This guide is for any student, staff member, or faculty member here at Oswego, but we think it will be most useful to upper level undergraduate students and graduate students!
We recommend you ask your professor what kind of literature review they'd like you to complete (see information about types of literature reviews below).
A literature review is a summary of important research on a particular topic.
A literature review focuses on drawing connections between research studies, which means:
The act of drawing connections is what makes a literature review different from an annotated bibliography.
This video provides a great overview of literature reviews - it's about 10 minutes long:
There are three common types of literature reviews:
Published articles. Here's an example:
Anderson, M. (2017). Transformational leadership in education: A review of existing literature. International Social Science Review, 93(1), 1-13. Retrieved from https://ir.ung.edu/work/sc/d2047fe4-a6b5-4f53-92ea-6d51926380ac
As an introduction to other types of published articles. This type of literature review is common when someone is trying to build on previous research, or address gaps in the research. Look at the 2nd & 3rd paragraphs of this article:
Ip, H. H., Wong, S. W., Chan, D. F., Byrne, J., Li, C. r., Yuan, V. S., & ... Wong, J. Y. (2018). Enhance emotional and social adaptation skills for children with autism spectrum disorder: A virtual reality enabled approach. Computers & Education, 117, 1-15. Retrieved from https://login.ezproxy.oswego.edu/login?url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131517302142?via%3Dihub
An unpublished paper. The assignment you're doing for this class falls into this category. Here are a few other examples of student literature reviews, from students at the University of West Florida:
