Essay Guide
Our comprehensive guide to the stages of the essay development process. Back to Student Resources
Why write a literature review?
The first step of any research project is to review the field. So let’s think about surveying, synthesising, critically analysing and presenting in more detail. A literature review does the following.
- Identifies gaps in current knowledge.
- Avoids reinventing the wheel – i.e. it saves you wasting time researching something that’s already been done.
- Allows you to show that you are building on a foundation of existing knowledge and ideas – i.e. carrying on from where others have already reached.
- Identifies other people working in the same field. Knowing who’s already working in your area and getting in touch with them can be an invaluable source of knowledge and support.
- Demonstrates the depth of your knowledge about your research.
- Identifies the important works in your area and shows that you’ve read them.
- Provides an intellectual context for your own work, and enables you to position your project in relation to others in the field.
- Identifies opposing views.
- Puts your own work in perspective – are you doing something completely new, revisiting an old controversy in the light of new evidence, etc?
- Demonstrates your research skills – i.e. you not only know about work in your area, you also know how to access it.
- Identifies information and ideas that may be relevant to your project.
- Identifies methods that may be relevant to your project.