How to Write a Scientific Literature Review: A Comprehensive Guide

A scientific literature review is a critical summary and assessment of the current research on a focused topic. Literature reviews are a key step in the research process, helping establish context for new studies and identifying gaps to explore. Writing an effective literature review requires strong information literacy, synthesis skills, and attention to detail. Emerging technologies will revolutionize this process, but most technologies can enhance your skills, which makes getting these basics down all the more important.

This comprehensive guide outlines proven techniques for efficiently researching, evaluating, organizing, writing, and polishing a rigorous scientific literature review. Follow these best practices to craft an insightful review that situates your work within the existing body of knowledge.

Choosing an Impactful Literature Review Topic

The first step is selecting a focused topic and research question. Your topic should be:

• Narrow enough to be manageable – Avoid excessively broad topics that would require reviewing thousands of papers. Target a well-defined research problem.
• Broad enough to have significance – The topic should have real-world relevance and connections to important issues in your field.
• Of interest to you – Reviewing literature on a topic you find intriguing will make the process engaging. Passion fuels the work.
• Built on existing knowledge – Choose a topic with an established core of literature to summarize and analyze. Avoid brand-new topics with minimal prior research.

Take time to brainstorm ideas, looking for gaps in current knowledge to explore. Many literature reviews emerge from themes uncovered during a comprehensive scholarly literature search on a general area of study.

Conducting a Rigorous Literature Search

With a defined topic, begin your literature search to uncover existing knowledge. Key steps include:

• Consult bibliographic databases– Search scholarly databases like PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar for potentially relevant articles on your topic.
• Employ advanced search strategies – Use boolean operators, nesting, and wildcards to construct targeted searches. Create alerts for new publications.
• Search additional sources – Look beyond journal articles alone. Search library catalogs, conference proceedings, dissertations, white papers, and pre-print archives.
• Review reference lists – Scan the reference lists and bibliographies in articles closely related to your topic for additional sources.
• Apply inclusion criteria – Develop clear criteria for which literature to include in your review based on relevance and quality.
• Document your process – Keep detailed notes on searches, including tools used, search strategies, and inclusion criteria.

A rigorous literature search demands a systematic, multifaceted approach. Strive for comprehensive coverage without getting sidetracked by peripheral resources.

Evaluating Literature Relevance and Quality

As you gather sources, evaluate each to determine its relevance and validity for inclusion in your review. Key factors to assess include:

• Topic relevance – How closely does the literature address your specific research question and fit into the scope of your review?
• Date of publication – For rapidly evolving fields, focus on most recent contributions. But seminal historical studies may still warrant inclusion.
• Type of study – Prioritize high-quality studies using rigorous quantitative or qualitative methods. Be cautious about including magazine articles, opinion pieces, and press releases.
• Author credentials – Favor articles by researchers with strong academic credentials and reputations in their subfield. But be open to new authors making contributions.
• Journal reputation – Seek out articles published in well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals with high impact factors within the discipline.
• Research quality – Critically evaluate the literature’s research questions, study design, sampling approach, variables, analysis, and argumentation.
• Statistical significance – For quantitative studies, inspect measures of statistical significance like p-values to assess the certainty of findings.

Take an analytical, data-driven approach to determining the literature’s significance and credibility to include in your review. Avoid relying on biases or intuition.

Crafting Your Literature Review

With a relevant collection of sources identified, you’re ready to start writing. Most literature reviews follow a standard structure:

Introduction

• Present the research problem or area you are investigating and explain its significance.
• State the purpose and scope of your literature review.
• Describe your literature search and selection process.
• Give an overview of the organizational structure.

Body

• Summarize individual sources and important findings on your topic. Synthesize major themes.
• Organize content into logical sections by a theme like sub-topic, chronology, source type, methodology, or other frameworks.
• Compare and contrast different research findings and theories on the same aspects of your topic.
• Identify major gaps, inconsistencies, or controversies in the existing literature to highlight areas for future study.

Conclusion

• Summarize the current state of knowledge on the topic based on the literature analyzed.
• Note any overall trends, surprises, or limitations.
• Discuss key implications for future research and practice.
• Conclude by tying back to your original research aims and question(s).

Aim for clarity, concision, and flow in your writing. Cite sources thoroughly. Follow style and formatting guidelines for academic reviews in your discipline.

Revising and Refining Your Literature Review

With your first draft complete, enter the revision process:

• Solicit feedback – Ask colleagues and advisors to review your literature review and offer constructive critiques.
• Verify content – Double-check that you accurately convey the data, findings, and conclusions from source material.
• Refine organization – Based on feedback, consider modifying the structure to enhance flow and transitions.
• Check style – Review your writing style, tone, and word choice. Avoid excessive jargon. Stick to a formal academic style.
• Polish grammar and mechanics – Carefully proofread for any lingering spelling, punctuation, or formatting issues.
• Update references – Incorporate any newly published literature. Reassess sources for continued relevance.

Revising is about refining your literature review to craft the clearest, most accurate, and polished scholarly analysis possible.

Key Takeaways for Writing an Impactful Literature Review

Follow these best practices when writing your next literature review:

• Choose a focused, significant topic in your field
• Take a systematic approach to the literature search
• Critically appraise sources for quality and relevance
• Synthesize sources into key themes and highlights
• Identify literature gaps to frame research questions
• Adhere to disciplinary writing conventions
• Solicit feedback from peers and mentors

Writing an effective scientific literature review takes time and diligent effort; new technologies can help. But the payoff is an insightful scholarly analysis that situates your original research within the existing body of knowledge. By following the steps in this guide, you can craft literature reviews that demonstrate your command of the subject matter and contribute to the advancement of science.

FAQ on writing literature reviews:

Does a literature review have an abstract?

No, literature reviews do not typically contain abstracts. Abstracts are used in primary research articles to summarize the purpose, methods, results, and conclusions. Literature reviews summarize and synthesize the existing research literature on a topic, rather than reporting new primary research. Therefore, an abstract is not needed. The introduction section of a lit review serves the purpose of orienting the reader to the scope and organization of the review.

How to organize a literature review?

There are a few main ways to organize the body of a literature review:

• Chronologically – Discuss the research in order of when it was published. This works well for topics with a clear progression of studies.
• Thematically – Divide content into subsections based on themes or categories that emerged from your analysis. This helps compare findings on specific aspects of the topic.
• Methodologically – Group studies by their research design or method, such as qualitative vs. quantitative. Allows comparing insights derived from different approaches.
• Conceptually – Organize by key theories, models, concepts, or frameworks guiding the research. Lets you contrast different conceptual perspectives.

Choose the structure that allows you to most logically synthesize sources and key learnings for your topic.

How to cite in a literature review?

To cite sources in a literature review, use the standard citation style guide for your field or as specified by your instructor/journal. For example:

• APA style for education, psychology, and other social sciences.
• MLA style for literature, arts, and humanities.
• AMA style for medicine, health, and biological sciences.
• Chicago style for business, history, and fine arts.

In the body text, cite sources using in-text citations like (Smith, 2022). At the end include a References or Works Cited list with full bibliographic information for each source. Proper citations allow readers to locate your source material.