Structure for Your Literature Review

Literature reviews tend to have a three-part structure: An introduction, the body of the literature review, and a conclusion.

Descriptive Title

A descriptive statement about your project.

• Example: Treating Depression through Online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Increasing Access to Mental Health Care in Underserved Areas

Introduction

The introduction to a literature review should do the following:

• Describe the overall topic of the literature review, foregrounding the problem you are trying to address and/or the research question you are trying to explore.
• Indicate why this issue is of importance to the field or of interest to you.
• Identify the key themes/categories/topics you’ll be exploring in your literature review.

Background

Depending upon your audience, you may need to provide contextual background information before diving into the themes/categories/topics. For example, because my Digital Curation as Technical Communication literature review was written digital rhetoric and technical communication specialists rather than library science specialists, I provided a background section in which I defined digital curation and provided an overview of why I thought digital rhetoricians and technical communicators should be interested in digital curation.

If you believe your focused, specific audience will need background information to understand or better understand the main body of your literature review, include a background section. If you don’t think they need one, skip the background section.

Use headers as you believe appropriate.

Body

The body of your literature review will be broken up into sections determined by your chosen themes/categories/topics. Each section should have its own header, and you may choose to organize a section into subsections, using subheaders.

Each section should start with its own section introduction — provide an overview of the section that:

• defines the theme/category/topic of the section
• describes the connection of the theme/category/topic to the literature review’s overall topic/problem/research question
• previews the sub-issues to be discussed in the section.

As you write each section, remember:

• Sections can be more than one paragraph. In fact, in most cases your sections should be multiple paragraphs. (Remember to develop paragraphs using the P.I.E. principle. Use topic sentences and transitions to compare, contrast, and connect your sources.)
• In each section, you want to weave your sources together by issue rather than summarizing each source in turn. You are synthesizing your information.
• Remember to analyze and interpret your sources rather than simply summarize and quote them. Explain what they mean and why you think your readers should know about them in order to better understand address the problem or research question.

Repeat this process for each of your sections.

Be Careful about Unintentional Plagiarism

Avoid direct quotations and use summary and paraphrase instead. This strategy can make certain you have read your sources carefully and understand their key points.

• REGARDLESS OF HOW YOU INTEGRATE A SOURCE, MAKE SURE YOU MARK YOUR BOUNDARIES! Your reader should have no difficulty recognizing where your idea ends and the source’s begins. Use an introductory lead-in (signaling phrase) and an in-text citation to mark the boundaries between your ideas and those of your source.

Conclusion

The conclusion should revisit your key purpose in writing the literature review and end with your conclusions about the research, questions you may have, and/or recommendations you can now make based on your review.