Literature Reviews: A Research Guide

Recent literature reviews on your topic can save you time and provide useful background, as well as citing important studies for you to read. These sources also give you a sense of how you might organize your own literature review. Read to discover: 

• how the definition of the topic has developed and changed
• what are the key works and who are the key theorists
• what methodologies have generally been used for research in this area
• what components of the topic have been singled out for special attention and why
• how the different studies are related
• knowledge gaps, controversies, areas of disagreement between experts, and future directions for research

Finding Literature reviews

• Some journals  focus specifically on publishing literature reviews.  One example is the Annual Reviews series of journals in life, physical and social sciences. Ask your subject librarian for titles of 'review' journals in your discipline. 
• Most academic journals occasionally publish literature reviews. Search a subject database for reviews in your discipline, or Google Scholar, Scopus or Web of Science to find literature across disciplines. Many of these databases and search engines have options to limit to reviews. If you don't see this option, just add "literature review" to your search terms. 

​Dissertations/theses

Because literature reviews are a required component of theses and dissertations, try searching a database like Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global to find a recent one related to your field. 

PRISM, UofC's institutional repository, has a Graduate Studies section where you can find previously published UofC theses and dissertations. You can search by topic keyword, or by supervisor if you want to look at published theses written by your supervisor's previous students, and how they approached the literature review.