What’s a Literature Review? Definition by Negation

Sometimes it is easier to begin to understand what something is by first establishing what it is not.

The literature review is not a disjointed collection of observations about the scholarship you read. It can be tempting to just write the literature review using what you already crafted for your annotated bibliographies. While that certainly can be one strategy to start the literature review, this chapter of your dissertation should be thoughtfully crafted. You should intentionally organize the sources to draw connections between and among the research you have collected and share observations that are reinforced by multiple sources from your research.

The literature review is not simply a summary of all sources you found while you were researching. While you do need to accurately reflect the content of the sources you have collected, you do not need to retell your reader the source in detail. The skill of summary is used to affirm that you did the research and know the sources well by providing key insights relevant to your research. Remember that a dissertation is entering a scholarly conversation. Your readers can find and summarize the source for themselves, and may already know the source well.

The literature review is not a persuasive argument. The literature review is designed to present a selected body of knowledge on a topic. Your research will most likely reveal that there are contradictions or that there is not agreement across all research. While you most certainly will make claims about the sources you read and will present the connections between and among the sources you identified, you are not writing a persuasive paper that builds towards a conclusive claim. Instead, you are establishing the scholarly context that focuses on your scholarly interest. That means that your writing can and should provide studies that present seemingly contradictory results. It is also important that you are mindful of your bias as you work through your research and draft the literature review. You are not building a case for your own research, but striving to objectively report key concepts, connections, and differences in a body of research.

If we consider first what a literature review is not, it becomes clear what a literature review is.

A literature review is a thoughtfully and carefully crafted essay that leverages accurate representations of the sources you have curated to deepen our understanding of themes in the research and establish the gap your research will explore.

Where Do You Begin?

It is best to begin with what you already know. You may have collected research over several weeks. You may have even set aside an article or resource in your coursework that you encountered in a previous course several months or even over a year ago. Now that you have identified a core set of resources that will be used to frame the academic conversation you are interested in, re-read your notes on each source. As you re-read, re-evaluate the sources you have kept and then begin to organize your research.

Evaluation

First, take a moment to evaluate the sources you have curated. Are there sources that are not as familiar to you? Perhaps your notes are not helping you recall the source or you are not sure why you kept this source to use in your literature review. If that is the case, it is a good idea to re-read that entire source. Take the time to critically evaluate the source and determine its appropriateness. Remember that you can and should include sources that present alternate perspectives or solutions, so if you do not agree with the source, that is not a valid reason to exclude it from your literature review. The more important question to ask as you re-read the source is, “how does this source contribute to the topic I am interested in?”

How Do You Find the Gap?

As you read your research, be mindful of the gap or gaps you might identify and save these ideas for chapter one of your dissertation. Remember, that the gap is what you want to research and focus on for your dissertation. It is the point in the academic conversation that has not yet been researched or researched thoroughly. You will not use this gap to transform your literature review into a persuasive argument, but it is in writing your literature review that you most often identify the gap you will explore with your dissertation.

Perhaps the best way to understand identifying the gap is by reading about another (admittedly imaginary) student’s experience.

This anecdote is illustrated in the “Finding the Gap” image. This infographic was generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT (2025) based on user-authored content and instructional prompts and is used with permission.

Organizing Your Research

Your gap is important as it will frame your research study, but the literature review is not a persuasive essay to make a case that the gap exists. Instead, the literature review should present the body of research you have reviewed as objectively as possible. The gap you have identified is introduced and developed in Chapter One.

It is important, then, that you thoughtfully plan out how you will logically present your research to your reader (Reid & Kowalski, 1996). You may have even started to organize your sources as you found them or as you just completed the process of re-reading your notes. You may have made observations that several articles all referred to one key source or you may have decided that several sources intentionally built upon each other’s research. There are many different structural moves you can leverage to help organize the sources you have found. These structures can be used exclusively or in any combination as you develop your literature review. We’ll highlight the most common organizing structures in a literature review., but this chapter does not present an exhaustive list of rhetorical moves. The key is that you develop an organizing structure that will help your reader see the connections and limitations of the sources you have included in your literature review.

Chronological

A chronological organization of sources helps if you are interested in or observed that scholarship evolved over time. Thinking through the sources in chronological order can help you see a pattern of development of ideas over time. It may also trace how one scholar’s approach to a concept has evolved over time. Additionally, some scholars engage in an academic conversation with one another through their articles. When scholars engage in such a debate, they typically call out the other source explicitly in the title or opening paragraphs of their research. Considering such public debates in chronological order can be useful.

Perhaps there is even a specific event that impacted what was researched before and what was researched after. For example, after the response to the COVID-19 pandemic closed many schools, colleges, and universities, the language around distance learning shifted to distinguish “remote learning”, what happened during the pandemic, from best practices in “online learning” or “distance learning”. This introduction of a new concept was pivotal in creating a space for scholars in online learning to explore what happened to teaching and learning when all classes were quickly moved online without connecting those good, bad, and indifferent practices to what research had already established as best practices in teaching and learning online. Making note of that shift and perhaps even tracking the continued or discontinued use of the term “remote learning” might be an important chronology to highlight in your literature review.

Definitions

Academic research tends to take the time to define its terminology. Researchers adopt widely accepted terms like urban, rural, public, and private, to name a few, to narrow the scope of their research. They may also use terms specific to a profession, e.g. writing tutors, peer tutors, embedded tutors, or supplemental Instruction leaders. These terms and how the authors define them are more than just context for you. You could use these terms to help organize your sources so that all sources that discuss academic support using the same terms or discuss a research study at similar types of institutions are explored together. You may even find it helpful to compare and contrast the findings of studies that focused on different definitions. How do the findings of studies that looked at urban public institutions compare and contrast to those that completed the same or a similar study at rural private institutions? Or how do studies that focus on ethics in tutor training compare and contrast when some focused on writing tutors and others focused on peer tutors in other subjects. As you read through your notes, pay attention to how sources define key terms. Analyze the key terms used to determine if such definitions yield a useful way to organize your sources.

Methodology

As you read through your notes, consider how the types of studies you have found to include in your research advance the conversation. Researchers tend to be quite explicit in their discussion of their research and will tell you whether they completed a qualitative, quantitative, or mixed method research study. The methodology they selected is going to yield a different type of study and different information to share in their study. Quantitative methods will focus on statistical analysis while qualitative analysis will focus on an analysis of interviews and/or focus groups. First consider the types of studies you have found. Were they all qualitative or quantitative? If so, is that truly a reflection of the scholarship or did you exclude sources that maybe you should go back and reconsider? Did the different types of studies come to similar conclusions or were their conclusions divergent? It may then be helpful to look at all the sources that use the same methodology collectively before looking at the body of research as a whole.

Pros and Cons

Sometimes research seeks to understand the strengths and weaknesses of a given topic. Research on the impacts of Open Educational Resources (OER) may yield positives like reduced cost, ease of integration into LMS, and ability for faculty to craft text to their course as well as negatives like technical challenges to consider, loss of physical course resources, and additional work for faculty to integrate into the course design (Lin, 2019). A researcher who follows Lin’s work may decide to focus on just one factor and explore that strength or weaknesses or may recreate the study and find a new list of pros and cons. Research might even explore one specific identified and well-established strength (i.e. best practice) or weakness (i.e. challenge) in the body of research.

When researchers either begin their study exploring a strength or weaknesses or share their results as strengths and weaknesses, you can use that information to organize your sources. Ask if the strengths and weaknesses listed across sources engaging in the same research are the same? Are there differences that need to be highlighted? If a study focuses on one perceived strength or weakness, how does that study advance what we already knew about a topic and inform the research moving forward? Does an article present the findings by recreating the same research study? Do those findings identify the same results, strengths and weaknesses? Answering these questions can help you organize your research to explore the nuances between and among sources on the same topic.

Theoretical Framework or Theoretical Perspective

You may find that several of the sources use the same theoretical framework or theoretical perspective, which will be covered in a later chapter. A theoretical framework is a formal theory or model drawn from scholarly literature used to explain and interpret the relationships between variables in a quantitative study (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). Two common examples would be Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986) or Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory (Vygotsky, 1978). A theoretical perspective is a much broader philosophy or worldview that underpins a qualitative study. For example, a study might be rooted in a constructivist perspective, which establishes the researcher’s supposition that reality is socially constructed and that knowledge is subjective based on interaction or context (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

When you start to recognize a theme or pattern in a body of research, you may want to group sources together by those that use the same theoretical framework or theoretical perspective. Such a grouping might reveal that all sources agree or come to the same findings using the frame or that there is a difference in what the frames reveal about the topic. It may even be helpful to consider the different research approaches or which research approaches are not present and the different populations that are studied through a theoretical lens.

Themes

Reading through your notes might reveal or reinforce a theme in the research. Themes should stand out prominently and are more than just your research focus. For example, if your research is on retention of first-generation college students, you may find that there is a theme in several sources that trace the experiences of student athletes or several sources explore the role of service learning projects. These themes then are elements that you should explore individually first and then determine if there are any relevant connections between the sources that need to be explored in your literature review.

How Do You Write the Literature Review?

Now that you have organized your notes you are ready to begin writing your literature review. In fact, the process of organizing your notes probably revealed how you might organize your literature review into specific sections. In essence, the strategies you used to organize your research become the structure of your literature review. These organizational strategies guide how you use the sources so that you are not merely writing individual summaries of each source, but intentionally guiding the reader in understanding how these sources interact with one another to create a body of scholarship.

Presenting summaries is one pitfall that some dissertation writers fall into. The other pitfall is the attempt to connect every article they read to every theme or organizing schema. Scouring the articles to find the connections between and among all of them is not a good use of your time. Sometimes the only connection across all of the sources is the broad topic. Sources that approach the topic of retention through the lens of Tinto’s Theory of Student Persistence (Tinto, 1975) may not intersect with those sources that use Astin’s Student Involvement Theory (Astin, 1984). Instead of trying to force a connection across all of the sources, make sure that you are referencing and discussing each source at least once in your literature review. You may need to use two or more organizational strategies to make sure that all of your sources are thoughtfully and intentionally incorporated into the literature review.

It can be useful to create an outline from your organized notes. The outline can be a simple sketch of headings based on how you grouped your sources and all of the relevant sources for that section. Or, it can be a more formal outline that uses letters and numbers to track headings, claims, and supporting details. Taking the time to transform your notes into an outline helps to structure your literature review. It becomes easier to see, for example, that the findings in the quantitative research justify the need for the qualitative research and therefore those two sections should follow that order. Plus, taking the time to include the authors or titles of the works to include in each section makes sure you do not miss a source you want to include in your literature review.

Helpful Writing Tips

• The literature review is a formal paper. It is important to follow formal Standard Edited American English conventions and to sparingly use contractions, first-person pronouns (e.g., say “the researcher recorded” instead of “I recorded”), and colloquialisms.
• It is ok if a source is not in every section of your literature review as long as every source is in at least one section. Additionally, each section should have a minimum of two sources.
• Spread the writing out over several days. You may want to write one section or two related sections in a day, but it may be overwhelming to write the entire literature review in one sitting.
• Write the introduction and conclusion after the body sections are completed. Once you have the body sections, it will be far easier to write an introduction to tell us about the trends in the research you plan to discuss and a conclusion that summarizes the research you presented.
• Focus on using an informative tone. You are presenting the information from the sources. While you can and should evaluate the sources and their claims, you should not use the evaluation to build your own argument.
• While you will identify and explain claims in your literature review chapter, you are not writing a persuasive essay to convince your reader that you are correct or that your interpretation is the only possible interpretation.
• The literature review should follow the most current APA citation formats for both in-text and Reference Page entries. If you are unsure how to cite a source, please work with a Reference Librarian, your mentor, or your Dissertation I instructor.

Incorporating AI Responsibly: Writing the Literature Review

Working Smarter

The literature review is the first element of your dissertation that you are writing. It will likely be a 20 to 40 page paper that examines the sources you have found in your research. While your mentor and readers will provide feedback on your writing, the document you share with them should be carefully proofread to eliminate common grammatical errors. The built-in spelling and grammar check in your word processing program or an online tool like Grammarly can be a helpful solution to copy editing your literature review. Be careful, though, that you do not blindly accept the suggested changes. Also, there are functions within some proofreading tools that go beyond grammar and punctuation checks. These functions may summarize the text you have written or suggest organizing structures for your writing, go beyond accepted AI copyediting for the purposes of a Saint Peter’s University dissertation.

Working Harder

It can be tempting to allow an AI tool like Chat GPT or even Magic School AI mine the content you have found to identify connections. But if you have not read through and made the connections between and among your sources, how do you know if there are other connections to draw? Perhaps one source belongs in several sections of your literature review. Or, perhaps the connection is thin or superficial because there is not a deep connection that you can use to connect two sources. More importantly, if you do not review the sources you have collected, know what they say and how they interact with one another, how do you identify the gap in the academic conversation that you want to enter? If you take a shortcut in analyzing the sources, you are going to make writing chapter one more challenging.

Conversation Topics for Your Mentor

Sometimes it can be a challenge to organize all of the sources you have gathered. There may not really be a clear organizing schema. If you find yourself staring at your sources and not making headway for more than a day or two, it is time to reach out to your mentor and request a meeting to talk through the research you have completed. Sometimes explaining your topic and the sources you found to another party can help you see information you overlooked.

Writing Activities

A literature review is more than just a summary of the sources you found. But it may be hard to connect all of the sources using the organizational structures highlighted in this chapter. When you find yourself struggling to incorporate a source write a summary of the source that describes in detailed, complete sentences the following:

1. Their research question
2. The design/methods of their study
3. The results they found (no need to report stats, just the general finding)
4. What this finding tells us about the topic

Then reassess the source.

How does the source contribute to the conversation about the topic? Could it be incorporated with another source or two into a subsection under a larger heading? Does it warrant a new section? Remember a section should have a minimum of two or three sources.

If it is truly disconnected from all of the other research, think about why. Was this an early source in your research that you have moved away from in your topic development, but did not want to eliminate from your study? Why did you want to keep it? Is it disconnected from all of the other research because it is part of the gap you plan to explore? If so, then it could be part of your concluding section of your literature review.

By now, you should see how the literature review frames the scholarly conversation and helps reveal gaps in the research. But identifying a gap is only the beginning. Chapter 3 will introduce the major research methodologies: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. These are the frameworks that scholars use to address such gaps. This chapter will help you connect your research questions to the most appropriate method.

References

Astin, A. W. (1984). Student involvement: A developmental theory for higher education. Journal of College Student Personnel, 25(4), 297–308.

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Lin, H. (2019). Teaching and Learning without a Textbook: Undergraduate Student Perceptions of Open Educational Resources. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 20(3), 1–18. http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/4224/5119

Reid, S. & Kowalski, D. (1996). Organizing Documents. The WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/writing/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=29

Tinto, V. (1975). Dropout from higher education: A theoretical synthesis of recent research. Review of Educational Research, 45(1), 89–125.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.