Literature

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A literature review is a carefully crafted examination of credible literature relevant to your focus topic. A literature review determines how the resources you found:

• Relate to and are relevant to your purpose
• Enable you to fulfill your purpose by offering different perspectives and insights to the purpose you identified
• Are similar to or different from one another
• Create a solid, evidence-based argument to support the purpose of your study
• Have implications for social change
• Stimulate new questions for future research
• Offer resources (included in the reference list) you can consult in your study

Discovering what others have produced and organizing and synthesizing this information into a coherent picture will allow you to place your own research interests into the larger context. A literature review should not be a mere summary of your articles but instead should relate to how the literature supports your study’s focus.