of the fieldwork methodologies used by different studies.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself when structuring your literature review according to methodology:

  • Which methodologies have been utilised in this field?
  • Which methodology is the most popular (and why)?
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the various methodologies?
  • How can the existing methodologies inform my own methodology?

3: The Conclusion Section

Once you’ve completed the body section of your literature review using one of the structural approaches we discussed above, you’ll need to “wrap up” your literature review and pull all the pieces together to set the direction for the rest of your dissertation or thesis.

The conclusion is where you’ll present the key findings of your literature review. In this section, you should emphasise the research that is especially important to your research questions and highlight the gaps that exist in the literature. Based on this, you need to make it clear what you will add to the literature – in other words, justify your own research by showing how it will help fill one or more of the gaps you just identified.

Last but not least, if it’s your intention to develop a conceptual framework for your dissertation or thesis, the conclusion section is a good place to present this.

In the conclusion section, you’ll need to present the key findings of your literature review and highlight the gaps that exist in the literature. Based on this, you'll  need to make it clear what your study will add  to the literature.

Example: Thematically Structured Review

In the video below, we unpack a literature review chapter so that you can see an example of a thematically structure review in practice.

Let’s Recap

In this article, we’ve  discussed how to structure your literature review for maximum impact. Here’s a quick recap of what  you need to keep in mind when deciding on your literature review structure:

  • Just like other chapters, your literature review needs a clear introduction , body and conclusion .
  • The introduction section should provide an overview of what you will discuss in your literature review.
  • The body section of your literature review can be organised by chronology , theme or methodology . The right structural approach depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your research.
  • The conclusion section should draw together the key findings of your literature review and link them to your research questions.

If you’re ready to get started, be sure to download our free literature review template to fast-track your chapter outline.

Literature Review Course

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling Udemy Course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

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Literature review 101 - how to find articles

27 Comments

Marin

Great work. This is exactly what I was looking for and helps a lot together with your previous post on literature review. One last thing is missing: a link to a great literature chapter of an journal article (maybe with comments of the different sections in this review chapter). Do you know any great literature review chapters?

ISHAYA JEREMIAH AYOCK

I agree with you Marin… A great piece

Qaiser

I agree with Marin. This would be quite helpful if you annotate a nicely structured literature from previously published research articles.

Maurice Kagwi

Awesome article for my research.

Ache Roland Ndifor

I thank you immensely for this wonderful guide

Malik Imtiaz Ahmad

It is indeed thought and supportive work for the futurist researcher and students

Franklin Zon

Very educative and good time to get guide. Thank you

Dozie

Great work, very insightful. Thank you.

KAWU ALHASSAN

Thanks for this wonderful presentation. My question is that do I put all the variables into a single conceptual framework or each hypothesis will have it own conceptual framework?

CYRUS ODUAH

Thank you very much, very helpful

Michael Sanya Oluyede

This is very educative and precise . Thank you very much for dropping this kind of write up .

Karla Buchanan

Pheeww, so damn helpful, thank you for this informative piece.

Enang Lazarus

I’m doing a research project topic ; stool analysis for parasitic worm (enteric) worm, how do I structure it, thanks.

Biswadeb Dasgupta

comprehensive explanation. Help us by pasting the URL of some good “literature review” for better understanding.

Vik

great piece. thanks for the awesome explanation. it is really worth sharing. I have a little question, if anyone can help me out, which of the options in the body of literature can be best fit if you are writing an architectural thesis that deals with design?

S Dlamini

I am doing a research on nanofluids how can l structure it?

PATRICK MACKARNESS

Beautifully clear.nThank you!

Lucid! Thankyou!

Abraham

Brilliant work, well understood, many thanks

Nour

I like how this was so clear with simple language 😊😊 thank you so much 😊 for these information 😊

Lindiey

Insightful. I was struggling to come up with a sensible literature review but this has been really helpful. Thank you!

NAGARAJU K

You have given thought-provoking information about the review of the literature.

Vakaloloma

Thank you. It has made my own research better and to impart your work to students I teach

Alphonse NSHIMIYIMANA

I learnt a lot from this teaching. It’s a great piece.

Resa

I am doing research on EFL teacher motivation for his/her job. How Can I structure it? Is there any detailed template, additional to this?

Gerald Gormanous

You are so cool! I do not think I’ve read through something like this before. So nice to find somebody with some genuine thoughts on this issue. Seriously.. thank you for starting this up. This site is one thing that is required on the internet, someone with a little originality!

kan

I’m asked to do conceptual, theoretical and empirical literature, and i just don’t know how to structure it

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Literature Reviews

  • What Is It?
  • Finding Literature Reviews

A literature review is both a process and a product. As a process, it involves searching for information related to your topic, to familiarize yourself with the relevant research and to identify issues and gaps in the research. In most cases you're seeking to identify the key authors and key arguments that are relevant to your topic, not to exhaustively read everything written on the subject. 

Types of Literature Reviews

A stand alone literature review can be a single work in its own right.  Examples include:

  • A class assignment
  • A review article

Literature reviews can also be component parts of larger bodies of work. Examples include:

  • A thesis / dissertation
  • An academic journal article introduction

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What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is the writing process of summarizing, synthesizing and/or critiquing the literature found as a result of a literature search. It may be used as background or context for a primary research project.

There are several reasons to review the literature :

  • Identify the developments in the field of study
  • Learn about the information sources and the research methodologies
  • Find gaps in the literature that can become research questions
  • Validate the originality of a research project
  • Evaluate the methods
  • Identify errors to avoid
  • Highlight the strengths, weaknesses and controversies in the field of study
  • Identify the subject experts

When writing your review, there are objectives you should keep in mind :

  • Inform the audience of the developments in the field
  • Establish your credibility
  • Discuss the relevance and significance of your question(s)
  • Provide the context for your methodological approach
  • Discuss the relevance and appropriateness of your approach.

​The level of detail or comprehensiveness of your literature review may depend on many things, but especially the purpose and audience of your review. For example, if you're writing a literature review that will aid you in writing a thesis or dissertation, you may want to have a very comprehensive lit review that reviews all relevant literature on a topic, as well as relevant sources beyond what is immediately and freely available (e.g. foundational scholarly articles not available through library collections).

Purpose of a Literature Review

Watch this YouTube video to understand the purpose of a literature review.

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  • Last Updated: Dec 12, 2023 3:07 PM
  • URL: https://library.knox.edu/literature-review

Educational resources and simple solutions for your research journey

How to write a literature review: An informative guide for researchers

How to write a literature review: An informative guide for researchers

How to write a literature review: An informative guide for researchers

One of the most common questions asked by researchers today is how to write a literature review , and we understand how this can be confusing. In this article, we try to simplify the process of writing a good literature review .   

Table of Contents

What is a literature review in research papers?  

A literature review forms a section or part of a dissertation or scholarly article, but it can also be considered a standalone piece of work. But why do we need to write a literature review? The aim of a writing a good literature review is to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the academic literature on a specific topic placed in context. Schwarz and his colleagues listed the main objectives of the literature review as follows: 1

  • Summarize prior research
  • Explain the results of prior research
  • Critically examine past research
  • Clarify alternative views of past research

You can find useful guides on how to write a literature review , including examples of literature reviews in a research paper , online or from university websites; note that these can vary depending on the nature of your study. However, literature review writing is not a simple or linear process , and that is why the answer to how to write a literature review for a research paper is not a straightforward one . As an author, you must go back and forth between different studies to reformulate or readjust those ideas. Sometimes you are constantly working on the literature review before, during, and even after your research study is completed. The type of literature review can vary depending on your research approach and design. 2

  • The most widely used is the traditional or narrative literature review, which critiques and summarizes the body of literature. It also draws conclusions and identifies gaps in a body of knowledge. Use a narrative approach when you have a highly focused research question.
  • A systematic review is the best approach when your research focus is on understanding feasibility, suitability, or effectiveness.
  • Opt for a scoping review if you are looking for an alternative to a literature review to clarify a concept or theory.
  • Theoretical reviews establish the existing theories, derive relationships between them, and develop new hypotheses to be tested.

Regardless of the nature of literature review, writing a good literature review is sometimes confusing and a laborious process that early career researchers, especially graduate students, find challenging. These include, but are not limited, to challenges i n:

  • critical evaluation of previous related studies and research gap identification.
  • indicating the theoretical position/framework.
  • citing and referencing.
  • achieving coherence and cohesion in writing.

how to write a literature review on an article

Tips for literature review writing  

When wondering how to write a literature review , the first point to remember is not to include studies that are not directly relevant to your study, as it will distract and frustrate the reader. It makes them lose sight of the purpose of your study.  Also, you cannot create a strong literature review by simply listing who has studied the topic and what each scholar concluded. The following guide can help you write a good review regardless of the research type. 3

1. Get your topic and research question correct : A unique, thought-provoking topic is what makes a good literature review stand out. Select interesting and useful topics that are hotspots in your field of study, but make sure that the research question is manageable. Understand the key terms related to your area of study. Discuss the topics with your supervisors or peers to understand landmark/seminal literature works.  

2. Decide the scope of your review : This depends on the nature of your study. Decide on the number of articles you want to read, the recentness of these articles, and how comprehensive these are.  

3. Go for reliable data sources : An important step in writing a good literature review is collecting data. Your data sources should include scholarly articles, books, conventions, conferences, dissertations, and theses. An easy place to look is the discipline-wise research guides created by librarians. Other tools that minimize your literature search time include R Discovery , SciSpace Discover, Sysrev, and Colandr.  

4. Track your searches : Use RefWorks, Mendeley, or Zotero to provide templates and help track your research citations. Read the abstract to determine articles of interest. Use maps and charts to identify connecting research and outline important categories. More relevant studies can be identified from bibliographies or references of these research studies.  

5. Keep notes : This is useful to writing a good literature review  as it helps you remember the important concepts discussed in the literature. It will also help you track your thought processes during the early stages of research.  

6. Structure your literature review : Before thinking what to write in a good literature review , think about its structure. Like a research article, the template of a good literature review should have an introduction, the main body, and a conclusion.  

  • The introduction section will define your topic, establish reasons for reviewing the selected literature sources, and decide the review’s scope.  
  • The main body begins with a wider general view of the topic being considered and ends with a specific focus of your study.  
  • The conclusion section evaluates the current state of existing research, identifies gaps in the existing literature to link your research, and outlines areas for future study. Your research question, hypothesis, or problem statement will also go here.

7. Length of the literature review : It varies depending on the purpose and audience. The best literature review length for journal articles is at least 2 pages or a few pages, depending on the length of your article. For example, for a 5,000-word journal article, the literature review can be between 1,200-2,000 words.  

We hope the article explains and answers your question how to write a good literature review , and the tips for literature review given above can help you write your next literature review easily.   

References:

  • Schwarz, A., Mehta, M., Johnson, N., & Chin, W. W. Understanding frameworks and reviews: a commentary to assist us in moving our field forward by analyzing our past.  ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems ,  38 (3), 29-50 (2007).
  • Munn, Z., Peters, M. D., Stern, C., Tufanaru, C., McArthur, A., & Aromataris, E. Systematic review or scoping review? Guidance for authors when choosing between a systematic or scoping review approach.  BMC medical research methodology ,  18 (1), 1-7 (2018).
  • Paul, J., & Criado, A. R. The art of writing literature review: What do we know and what do we need to know?  International Business Review ,  29 (4), 101717 (2020).

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How to write a good scientific review article

Affiliation.

  • 1 The FEBS Journal Editorial Office, Cambridge, UK.
  • PMID: 35792782
  • DOI: 10.1111/febs.16565

Literature reviews are valuable resources for the scientific community. With research accelerating at an unprecedented speed in recent years and more and more original papers being published, review articles have become increasingly important as a means to keep up to date with developments in a particular area of research. A good review article provides readers with an in-depth understanding of a field and highlights key gaps and challenges to address with future research. Writing a review article also helps to expand the writer's knowledge of their specialist area and to develop their analytical and communication skills, amongst other benefits. Thus, the importance of building review-writing into a scientific career cannot be overstated. In this instalment of The FEBS Journal's Words of Advice series, I provide detailed guidance on planning and writing an informative and engaging literature review.

© 2022 Federation of European Biochemical Societies.

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  • Open access
  • Published: 16 February 2024

Cultural threads in writing mastery: a structural analysis of perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, and motivation as mediated by self-reflection in Chinese EFL learners

  • Ye Tao 1 &
  • Jianbin Yu 1 , 2  

BMC Psychology volume  12 , Article number:  80 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

The study explores language acquisition in Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education, where English proficiency is crucial for global opportunities. As China gains prominence, the demand for English skills rises beyond communication to include academic and business success. The Chinese education system emphasizes proficient English writing for further education and professional achievement. This research investigates the complex linguistic context for EFL learners in China, analyzing the intersection of psychological factors, cultural nuances, varied pedagogy, and individual experiences.

Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is utilized for analysis, enabling the creation of a metric set to explore intangibles such as perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, study habits, cultural influences, and introspection. The research utilizes a diverse sample from multiple universities across different regions of China, incorporating demographic factors to encompass the varied characteristics within the EFL learner community.

Results reveal that perfectionism (β = 0.30, p  < 0.001), learning self-efficacy (β = 0.25, p  = 0.005), motivation (β = 0.35, p  < 0.001), study habits (β = 0.20, p  = 0.01), and self-reflection (β = 0.28, p  < 0.001) significantly predict writing proficiency. Cultural effects (Beta = 0.15, p  = 0.05) show a statistically significant, albeit minimal, impact. Mediation-moderation analysis underscores perfectionism as a mediator (Beta = 0.25, p  = 0.005), emphasizing its influence on other predictors. Cultural factors act as moderators (Beta = 0.15, p  = 0.01), shaping the link between predictors and writing skills. The combined mediation and moderation effects on writing proficiency are positively significant (Beta = 0.20, p  = 0.02).

Conclusions

This study makes a significant theoretical contribution, enhancing existing models and providing practical insights for EFL educators and policymakers. Emphasizing the intricate relationship between psychological factors and cultural dynamics underscores the necessity for a sophisticated, culturally sensitive approach to language acquisition in Chinese EFL instruction. Beyond language skills, the research recognizes the importance of fostering a conducive environment that encourages personal development, socio-cultural awareness, and a holistic learning approach.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

The ability to communicate oneself effectively in writing has become more critical in the academic and professional worlds, making fluency in EFL a necessary goal for anyone pursuing an international education [ 1 ]. This study seeks to shed light on the intricate interplay between perfectionist tendencies, beliefs in one’s ability to learn, intrinsic motivation, and writing proficiency among Chinese students learning English as a foreign language. Understanding the factors (cultural, pedagogical, and individual) that influence Chinese EFL students’ ability to write in English calls for a thorough investigation. This study is essential for guiding efficient teaching methods, raising students’ accomplishments, and adding to the conversation about language education as a whole [ 2 ].

Background and context

The necessity for fluency in English has grown significantly in recent years in China due to the country’s expanding global influence. The importance of the English language as a method of communication and a gateway to better professional and educational opportunities has created this demand. The Chinese academic system lays heavy emphasis on the English language, and many students see the ability to write well in English as crucial to their future success [ 3 ] in both higher education and the job market. Chinese learners of EFL face a challenging linguistic landscape shaped by cultural nuance, pedagogical approach, and their unique paths to proficiency. Fluency in English has become more critical in academic, professional, and international contexts in China as a result of the country’s rapid economic development and rising global significance. In light of China’s ongoing interaction with the international community, the acquisition of English language skills has emerged as both a pragmatic need and a representation of cultural flexibility and global awareness [ 4 ]. In the Chinese cultural milieu, language has a purpose beyond essential communication, as it encompasses a multifaceted fabric of tradition, symbolism, and social stratification. The incorporation of English as a second language has initiated a nuanced interplay between enduring cultural norms and the worldwide linguistic requirements of the contemporary day. The impact of Confucian ideals, such as those seen in traditional East Asian societies, might potentially modify the attitudes of students towards authoritative figures, hence influencing their relationships with English language teachers and their approach to written tasks. The effect of Confucian values, mainly the focus on respect for authority, may have an impact on the manner in which students receive and react to comments provided in their writing [ 5 ]. The Chinese education system has seen substantial changes in order to adapt to the evolving needs of an increasingly dynamic global environment. The changes in question place significant emphasis on English language training, which signifies a dedication to providing Chinese learners with the required abilities for engaging in international cooperation and communication. The pedagogical strategies used in EFL classrooms often strive to strike a harmonious equilibrium between conventional language education and progressive techniques aimed at augmenting communicative competence [ 6 ]. The current educational landscape maintains a focus on rote memory. This practice has historical roots while also acknowledging the increasing significance of cultivating critical thinking and creative expression, especially in the realm of written communication.

EFL learners in China include a wide range of people who possess distinct origins, motivations, and learning methods. While many individuals may be motivated by academic ambitions, others may see English language competence as a crucial factor in gaining access to global employment markets or pursuing foreign educational prospects. The exposure to the English language among individuals is also subject to geographical changes [ 7 ]. Students residing in metropolitan locations are likely to have a more significant number of prospects for engaging in immersive language experiences. In contrast, those residing in rural regions may encounter higher obstacles in terms of obtaining resources for the English language. Within the framework of the Chinese education system, there exists a prevailing perception that the attainment of English proficiency, particularly in the domain of writing, serves as a pivotal factor in facilitating success throughout several tiers. A high level of English language proficiency is a mandatory requirement for acceptance into several foreign tertiary education programs. According toAlexander [ 8 ], Chinese students who have ambitions of pursuing higher education overseas acknowledge the significance of showcasing proficient writing abilities in order to thrive in highly competitive application procedures. In the context of a globalized world, the capacity to communicate effectively in English is becoming more intertwined with one’s prospects for employment. Employers, both domestically and internationally, often place a high value on applicants who possess strong English communication skills, with a particular emphasis on written proficiency. Proficient English writing abilities are often regarded as advantageous in a variety of professional domains, including business, technology, academia, and the arts. As China actively participates in partnerships with overseas counterparts, proficient written communication in the English language emerges as a crucial factor for achieving success in global endeavors. According toGuo&Asmawi [ 9 ], the acquisition of proficient English writing skills enables individuals to effectively communicate ideas clearly and succinctly, hence promoting successful cross-cultural communication.

The psychological concept of perfectionism, which involves the establishment of very high standards and a constant need for flawlessness, has received considerable study in the field of language acquisition. The intricate and diverse nature of language learning, particularly in relation to writing skills, is influenced by the presence of perfectionism. It is of utmost importance to comprehend the ways in which perfectionist inclinations are shown and exert an impact on the writing process within the population of Chinese EFL learners. This understanding is essential for devising interventions that are specifically tailored to facilitate the cultivation of a healthy academic trajectory [ 10 ]. The concept of self-efficacy, which is a fundamental element of Bandura’s social cognitive theory, pertains to an individual’s confidence in their capacity to execute a specific job successfully. The development of a sense of personal competence is crucial for learners of EFL who are expected to complete writing projects of varying degrees of difficulty and complexity. Insights into the motivational and cognitive components of language acquisition may be gained by analyzing the correlation between learner efficacy and writing competence [ 11 ]. An integral part of learning a language, motivation is the engine that keeps students working towards their goals. Teachers need to be aware of the factors that encourage or discourage students from actively participating in writing tasks. The intricate relationship between intrinsic motivation and written output among Chinese EFL students calls for a systematic investigation [ 12 ].

Rationale and significance

The dynamic relevance of the interaction between perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, and self-reflection is magnified in the unique context of Chinese EFL learners. Learners’ perspectives on accomplishment and success in language learning are shaped by their perfectionism, which may be culturally complex. To learn a new language effectively, one must balance demanding excellence and damaging oneself with excessive criticism. Conversely, learning self-efficacy investigates students’ confidence in their ability to become fluent English speakers, a factor that is strongly related to students’ cultural identity and past educational experiences. Cultural norms and social expectations in China inspire EFL students to learn a new language with a unique twist. As a natural learning component, self-reflection also helps students adjust their approach to language acquisition and gain insight into their progress. Our research aims to provide insights beyond standard frameworks and directly related to Chinese EFL learners’ cultural and educational environment by unraveling the intricacies and synergies that contribute to their holistic development within this rich tapestry of factors.

This study recognizes the necessity for a comprehensive approach to understanding Chinese EFL students’ English writing skills. This study examines the delicate relationship between students’ perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, and writing competence to understand better how they affect English writing outcomes. Cultural Influence and Self-Reflection complicate the investigation. This acknowledges the complex link between personality, social environment, and cognition. The implications of this discovery go beyond science. The findings of this research may be utilized to improve the Chinese EFL curriculum, teaching, and resources. Additionally, this study adds considerably to language learning knowledge. They assist academics, educators, and policymakers in understanding EFL writing ability in culturally diverse situations.

Objectives of the study

This research aims to accomplish three main goals:

To study how perfectionism, self-efficacy, and motivation affect Chinese EFL students’ writing.

To examine how culture affects perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, and writing skills.

To examine Chinese EFL students’ perfectionist tendencies, language learning self-efficacy, study motivation, and English writing skills.

The larger academic community recognizes the critical importance of this research on Chinese EFL learners. Fluency in English is needed to take advantage of the many worldwide possibilities presented by China’s rise to global superpower status. A fresh perspective on the complex process of language acquisition is provided by the detailed examination of cultural effects in conjunction with the in-depth investigation of psychological aspects, including learning self-efficacy, motivation, self-reflection, and perfectionism. This study adds to our knowledge of how these factors interact within a unique language and cultural setting by exploring the experiences of Chinese EFL learners. This study’s results have the potential to influence policymaking, pedagogical practices, and educational practices in order to improve this population’s English writing skills, which is an essential component of successful global communication.The hypothesized model for ready reference is shown in Fig.  1 .

figure 1

Hypothesized model

Source: self Extract

This study is divided into many sections to cover the issue thoroughly. The literature review then examines major theoretical frameworks and empirical studies on perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, and EFL writing competence. Study design, participant recruitment, data collection, and statistical analysis are detailed in the methods section. The next sections will present and debate the findings, followed by discussions on their possible uses, limits, and future research.

Literature review

The literature review is an essential part of learning about the theoretical models and empirical studies that form the basis of the study. The subsequent empirical investigation is triggered by combining cultural factors, motivational factors, and psychological concepts within the context of Chinese EFL students.

Relationship between perfectionism and EFL writing proficiency

The idea of perfectionism in psychology has gained prominence in the field of second language learning because of its profound impact on students’ mental processes and academic outcomes. According toStoeber [ 13 ], perfectionism is a complex concept that encompasses several aspects, including self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially dictated dimensions. This conception provides a fundamental framework for comprehending the intricate ramifications of perfectionism in the context of EFL acquisition. Perfectionism is acknowledged within the field of language acquisition as having the capacity to impact learners’ attitudes, behaviors, and results. The endeavor to achieve exceedingly high benchmarks and the inclination to be excessively self-critical provide the framework for a multifaceted interaction between perfectionism and different aspects of language acquisition, specifically within the realm of EFL instruction. The correlation between perfectionism and writing skills is of notable importance within the context of language acquisition. Tan [ 14 ] examined the relationship between self-oriented perfectionism and the quality of written assignments among students in a university setting. The results of their study indicated a significant positive association, indicating that those who possess high personal standards are more likely to have superior writing skills. This association suggests that the personal urge to achieve perfection might act as a motivating factor that improves the quality of written work. The discovery presented in this study raises the need to investigate the motivating dimensions of perfectionism and its impact on the acquisition of writing abilities among EFL learners in China [ 15 ]. The convergence of perfectionism and cultural factors, particularly in the context of Chinese culture, offers an extra dimension of intricacy. Cultural variables have a crucial role in influencing the expression of perfectionistic impulses among Chinese EFL learners. The contribution of cultural factors, namely collectivism and the impact of Confucian ideals, to the development of perfectionist tendencies, has been investigated by Yang et al. [ 16 ] and Wan et al. [ 17 ]. Within the context of Chinese culture, where there exists a strong inclination towards the pursuit of academic success, the significance placed on accomplishment and industriousness may either intensify or alleviate the consequences associated with perfectionism. The impact of collectivism in Chinese culture may shape people’s perceptions and reactions toward the social demands linked to perfectionism [ 18 ].

The integration of the literature results underscores the complex relationship among perfectionism, writing skills, and cultural factors within the domain of EFL education in China. The study approach being presented emphasizes the multifaceted character of perfectionism, acknowledging its capacity to both positively and negatively impact the writing performance of learners.

The initial hypothesis of the investigation is formulated based on the literature given.

Hypothesis 1

A significant correlation exists between perfectionism, cultural factors, and EFL writing skills among Chinese learners.

Hypothesis 1a

There is a positive correlation between self-oriented perfectionism levels and writing performance among EFL learners in China.

Hypothesis 1b

The impact of cultural characteristics, such as collectivism and the influence of Confucian principles, will serve as a moderating factor in the association between perfectionism and writing performance among Chinese EFL learners.

Influence of learning self-efficacy on EFL writing proficiency

The idea of learning self-efficacy, which is firmly grounded in Bandura’s social cognitive theory, plays a fundamental role in comprehending people’s attitudes about their ability to do activities successfully [ 19 ]. Bandura’s theoretical framework posits that self-efficacy beliefs have a significant influence on people’s decision-making processes, exerting an impact on the level of effort they invest and ultimately deciding their ability to persist in the face of obstacles. Within the realm of language acquisition, these components assume paramount importance as they have a significant influence on learners’ advancement, especially in the realm of written competence [ 20 ]. A multitude of empirical investigations have been conducted to examine the complex association between self-efficacy in learning and results in language acquisition. In their extensive study,Magogwe& Oliver [ 21 ] did a thorough inquiry to examine the relationship between self-efficacy beliefs and language proficiency. Their findings revealed a significant positive link between these two variables. This discovery highlights the motivating significance of people’s self-assurance in their language acquisition aptitude. Individuals who have a robust belief in their ability to succeed, sometimes referred to as self-efficacy, are more likely to display increased levels of desire, active participation, and, ultimately, enhanced performance in the acquisition of a new language. In the specific context of writing proficiency, the impact of gaining self-efficacy becomes notably significant. The act of writing is a multifaceted talent that requires not just proficiency in language but also a sense of self-assurance in appropriately expressing thoughts and concepts [ 22 ]. Individuals who possess a strong sense of self-efficacy in the domain of writing tend to have a greater inclination towards approaching writing activities with excitement, dedicating substantial effort towards honing their writing abilities, and demonstrating persistence in the face of obstacles. To comprehend the concept of learning self-efficacy in the Chinese educational setting, it is necessary to consider the impact of cultural factors. The study conducted by Chan [ 23 ] highlights the considerable influence of cultural values on the development of self-efficacy beliefs among the Chinese student population. The significant importance placed on academic accomplishment within Chinese culture is closely intertwined with learners’ conceptions of their skills, hence exerting an influence on their motivation and overall academic performance. The development of learning self-efficacy is also influenced by educational contexts, which include instructional approaches, peer relationships, and institutional support. Within the context of Chinese education, the amalgamation of traditional instructional techniques with contemporary, learner-focused methodologies significantly influences students’ perceptions of their academic capabilities [ 24 ]. The amalgamation of these scholarly discoveries highlights the complex and diverse characteristics of self-efficacy in the context of learning, emphasizing its crucial influence on language acquisition achievements, specifically in the domain of writing skills. The study approach being presented recognizes the interrelatedness of self-efficacy, cultural factors, and the educational environment in shaping the writing skills of EFL learners.

Wang et al. [ 25 ] developed a robust instrument to measure the proficiency of Chinese EFL instructors when it comes to drafting evaluation comments. Evaluation review competency, feedback collection procedures, comparison observations, composition understanding, and evaluation opinions’ usefulness approaches make up the research’s validated survey. There are ramifications for instructors, evaluators, and EFL instructors. Wang &Hemchua [ 26 ] highlight the underappreciated use of illustrations in the instruction of languages, especially when it comes to teaching English. They provide conceptual and practical implications for ELT materials that use illustrations to improve international interpersonal abilities and comprehension of culture. Using students’ confidence and readiness to interact in mixed-learning contexts as their primary foci, Guo et al. [ 27 ] explore how to motivate students to acquire languages. Basic competency and counseling modality acted as modifiers in their quasi-investigation of 232 subjects, which found that ways to scaffold substantially affect confidence levels.

The second hypothesis of the research, derived from the literature referenced, is as follows:

Hypothesis 2

A significant correlation exists between the levels of learning self-efficacy, cultural influences, and EFL writing skills among Chinese learners.

Hypothesis 2a

There is a positive relationship between the levels of learning self-efficacy among EFL learners in China and their ability in English writing.

Hypothesis 2b

The connection between learning self-efficacy and writing competency among Chinese EFL learners would be influenced by cultural variables.

Motivational factors in EFL writing proficiency

Motivation is widely acknowledged as a fundamental aspect of language acquisition, exerting a dynamic influence on learners’ levels of engagement and perseverance. According to Law et al. [ 28 ], motivation may be classified into two distinct dimensions: intrinsic and extrinsic. In the realm of motivation, there exists a coexistence between intrinsic motivation, derived from internal variables like interest and satisfaction, and extrinsic motivation, which is propelled by external rewards or consequences. When it comes to improving students’ writing abilities, both cognitive and emotional factors play essential roles in shaping students’ perspectives and actions. Research in the area of EFL acquisition has shed light on the nuanced relationship between intrinsic motivation and language learning outcomes. According toAtay& Kurt [ 29 ], Gardner’s suggested socio-educational paradigm emphasizes the concept of integrative motivation, which is tied to a strong propensity to integrate into the community of the target language. It is essential to understand the motivations that inspire students while teaching English as a foreign language in China, where being able to speak in English is frequently considered a method to access worldwide opportunities. Chinese EFL students’ motivation stems from a firm conviction that mastering English would open doors to opportunities throughout the world. Individuals invest time and energy into learning languages, with a focus on improving their writing abilities so that they may take an active role in global society, pursue foreign educational opportunities, and broaden their employment chances [ 30 ]. Cultural factors significantly influence motivational orientations in language acquisition. Li [ 31 ] study examines the concept of motivation within Asian EFL environments, with a particular focus on China. The research highlights the intricate interplay between motivation and cultural values, emphasizing the ever-evolving and multifaceted nature of motivation in these settings. The endeavor to achieve academic achievement, which is closely linked to broader societal desires for social acknowledgment, has a substantial impact on students’ motivational tendencies. A strong emphasis on the pursuit of intellectual achievement characterizes the Chinese cultural context. The drive to flourish in English writing may be closely associated with the social importance attributed to academic success. The motivation of Chinese EFL learners to develop writing competency is influenced by the potential for social recognition and increased possibilities, both within their local communities and on a worldwide scale [ 32 ]. The integration of the literature above results underscores the intricate interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the impact of global possibilities on motivation within the Chinese setting, and the significance of cultural elements in creating patterns of motivation. The study approach being presented emphasizes the complex and varied nature of motivation, acknowledging its multiple origins and effects on the writing skills of EFL learners.

The third hypothesis suggested in this research is as follows:

Hypothesis 3

A significant correlation exists between motivational variables, cultural effects, and EFL writing skills among Chinese learners.

Hypothesis 3a

Chinese EFL learners who possess higher levels of integrative motivation will demonstrate enhanced competency in the skill of English writing.

Moderating role of cultural influences

The complex and dynamic relationship between cultural factors and language learning outcomes is a topic of great significance since it significantly impacts the efficacy of language training [ 33 ]. Cultural diversity comprises a range of factors, including communication methods, attitudes toward authority, and ways of learning. These factors have the potential to influence the interaction between psychological dimensions and language competency greatly. In the context of EFL education in China, it is crucial to possess a comprehensive awareness of cultural elements. This understanding is especially essential in the facilitation of links between psychological constructs and the level of competency in writing [ 34 ]. The phenomenon of acculturation, which pertains to the process of adapting to a new culture, has significant consequences for people’s approaches to activities related to language acquisition. The study conducted by Zhou et al. [ 35 ] places significant emphasis on the acculturation tactics used by people, highlighting the intricate equilibrium they establish in order to preserve their own culture while also assimilating into the new society. In the context of EFL education in China, where students are faced with the challenge of balancing traditional values with global expectations, cultural influences will probably have a significant moderating effect. The expression and perception of psychological constructs, such as perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, and motivation, may be influenced by cultural variances in communication styles. The manner in which feedback on writing is delivered to students in China, characterized by a cultural inclination towards indirect communication, can influence the association between perfectionism and writing skills [ 2 ]. The impact of cultural norms on learning self-efficacy beliefs may be seen via the influence of attitudes toward authority. In societies that place a strong emphasis on respecting authority, students’ levels of confidence while engaging in language acquisition activities may be influenced by their perception of the expectations set by authority people. Comprehending this phenomenon is essential in order to elucidate the moderating impact of cultural factors on the correlation between self-perceived competence in learning and proficiency in writing. The influence of cultural variances on motivational patterns may be seen in different methods of learning, such as those that prioritize rote memorization or those that stimulate critical thinking [ 36 ]. Students hailing from cultures that prioritize individual performance may exhibit intrinsic motivation driven by a personal aspiration for success. In contrast, students from collectivist cultures may get motivation from their contribution to the collective success of the group. It is imperative to acknowledge these cultural subtleties in order to fully grasp the manner in which cultural factors control the association between motivation and writing aptitude [ 37 ].

The fourth hypothesis of the investigation is stated as follows:

Hypothesis 4

The influence of cultural variables on the association between perfectionism and writing competence is expected to be significant among Chinese EFL learners.

Hypothesis 4a

The impact of cultural factors will be discernible in the correlation between learning self-efficacy and writing competence among Chinese EFL learners.

Hypothesis 4b

Cultural effects are expected to have a moderating effect on the association between motivating variables and writing competence in Chinese EFL learners.

Mediating effect of self-reflection

Self-reflection, which involves the intentional examination of one’s ideas, behaviors, and personal encounters, is a cognitive activity that has a substantial impact on the acquisition of language [ 38 ]. The use of metacognitive practice enhances the comprehension of language learning procedures and promotes the advancement of skills. Self-reflection has a vital role in developing EFL writers’ awareness and metacognitive control [ 39 ]. When it comes to writing, self-reflection is essential since it establishes a link between reflective practices and improvements in writing ability and the development of critical thinking skills. The research done by Lew et al. [ 40 ] explores the value of reflective journals in the writing process, demonstrating that the act of self-reflection helps students’ awareness of their writing talents and limits. Therefore, the raised awareness contributes to the ongoing development of one’s writing abilities. While it is generally agreed that introspection is crucial to learning a new language, additional research into the cultural differences in how this is seen is required. The existing knowledge gap presents an opportunity to explore the ways in which people from various cultural backgrounds, such as EFL learners in China, participate in reflective practices. The impact of cultural variations in communication styles and attitudes towards introspection on the manner in which EFL learners engage in self-reflection as a means of mediating the connections between psychological characteristics and writing competency has been explored byGreenier et al. [ 41 ]. The impact of cultural diversity on communication styles may shape the manner in which people articulate their ideas and experiences throughout the process of self-reflection. In societies that emphasize indirect modes of communication, the practice of self-reflection may manifest in intricate ways, influencing the extent and lucidity of learners’ perceptions. A comprehensive grasp of these cultural subtleties is needed in order to effectively evaluate the moderating influence of self-reflection within the domain of EFL writing competence [ 42 ]. The inclination to participate in metacognitive processes, such as self-reflection, may be influenced by individuals’ attitudes towards introspection, which are firmly ingrained in cultural norms. Cultures that place importance on individual introspection may cultivate a more robust correlation between self-reflection and skill in writing as learners engage in deliberate contemplation and evaluation of their writing approaches and results [ 43 ].

Drawing upon the material that has been referenced, the ultimate hypothesis of the investigation may be articulated as follows:

Hypothesis 5

The mediating role of self-reflection will be seen in the association between perfectionism and writing competence among Chinese EFL learners.

Hypothesis 5a

The presence of self-reflection as a mediating factor will be observable in the correlation between learning self-efficacy and writing competency among Chinese EFL learners.

Hypothesis 5b

The mediating role of self-reflection in the link between motivating variables and writing competency will be examined among Chinese EFL learners.

Hypothesis 5c

The moderating role of cultural influences will be seen in the mediating impact of self-reflection on the association between psychological characteristics and writing skills among Chinese EFL learners.

The primary objective of this research is to address significant deficiencies in current scholarly works by providing a comprehensive and culturally attuned investigation of the relationship between psychological factors, cultural influences, and self-reflection in relation to EFL writing competency among Chinese students. Prior research has recognized the impact of psychological factors, such as perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, and motivation, on EFL writing competency [ 44 , 45 ]. Nevertheless, there needs to be more cross-cultural analysis of these variables, particularly in relation to Chinese EFL learners. The primary objective of this research is to address the existing disparity by examining the complex relationship between psychological variables and writing competence while taking into account the distinct cultural intricacies seen within Chinese educational environments. Although scholars have recognized the significance of cultural effects on language acquisition, there is a need for studies investigating the moderating influence of cultural variables on the connection between psychological dimensions and EFL writing skills [ 46 , 47 ]. This research acknowledges the need to address this knowledge gap by investigating the ways in which cultural factors impact the intricate connections between perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, and writing competency in Chinese EFL learners. The significance of self-reflection in language acquisition is well acknowledged; nonetheless, there exists a need for comprehension of the mechanisms via which self-reflection functions within various cultural settings. The present study aims to fill this research vacuum by examining the mediating effect of self-reflection on the associations between psychological characteristics and writing competence. Additionally, this study takes into account the cultural components that influence reflective practice among Chinese EFL learners. Prior studies have often focused on specific psychological components in a fragmented manner, without a comprehensive framework that incorporates many aspects [ 48 , 49 ]. The study’s goal is to add to the existing body of knowledge by using a comprehensive approach that accounts for the interplaying effects of perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, cultural influences, and introspection. An integrated method is used to understand better the many processes that influence EFL writers’ abilities.

This study provides a thorough understanding of the relationships between perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, and writing proficiency among Chinese EFL students. This method goes beyond the narrow study of individual components to show how they all interact together to affect the final written product. The study of how cultural elements might operate as moderators is an essential contribution to the current knowledge. The primary goal of this study is to investigate cultural impacts on the links between psychological aspects and writing abilities in the context of Chinese EFL instruction. The study’s overarching goal is to help educators better understand cultural differences so that they may design more effective individualized learning plans. This research endeavor pioneers a novel exploration of the relatively unexplored significance of self-reflection in many cultural situations. This study aims to provide significant insights into the metacognitive processes that influence language learning outcomes among Chinese EFL learners. Specifically, it explores the role of self-reflection in mediating the links between psychological variables and writing competency. The implications of the study’s results have practical significance for professionals in the fields of education, curriculum development, and policymaking. The identification of cultural and psychological elements that impact EFL writing skills provides a basis for the creation of focused treatments that cater to the particular requirements of Chinese learners. These interventions have the potential to improve teaching practices, curriculum design, and support systems in order to maximize results related to writing competence.

Methodology

Participants.

This research focuses on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in China, specifically those enrolled in language learning programs at the postsecondary level, aiming to explore the intricate relationships between psychological variables, cultural factors, and writing skills. A purposeful sampling strategy targeted 563 individuals from diverse Chinese universities and language schools, representing major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. The data collection involved administering a structured questionnaire survey, ensuring reliability and accuracy. The survey utilized a Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree) to assess various constructs, including perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, writing skills, cultural influences, and self-reflection. The study incorporated a diverse set of variables, such as Writing Proficiency (WP), Perfectionism (PERFECT), Learning Self-Efficacy (LSE), Motivation (MOT), Study Habits (SH), Self-Reflection (SR), and Cultural Influence (CI). These variables were assessed using established instruments adapted from prior research, ensuring comprehensive insights into the complex dynamics influencing EFL writers’ competence in Chinese.

Instruments

Different instruments were used for collecting the data, each is explained as follows.

Writing Proficiency (WP).The study used the ‘Self-report writing proficiency scale’, which was derived from the research conducted by Silvia et al. [ 50 ]. The research implemented a reorganization of the items, including a set of five questions specifically relevant to the subject matter under investigation. The questions have been designed according to the 5-point Likert scale items. The provided question is presented in the following manner: “I can express my thoughts clearly in written English.”

Perfectionism (PERFECT)

The study used ‘Hewitt and Flett’s Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS)’ adapted from the study of Hewitt et al. [ 51 ]. The five items are used in the study. The sample question is as follows: “I often set extremely high standards for my written assignments.”

Learning self-efficacy (LSE)

The study used ‘Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Scale’ from the scholarly work of Wang et al. [ 52 ] and redesigned five items related to the study theme. The sample question is as follows: “I am confident in my ability to learn and improve my English writing skills.”

Motivation (MOT)

The study used ‘Gardner’s Integrative Motivation Scale’, adapted from the scholarly work ofChoubsaz&Choubsaz [ 53 ]. The five items have been redesigned according to the study’s theme. The sample question is as follows: “I am motivated to improve my English writing skills.”

Study habits (SH)

The study used the ‘Self-report writing proficiency scale’, adapted from the research of Silvia et al. [ 50 ]. The sample question is as follows: “I allocate dedicated time to practice writing in English.”

Self-reflection (SR)

The study used ‘Vandergrift &Tafaghodtari’s Self-Reflection Scale’ taken from the scholarly work of Vandergrift et al. [ 54 ] and re-structured the questions as per the study’s theme. The five questions are used in the study. The sample question is as follows: “I often reflect on my writing strengths and weaknesses.”

Cultural influence (CI)

Cultural context shapes how learners with strong self-efficacy (LSE) and high motivation (MOT) utilize these traits for effective writing, considering cultural norms and values. The study used a ‘Customized scale’ based on some identified cultural dimensions, adapted from the scholarly work of Li &Kalyanaraman [ 55 ]. The five items have been taken for cultural influence on writing proficiency in English. The sample question is as follows: “My cultural background affects my approach to writing in English.”

Data analysis

Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was employed in this study utilizing Smart PLS software. The measurement model’s robustness was evaluated through various statistical assessments. Reliability, a crucial aspect ensuring the consistency of measurements, was estimated using internal consistency measures, specifically Cronbach’s alpha, for each latent variable. Divergent validity, examining the distinctiveness of different latent variables, and convergent validity, assessing the extent to which indicators of the same latent variable converge, were thoroughly estimated. Smart PLS facilitated these analyses, providing insights into the reliability and validity of the measurement model, crucial for elucidating the intricate relationships among latent variables within the structural equation framework.

Model fit indices, including but not limited to chi-square, Comparative Fit Index (CFI), and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), were assessed to determine the overall fit of the structural equation model.The use of this complete method assures the strength and accuracy of our measuring model while also offering significant insights into the intricate relationship between several elements that impact the writing skills of EFL learners in the Chinese setting.

Results and discussion

Table  1 displays the demographic distribution of participants, offering valuable insights into the characteristics of the research sample, including variables such as gender, age group, academic level, and proficiency in EFL.

The demographics of the study’s participants provide light on their heterogeneous distribution among various groups. With 49.73% male and 50.27% female responses, the poll displays a fair representation when it comes to gender. The present equilibrium provides an excellent chance to examine research subjects thoroughly within a multidimensional gender framework. There is a wide variety of ages represented in this poll, although respondents aged 21–23 make up a sizable chunk (35.52%). Incorporating a wide range of people from different ages and backgrounds into our studies of linguistic phenomena is made possible by the existence of demographic change. A large majority of the participants (62.17%) are undergraduate students, showing that individuals just beginning their formal education are overrepresented. Finally, there is a wide range of proficiency in EFL, with a sizable majority (44.41%) located at the intermediate level. Incorporating a wide variety of people from different backgrounds and educational levels increases the study’s applicability and provides more nuanced findings. Descriptive statistics for the study’s significant variables are summarized in Table  2 , which may be used to get an understanding of the data set’s central tendency and variability.

The participants in the study had a moderate degree of perfectionist inclinations, as indicated by a mean score of 3.75 and a standard deviation of 0.92 on a scale ranging from 2 to 5. The construct of Learning Self-Efficacy, which is measured on a scale ranging from 2 to 5, has a mean value of 4.20 and a standard deviation of 0.80. These statistics indicate that participants typically had a high degree of confidence in their perceived capability to acquire proficiency in the English language. The participants’ participation in language acquisition is influenced by motivational variables, as shown by a moderate degree of motivation with a mean of 3.90 and a standard deviation of 0.85. The domains of Study Habits, Cultural Influences, and Self-Reflection have mean scores of 4.05, 3.60, and 4.15, respectively, mainly suggesting good trends in these areas. The Writing ability assessment, which yields scores ranging from 2 to 5, has a mean of 4.2 and a standard deviation of 0.64. The results show that the average level of writing skill among the sample is relatively high. To provide the groundwork for future inferential investigations in the study, the offered descriptive statistics provide a thorough understanding of the measures of central tendency and dispersion for each variable. Table  3 ’s correlation matrix gives a complete picture of the connections between the variables. Each column in the matrix represents the correlation coefficient between two variables, indicating the strength and direction of the connection.

The association between Writing Proficiency and other factors is of significance, i.e., the moderate to high positive correlations seen with Perfectionism (0.45), Learning Self-Efficacy (0.35), and Motivation (0.40). The observed correlation coefficient of 0.25 between Perfectionism and Learning Self-Efficacy (LSE) indicates a slight positive link. Similar to these findings, we find that perfectionism is somewhat positively related to both motivation ( r  = 0.30) and study habits ( r  = 0.15). The link between perfectionism and cultural influences is just 0.20. However, the association between perfectionism and self-reflection is a robust 0.35. A moderate to strong positive link ( r  = 0.45) is seen between Perfectionism and Writing Proficiency, indicating the greatest positive correlation among the variables. In connection to the construct of Learning Self-Efficacy, it is seen that there exists a modest positive correlation with Motivation ( r  = 0.40), a modest positive correlation with Study Habits ( r  = 0.20), and a moderate positive correlation with Cultural Influences ( r  = 0.30). The observed correlation coefficient of 0.35 between Learning Self-Efficacy and Writing Proficiency suggests a modest positive relationship between these two variables. Motivation has a modest positive association with Study Habits ( r  = 0.15) and a moderate positive association with Cultural Influences ( r  = 0.25). The observed correlation coefficient of 0.40 between Motivation and Writing Proficiency indicates a modest positive association. The study habits have limited associations with the other factors, underscoring its largely autonomous character within this particular environment. The findings indicate that there are weak to moderate positive relationships between Cultural Influences and Perfectionism ( r  = 0.20), Learning Self-Efficacy ( r  = 0.30), Motivation ( r  = 0.25), and Self-Reflection ( r  = 0.35). The results indicate that there is a moderate positive relationship between Self-Reflection and three variables: Perfectionism ( r  = 0.35), Learning Self-Efficacy ( r  = 0.25), and Writing Proficiency ( r  = 0.30).

The existence of a positive association between Perfectionism and Learning Self-Efficacy is consistent with established psychological theories, suggesting that persons who strive for high standards may also possess a strong conviction in their ability to learn [ 56 ]. This implies that cultivating a favorable self-efficacy attitude may be a deliberate endeavor to improve learners’ perfectionistic inclinations, which may lead to increased academic achievement and subsequent economic production. The association between Motivation and learning self-efficacy aligns with motivational theories that underscore the interdependent connection between an individual’s belief in their learning capabilities and their will to attain mastery of a language [ 57 ]. Individuals who possess a strong motivation to study and have a confident confidence in their ability to succeed may have a greater likelihood of achieving success in both academic and professional domains. This, in turn, has the potential to contribute to the overall economic competitiveness of a country. The presence of a robust positive link between Perfectionism and Writing ability highlights a complex relationship between the pursuit of excellence and one’s natural ability in language. Individuals exhibiting perfectionist tendencies may possess a greater propensity for generating written work of superior quality, hence potentially yielding economic ramifications in the domains of proficient communication, scholastic success, and future job prospects. Moreover, the observed positive connection between Cultural Influences and many psychological dimensions underscores the complex interaction between cultural values and individual educational encounters. The comprehension and use of cultural influences might be advantageous in formulating educational policies and linguistic programs that are in harmony with the socio-cultural context, hence possibly cultivating a workforce with improved abilities in global communication.

Table  4 provides a thorough examination of the Convergent validity score, which assesses the validity of the measurement model by analyzing the associations between latent components and their respective indicators. The academic interpretation presented in this research greatly strengthens the methodological rigor and deepens our comprehension of the psychological notions being examined.

When analyzing Perfectionism, it is seen that the Multidimensional Scale (MS) and Personal Standards (PS) indicators have significant factor loadings, ranging from 0.85 to 0.90, respectively. The substantial factor loadings highlight a strong correlation between the underlying concept of Perfectionism and the observable indicators, thereby emphasizing their significant contributions to its assessment. The construct of learning self-efficacy may be accurately assessed using Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Scale (BSES) and Perceived Ability (PA), which have factor loadings ranging from 0.80 to 0.85. The strong loadings observed indicate that both indicators effectively measure the latent variable of Learning Self-Efficacy, which represents participants’ belief in their skills to learn a language. Motivation, which includes both intrinsic and extrinsic components, is effectively measured by the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) and the Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation (IEM) indicators, which have factor loadings ranging from 0.80 to 0.90. The substantial loadings observed in this study serve to emphasize the efficacy of the selected indicators in capturing the underlying concept of Motivation. The study habits, as assessed by the Time Management Scale (TMS) and Study Environment (SE), exhibit factor loadings within the acceptable range of 0.80 to 0.85. The observed loadings indicate that the constructs of TMS and SE are valid measures of the latent variable of Study Habits, providing insights into individuals’ abilities to manage their time and their preferences for study environments. Cultural influences, as measured by the Cultural Values Scale (CVS) and Cultural Background Impact (CBI), show factor loadings ranging from 0.75 to 0.88. Both variables provide substantial contributions to the measurement of Cultural Influences, highlighting the influence of cultural values and background on the psychological constructs of individuals. Self-reflection, as evaluated by the Reflective Learning Scale (RLS) and Metacognitive Awareness (MA), demonstrates effective measurement with factor loadings ranging from 0.88 to 0.92. The observed high loadings suggest that both the RLS and MA measures effectively capture the underlying concept of Self-Reflection, providing evidence of participants’ engagement in reflective learning activities and their knowledge of metacognitive processes. The assessment of writing proficiency is conducted using the Writing Proficiency Scale (WPS) and Writing Quality (WQ), which have consistently shown strong factor loadings ranging from 0.75 to 0.88. The obtained loadings provide support for the validity of WPS and WQ as indicators of the latent construct of Writing skills. They demonstrate that both measures accurately capture participants’ skill in writing and the quality of their written work.

The appropriateness of the model is further supported by the fit indices, namely the Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA). The model exhibits a satisfactory fit to the observed data, as shown by the CFI value of 0.96 and the RMSEA value of 0.06. The inclusion of these indices, in addition to the component loadings, serves to enhance the reliability and validity of the measurement model in accurately capturing the psychological aspects that are being examined. The findings of hypothesis testing are shown in Table  5 , offering significant insights into the complex interactions among several predictor factors and the outcome variable of Writing Proficiency. Each hypothesis examines the distinct impact of a psychological component on the acquisition of writing abilities in individuals learning EFL.

Hypothesis 1 proposes that there is a substantial positive correlation between Perfectionism and Writing Proficiency (WP). The obtained Beta coefficient of 0.30, accompanied by a p-value below 0.001, suggests that persons who possess high personal standards and tend to be self-critical are more likely to have exceptional writing skills. The discovery above is consistent with economic logic since perfectionism may result in a precise focus on particulars and a dedication to generating written material of exceptional quality, both of which are crucial characteristics in academic and professional environments [ 58 ]. The present study examines the impact of Learning Self-Efficacy (LSE) on Writing Proficiency. The findings indicate a statistically significant positive correlation (Beta = 0.25, p  = 0.005) between learners’ self-efficacy in language acquisition and their proficiency in written expression. This is consistent with logical thinking and supported hypothesis 2 , as persons with high self-efficacy tend to approach writing projects with a sense of confidence, dedicating their efforts and demonstrating persistence in order to get the best possible results [ 59 ]. The present study investigates the relationship between motivation and writing proficiency. The significant and strong positive correlation (β = 0.35, p  < 0.001) highlights the crucial influence of motivation on the development of writing abilities, as supported the hypothesis 3 . According to Rose et al. [ 60 ], persons who possess a strong sense of motivation are inclined to see writing ability as a highly advantageous talent that contributes to their academic and professional opportunities. Consequently, this perception drives them to consistently invest their efforts and actively participate in various writing endeavors. The hypothesis 4 examines the correlation between study habits and writing proficiency. The findings of this research demonstrate a statistically significant positive relationship (β = 0.20, p  = 0.01) between efficient study habits and better writing abilities, emphasizing the significance of the former in the development of the latter. According toAlshuraiaan [ 61 ], the implementation of effective study habits may enhance the utilization of time and resources, hence creating a favorable setting for the development of writing skills. This study H(5a) investigates the impact of cultural influences on writing proficiency. The observed connection is marginally significant (Beta = 0.15, p  = 0.05), suggesting that cultural factors may play a role in how a person learns to write. Cultural variables may affect how people approach writing, leading to the expression of different worldviews and modes of expression [ 62 ]. H(5b,c) performed research on how S-R affected students’ writing abilities. The results show that there is a positive and substantial correlation between the two variables (Beta = 0.28, p 0.001). This shows the significance of developing better writing abilities via reflective learning methodologies. Chung et al. [ 63 ] claim that self-reflective individuals may get a more complete understanding of their writing strengths and weaknesses. With this newfound insight, they may hone in on particular areas to improve their writing.

The research supports renowned theoretical frameworks in education, psychology, and language learning. Learning self-efficacy is seen through the prism of Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, which postulates that people’s perceptions of their skills impact the results of their learning. In addition, the investigation of motivation is based on the Self-Determination Theory. This theory highlights the importance of internal and external influences in guiding long-term involvement and competence. In order to decipher the complex nature of perfectionism, the research also uses Hewitt and Flett’s Psychological Perfectionism Theory. The discussion is strongly supported by these theoretical foundations, which provide a solid framework for understanding the results and how they fit into the larger body of knowledge in psychology and language acquisition.

In conclusion, the outcomes of the hypothesis testing provide valuable insights into the diverse array of variables that impact the writing skills of EFL learners. The economic justifications highlight the possible consequences of these psychological concepts on academic and professional achievement, emphasizing the need for focused treatments to improve writing abilities in language acquisition settings. The findings of a hierarchical regression analysis examining the potential mediation and moderation effects on the association between predictor factors and the outcome variable of Writing Proficiency are shown in Table  6 . The aforementioned multi-step approach offers significant contributions to the understanding of the intricate relationship between psychological dimensions, hence illuminating possible effects that may mediate or moderate this relationship.

In the first model, the incorporation of perfectionism as an intermediary variable in the association between predictor factors and Writing Proficiency results in a Beta coefficient of 0.25 ( p  = 0.005). The results of this study indicate that perfectionism serves as a partial mediator, implying that the influence of other predictor factors on Writing Proficiency is partially mediated by perfectionism. The observed mediation effect has substantial significance for both management and instructional contexts. The focus of treatments aiming at improving writing skills among EFL learners is to address perfectionistic inclinations [ 64 ]. Perfectionism, which entails an unwavering dedication to exceedingly high standards and intensified self-evaluation, has the potential to either help or impede achievements in academia and the professional realm. The comprehension of the mediating function of perfectionism is crucial for educators and intervention designers, as it highlights the need for specific tactics aimed at effectively managing and using this characteristic. On the one hand, persons who possess perfectionistic inclinations may have a strong motivation for achieving greatness. When this desire is well-directed, it may have a favorable impact on one’s writing skills. Conversely, an excessive inclination towards perfectionism may result in heightened levels of tension, anxiety, and a pervasive apprehension of failure, so hindering the process of language acquisition and hampering writing proficiency. Hence, it is essential to develop therapies that aim to achieve a harmonious equilibrium, promoting a constructive pursuit of excellence while mitigating the adverse effects associated with perfectionism [ 65 ]. The provision of resources for students to effectively control perfectionistic impulses, the cultivation of a development mindset, and the promotion of a supportive learning environment may together enhance the advantageous features of perfectionism while minimizing its potential disadvantages. In addition, it has been shown that persons who possess better management of perfectionism tend to exhibit higher levels of adaptability, resilience, and proficiency in communication within academic and professional environments. These attributes have been shown to have a favorable impact on their overall long-term achievements [ 66 ].

In the second model, the examination of the moderating impact of Cultural Influences demonstrates a statistically significant Beta coefficient of 0.15 ( p  = 0.01). The finding above suggests that the effect of predictor variables on Writing Proficiency is contingent upon cultural factors. This statement suggests that the cultural environment in which language acquisition occurs has a significant impact on the strength and characteristics of the connection between psychological factors and writing abilities. The phenomenon of cultural effects in the Chinese EFL learning environment is characterized by the moderation effect, which emphasizes the intricate interaction between individual psychological elements and the broader cultural background. According toAl-Takhaynehet al. [ 67 ], several factors, such as cultural values, social expectations, and educational standards, might serve as moderators, exerting an influence on the relationship between psychological dimensions and writing proficiency results. This observation has significant value for individuals in the field of education, policymakers, and curriculum designers who want to customize language learning interventions to align with the distinct cultural dynamics of a given setting. The significance of acknowledging cultural moderation highlights the need to use context-specific methodologies in language instruction. The effectiveness of a uniform technique may be limited since the influence of psychological elements on writing skills might differ depending on the cultural context of learners. In light of this, treatments that take into consideration cultural subtleties and include educational probably practises that are sensitive to culture would result in more precise and effective results [ 68 ]. In addition, recognizing the moderating influence of culture aids in cultivating a learning environment that is more inclusive and efficient, guaranteeing that language instruction corresponds with the cultural values and expectations of the students [ 69 ].

The third model provides a thorough examination of the mediation and moderation effects, specifically investigating the combined impact of Perfectionism and Cultural Influences on Writing Proficiency. The Beta value of 0.20 ( p  = 0.02) suggests a complex association in which both Perfectionism and Cultural Influences jointly contribute to the variability seen in Writing Proficiency. The finding above underscores the delicate relationship between internal psychological elements and exterior cultural influences in the realm of Chinese EFL education. The incorporation of mediation and moderation effects implies that the relationship between Perfectionism and Writing Proficiency is influenced not only by other psychological factors, as shown in Model 2, but also by cultural factors. This statement underscores the need for comprehensive and contextually appropriate treatments in the realm of language acquisition. The findings suggest that only targeting perfectionistic inclinations may not be enough; instead, treatments should take into account the broader cultural framework within which language acquisition takes place. The results above emphasize the need to use comprehensive strategies to improve writing skills. Language education programs and treatments need to acknowledge the interdependence between internal psychological processes, such as perfectionism, and exterior cultural factors [ 70 ]. The comprehensive comprehension of this subject matter may provide valuable insights for the creation of specific approaches that tackle individual psychological elements and cultural influences. As a result, this can lead to improved language learning results that are both more efficient and culturally attuned.

Theoretical and practical contributions

This research made significant advances in language learning, psychology, and education theory. This study examines perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, study habits, cultural effects, and self-reflection in Chinese EFL training. To extend and expand existing theoretical models, this research uses a complete theoretical framework to provide nuanced insights into complex relationships between many factors. This study adds significantly to the literature on cultural influences and language learning. This research examines how Chinese culture affects cognitive frameworks and written communication. This research contributes to cross-cultural language learning theories and examines global language education. Furthermore, mediating and regulating elements enhance the theoretical framework. Perfectionism and cultural influences help us grasp the intricate relationships between personality characteristics and writing abilities. By improving our knowledge of language learning, this study benefits psychology and education.

The implications for Chinese and foreign language instructors, policymakers, and practitioners are enormous. Writing ability prediction study may help tailor English language competency programs [ 71 ]. The study’s results may affect curriculum and instruction design. Parkhouse et al. [ 72 ] suggest customizing language courses to students’ perfectionism and cultures to boost classroom efficiency. Language training should emphasize reflection, study habits, and pupils’ innate desires [ 73 ]. This study may help inform culturally sensitive language education policies. Policymakers may tailor curricula to Chinese students by considering cultural considerations. This helps create evidence-based learning environment rules. This study’s theoretical and practical contributions enable a comprehensive and culturally sensitive second language teaching strategy. This study recognizes the link between psychological elements and cultural aspects and lays the groundwork for future EFL learning research and practice.

This study provides important insights that educators, policymakers, and practitioners may use in EFL education in China and other real-world language learning environments. In order to develop more effective treatments and teaching methods, it is essential to understand the substantial predictive impacts of factors including cultural influences, perfectionism, motivation, study habits, self-reflection, and learning self-efficacy on writing competence. Writing programs may be customized to help students overcome their perfectionist inclinations, build self-confidence, and inspire them to study via relevant activities. Using these findings, policymakers should push for changes to the curriculum that teach students to think critically and write with an awareness of cultural context and improve their language skills. By acknowledging the moderating effect of cultural factors on the link between predictors and writing abilities, language education practitioners may create treatments that include cultural components in writing training.

Conclusions and policy recommendations

This research looked at how learning to write in English as a second language is affected by both individual and societal influences. The findings shed light on the intricate relationships between variables, including perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, motivation, and cultural influences. In addition, this study aimed to delineate the mediating role of perfectionism and the moderating influence of cultural variables on the components that determine writing proficiency. These observations provide valuable contributions to the broader understanding of the many elements that impact the results of language acquisition. The following policy suggestions are proposed to facilitate a comprehensive and culturally aware approach to EFL education, promoting an atmosphere favorable to language learning and mastery, i.e.,

Academia must engage in collaborative efforts with educators in order to develop an EFL curriculum that effectively integrates culturally relevant subject matter and instructional approaches. The incorporation of indigenous cultural tales, literary works, and illustrative instances into language learning materials has the potential to augment students’ levels of involvement and motivation.

The implementation of professional development programs targeting cross-cultural competence and awareness is vital for EFL instructors. These programs have the potential to provide educators with the necessary skills to effectively negotiate varied cultural settings within the classroom setting and successfully modify teaching tactics to cater to the unique requirements of students from a wide range of cultural backgrounds.

Educational strategies need to prioritize the establishment of a conducive and all-encompassing learning milieu. Efforts aimed at fostering cultural interaction, facilitating open discourse, and cultivating mutual understanding among students have the potential to create a pleasant environment that enriches the language-learning process.

Governments may consider the examination of technological integration as a means to encourage virtual cultural interactions. The use of online platforms, virtual reality, and multimedia materials may provide students the opportunity to engage in immersive experiences, enabling them to connect with genuine cultural material that extends beyond the physical boundaries of the traditional classroom setting.

Officials need to contemplate the implementation of incentives or subsidies for language study abroad programs. Participating in immersive experiences in English-speaking nations may provide students with direct exposure to cultural subtleties and linguistic settings, therefore exerting a substantial influence on their language skills.

It is essential to foster further scholarly investigation into the convergence of cultural factors and the process of acquiring language skills. Academia needs to be updated on developing research results and use evidence-based strategies when formulating language education legislation.

Foster partnerships with local communities to establish language learning projects that transcend traditional classroom boundaries. Community involvement initiatives, language exchange initiatives, and extracurricular activities may provide supplementary avenues for students to actively participate in and augment their language proficiency within authentic contexts.

Study directions for subsequent research include delving more into aspects of English language competency beyond the current focus on writing ability in the Chinese EFL setting. Future studies can examine how Chinese EFL students’ comprehension, reading, listening, and verbal skills are fine-tuned.Subsequent investigations may also include the use of longitudinal methodologies in order to investigate the dynamic characteristics of the discovered connections. Moreover, the examination of particular cultural features and the exploration of therapies aimed at mitigating the possible adverse effects of perfectionism on language acquisition provide attractive areas for future research. These efforts have the potential to enhance language instruction practices by making them more focused and efficient.

Data availability

Data will be made available upon request to corresponding author.

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Tao, Y., Yu, J. Cultural threads in writing mastery: a structural analysis of perfectionism, learning self-efficacy, and motivation as mediated by self-reflection in Chinese EFL learners. BMC Psychol 12 , 80 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01572-5

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