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College of Education

This guide provides a brief overview of resources available through the University Libraries. Specialized Guides are available for subdisciplines held within the College of Education.

Steps in a Literature Review

This page was developed to help users understand what a literature review was and to understand what steps are involved in completing a Literature Review. In addition, there are several boxes that refer you to materials that could be useful while building a Literature Review.  Particularly the flow diagram displayed below clearly shows the process.

Basic Steps: 

  1. Define the Research Question
  2. Plan the Review 
    • where will you search?
    • which databases?
    • what time frame?
    • what years included?
    • what keywords?
    • what subject terms?
    • what will you not search, if anything?
  3. Research the Literature
  4. Analysis the Gathered Items
  5. Write the Review

PRISMA

An organization dedicated to  evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. To learn more see their website at http://www.prisma-statement.org/. However, Prisma suggests citing one of their papers and therefore please see https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000097. 

The Flow Diagram is in picture format in the box to the right. 

The checklist offer is useful as you start the process of putting the data together - see below

What is a Literature Review

A Literature Review is the gathering of peer-review scholarly journal articles, books, dissertations, and thesis relevant to a particular topic, area of research, or theory, that provides a summary and critical evaluation of each item. The purpose is to offer an overview of significant literature published on a topic.

Literature Reviews can be one step in the process of writing peer-reviewed scholarly articles or can be a systematic review that stands alone. 

Literature Review

  • Critiques and summarizes a body of literature
  • Draws conclusions about the topic
  • Identifies gaps or inconsistencies in the literature
  • Requires a sufficiently focused research question
  • Shows command of the subject area and understanding of the problem
  • Brings the reader up-to-date with current literature on a topic
  • Justification for future research in the area

Systematic Literature Review

  • More rigorous and well-defined method described in detail
  • Details the time frame within which the literature was selected
  • Details the methods used to evaluate and synthesize findings of the primary research in question

Meta-analysis

  • A form of systematic review
  • Takes findings from several studies on the same subject and analyzes them using standardized statistical procedures
  • Integrates findings from a large body of quantitative findings to enhance understanding
  • Detects patterns and relationships

Meta-synthesis

  • A form of systematic
  • Non-statistical technique
  • Integrates, evaluates and interprets findings of multiple qualitative research studies
  • Involves analyzing and synthesizing key elements
  • Goal: transformative of the individual findings into new conceptualizations and interpretations