Literature review is an essential part of academic research project. It is a careful examination of a body of literature pointing towards the answer to the research question. Literature covers everything relevant that is written on a topic: books, journal articles, newspaper articles, historical records, government reports, theses and dissertations etc. It includes scholarly journal, scholarly books, authoritative databases and primary sources.

Importance of Literature Review

A literature review is done to avoid duplication of research. Whether the question is already answered by someone else. To know the developments taken in the related field and to know the area for further research. To justify the topic is related with the trends of research and at the same time it is different from the researches already performed.                                         

A literature review typically includes primary, secondary and tertiary sources.

Primary sources are original source. They have not been filtered through interpretation or evaluation. They could be diaries, interviews, journal articles published in the peer reviewed publication (subjecting an authors work, research or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are expert).

Secondary sources are the commentary or the discussion of the evidence like textbooks, encyclopedias, journal articles, websites etc.

Tertiary sources are a collection of primary and secondary sources like bibliographies, indexes, abstracts, directories etc.

There are two components in literature review i.e. a search through literature and the writing of the review. In search for literature you may face 2 challenges either finding too much of information or too little of information. If you find too many citations that there is no end in sight to the number than the question is too broad. If you find too little information your topic too narrow.

To conduct a literature search one needs to find out whats been written on a given subject through Bibliographies and references in key textbooks, and recent journal articles, abstracting databases, citation databases etc.

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