You are tasked to do a literature review. You immediately grab that favorite novel of yours, thumbed through it, and gave your verdict “thumbs up”. You heaved a sigh of relief since you know you have done your task well.

But wait… You’ve got the wrong literature review in your mind. The ‘literature’ in literature review is the amalgamation of any materials or resources on a certain topic from pamphlets to books to articles to periodicals and so on. Your readers also would not care whether it’s a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ for you.

A literature review in essay writing is a discussion of the sources of information on the topic of the essay write. It can be a simple summary of the sources or a reorganization of the information. On a certain extent, the literature review may analyze and evaluate the sources and advise the reader on their merit and relevance.

In an essay write, the literature review must be able to accomplish the following:

1. should be able to organize references or sources that directly relates to the thesis statement;
2. summarize the results and identify what is known and what is not known;
3. determine any controversy in the sources; and
4. identify areas that need further research.

One must remember that the literature review is discursive and should not merely be a summary of one literature after another. It is simply not a list but an evaluation of the sources as they relate to your thesis statement.