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The Literature Review is a critical look at the existing research that is significant to the work that you are carrying out.  It is NOT a summary of all the sources you consulted.  It is NOT recording a list of consulted work or to show off how many sources you did consult!  The Literature Review is a critical and careful examination of past studies and theories. The Literature Review must evaluate the work, show the relationships between different works, and show how it relates to your work.

Read with a purpose: you need to summarize the work you read but you must also decide which ideas or information are important to your research (so you can emphasize them), and which are less important and can be covered briefly or left out of your review.

You should also look for the major concepts, conclusions, theories, arguments, and methodologies that underlie the work, and look for similarities and differences with closely related work. This is difficult when you first start reading, but should become easier the more you read in your area.

Questions to Consider:

1. For each study, what are the objectives, sample methodology, and highlights of the findings?

2. How many studies are doing similar things in terms of sample and methods used?  Are their findings consistent?

3. Are their methods of data collection and analysis valid and reliable?

4. What are the issues and problems that still need to be researched or identified or justified further?

Write with a purpose: your aim should be to evaluate and show relationships between the work already done (Is Researcher Y's theory more convincing than Researcher X's? Did Researcher X build on the work of Researcher Y?) and between this work and your own. In order to do this effectively you should carefully plan how you are going to organize your work.

Use Social Science Citation Index to see if your articles are cited elsewhere.  You can also see a list of cited references to articles from a basic word search.  This is very useful for the literature review.