Literature Search

A literature review is one of the most important — and most stressful — pieces of academic writing you’ll do. Whether it’s a chapter in your dissertation, the opening of a journal paper, or a standalone assignment, the goal is the same: to map what’s already known about your topic, show where the gaps are, and position your own research within that conversation.

This guide walks through every step, from choosing a research question to formatting your final bibliography. It covers narrative, systematic, scoping, and meta-analytic reviews, with a worked example you can follow along with. It also shows where AI tools like SciSpace fit into the workflow — and, just as importantly, where they don’t.

A literature review is a critical summary of the existing research on a specific topic. It’s not a book report on each paper you’ve read. It’s an organized synthesis — grouping studies by theme, methodology, or argument — that shows readers (and your supervisor or peer reviewers) that you understand the state of the field and have identified a meaningful place for your own contribution.

The single most common reason literature reviews get marked down is “serial summarizing” — listing what each author did, one after the other, with no overall argument. Synthesis is the opposite: you organize your sources around ideas, not around authors.

For example, instead of writing “Smith (2019) found X. Then Jones (2021) found Y. Then Patel (2023) found Z,” a synthesizing version reads: “Researchers broadly agree that X is true (Smith, 2019; Patel, 2023), though some studies using smaller samples have reported the opposite (Jones, 2021).”

You’ll know you’re synthesizing when your paragraphs are anchored around concepts (“Researchers disagree about the role of cortisol…”) rather than around papers (“In Smith’s 2019 study…”).