What is a Literature Review?
What is a literature review and how do I determine if one is needed?
A literature review is a systematic approach to locating, reviewing, and evaluating the published work and work in progress of scholars, researchers, and practitioners on a given topic.
Literature reviews are done for many reasons and situations.
Here's a short list:
to learn about a field of study
to understand current knowledge on a subject
to formulate questions and identify a research problem
to focus the purpose of one's research
to contribute new knowledge to a field
personal knowledge
intellectual curiosity
to prepare for architectural program writing
academic degrees
grant applications
proposal writing
academic research
planning
funding
Sources to use for literature review:
Online catalogs of local, regional and special libraries
meta-catalogs such as worldcat.org, artlibraries.net or RIBA
subject-specific online article databases (such as Art Full Text, Avery Index, etc)
works cited in scholarly books and articles
print bibliographies
the internet-locate major nonprofit, university, and government websites
search google scholar to locate gray literature & referenced citations
trade and scholarly publishers
Who to ask for guidance:
professors & thesis committee members
experts and practitioners in one's field
librarians
colleagues
Tutorial
Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students
Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students by North Carolina State University Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Readings
Further reading on literature reviews
Conducting Research Literature Reviews: from the internet to paper
Doing a Literature Review: releasing the social science imagination
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