How to Write a Literature Review for a Dissertation

This is a guest article written by our colleague Dr. Steve Tippins from Beyond PhD Coaching.

Today we’re going to talk about writing your dissertation’s literature review. This is where you give the background of the literature showing the reader you understand where your topic came from. It’s also where you develop your gap in the literature, which gives you the basis for doing your study. 

There are several sections in the Literature Review.

Introduction

Where do we start? Well, where we start every single chapter: with an introduction. Give the reader a little background on what you’re doing, restate the topic, problem statement, and purpose statement. You may want to include the questions you’re going to be asking. 

Literature Review Process, or Literature Search Strategy

Next is a section which is sometimes called the literature review process or the literature search strategy. It answers the question, how did you find your literature? This is a section where you explain the process you went through to find your literature. What databases did you search? What key terms did you use? This lets the reader know that you did a fairly exhaustive search of what’s going on. 

Theoretical or Conceptual Framework

Next is your theoretical or conceptual framework. You touched on this in chapter one, but this is where you really go deep into it. If you’re using something like go critical race theory, you talk about its origins and how it’s being used now. This section is about four or five pages. 

Literature Review

Next, the real meat of your chapter two: the literature review of your topic. This is where you show the reader you really understand the topic inside and out. 

The idea in your literature review is to go from broad to narrow. It’s also best to follow a chronological order when possible. Start with the breadth of the topic and narrow it down as close as you can to your field and your area. Bring the reader to the gap in the literature and the specific questions you’re asking. 

Steps for Conducting a Literature Review

How do you conduct a literature review? You’re not the first to ask. Borg, Gall, and Borg (1996) broke down Ogawa and Malen’s (1991) method for conducting a literature review into the eight steps. Here is a summary:

1. Create an audit trail.
2. Define the focus of the review. 
3. Search for relevant literature. 
4. Classify the documents. 
5. Create summary databases.
6. Identify constructs and hypothesized causal linkages. 
7. Search for contrary findings and rival interpretations. 
8. Use colleagues or informants to corroborate findings. 

Traps of the Literature Review Section

One thing to be careful of is something that many people call a string of pearls. What they mean is this: don’t just cite Jones and then cite Smith and then cite Robinson and then cite Rabinsky and then go to the next chapter. We want to see that you understand where Jones and Smith and Rabinsky and others fit in the context of the whole, where they agree, and where they disagree. That way, you are synthesizing the literature, not just regurgitating it.

There are other traps as well. Gall, Borg, and Gall (1996) claimed that the most frequent mistakes made in reviewing the literature are that the researcher: 

1. does not clearly relate the findings of the literature review to the researcher’s own study; 
2. does not take sufficient time to define the best descriptors and identify the best sources to use in review literature related to one’s topic; 
3.  relies on secondary sources rather than on primary sources in reviewing the literature; 
4. uncritically accepts another researcher’s findings and interpretations as valid, rather than examining critically all aspects of the research design and analysis; 
5. does not report the search procedures that were used in the literature review; 
6. reports isolated statistical results rather than synthesizing them by chi-square or meta-analytic methods; and 
7. does not consider contrary findings and alternative interpretations in synthesizing quantitative literature. (pp. 161-162) 

Summary Section

Finish your literature review with a summary. Bring it all together. Summaries in chapter two can be longer than other chapters because you’re summarizing a whole bunch of literature. 

How Long Should Your Literature Review Be?

Some schools say your literature review should be 30 to 50 pages. The longest one I ever saw was 280 pages – a little bit too long. The shortest one I ever saw was eight pages –  a little bit too short. Find a balance and let your committee know that you really understand the topic and have covered the breadth of the literature.