Literature Reviews

The purpose of a literature review is to:

Convey to the reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

(Taylor, Univ. of Toronto; https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/types-of-writing/literature-review/)

The primary purpose of a literature review is NOT to portray a list of what has been writing.

(Turner, 2023)

A literature review should:

• be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing,
• synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known,
• identify areas of controversy in the literature, and
• formulate questions that need further research. (Taylor, nd)

Additionally, literature reviews should also address the follwoing concerns:

• Is the topic selected of interest to your audience, the industry and/or the publication you are targeting?
• Does the literature make a significant, value-added contribution to new thinking in the field (Torraco, 2005).
• Does the literature add value to the field? What value?
• Does the literature identify a discrpancy in the literature, identify a gap in the literature, identify confilcing / contradictory views in the existing literature, or identify a change in common trends? (Turner, 2023)

Synthesize, don’t summarize

The single most important thing a literature review does is synthesize — it builds an integrated account of what the literature collectively shows, rather than cataloging studies one at a time. Torraco (2005, 2016) describes the integrative review as one that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes a body of literature so that new frameworks and perspectives can emerge. The failure mode to avoid is the “descriptive bibliography”: a string of summaries (“Smith found X; Jones found Y; Brown found Z”) with no connecting argument.

To move from cataloging to synthesis, read across studies and surface:

• Agreements — where findings converge, and how strongly.
• Asymmetries — e.g., far more studies examine one side of a relationship than the other.
• Trajectories — how the conversation has shifted over time.
• Conflicts — where streams reach incompatible conclusions, and why.
• Gaps — what has not yet been examined, which sets up your contribution.

Organize the review around your thesis or research questions — not around individual authors — and let each section make a claim that the cited studies, read together, support.

Cooper’s six dimensions, briefly

Cooper’s (1988) taxonomy is a useful planning tool. Decide, up front, where your review sits on each of six dimensions:

• Focus — what the review centers on (research findings, methods, theories, or practices/applications).
• Goal — what it aims to do (integrate and synthesize, critique, or identify central issues).
• Perspective — a neutral, even-handed stance versus an explicitly argued position.
• Coverage — how exhaustive you are (exhaustive, exhaustive with selective citation, representative, or central/pivotal works).
• Organization — how the review is arranged (historical, conceptual, or methodological).
• Audience — who you are writing for (specialized scholars, general scholars, practitioners, or the public).

Choosing a review type

When the review is itself the study, the type you choose shapes the method, the findings, and the contribution you can claim (Cho, 2022; Rocco et al., 2023):

• Systematic (SLR) — an inclusive, replicable protocol; best when the literature is large and you must defend what was included or excluded.
• Integrative — a representative selection of literature streams, synthesized into a new framework or set of propositions.
• Scoping — a map of the breadth of existing work, often a precursor to a fuller review or study.
• Meta-analysis — statistical pooling of effect sizes across comparable quantitative studies.

For deep, method-by-method guidance and a curated reading list, see Literature Review & Evidence Synthesis Methods in Resources; to turn a topic into a tested search strategy, use the SLR Search Coach.

Common pitfalls

• Writing a descriptive bibliography instead of a synthesis.
• Organizing by author (“Smith… Jones…”) rather than by theme or argument.
• Claiming one review type but doing another (e.g., calling a representative selection “systematic”).
• Citing in clusters without indicating which study contributed what.
• Listing studies but never naming the gap the review opens.
• Summarizing without critique — not weighing strengths and weaknesses.

Before you finalize — a self-check

• Is the review organized around themes or questions rather than individual authors?
• Does each section make a claim supported by several studies read together?
• Have I surfaced agreements, conflicts, trajectories, and gaps — not just summaries?
• Have I weighed the strengths and weaknesses of the literature, not only reported it?
• Is it clear what gap or contribution the review sets up?
• If this is a stand-alone review, have I named and followed a specific review type?

References

Cho, Y. (2022). Comparing integrative and systematic literature reviews. Human Resource Development Review, 21(2), 147–151.

Cooper, H. M. (1988). Organizing knowledge syntheses: A taxonomy of literature reviews. Knowledge in Society, 1, 104–126.

Imel, S. (2011). Writing a literature review. In T. S. Rocco & T. G. Hatcher (Eds.), The handbook of scholarly writing and publishing (pp. 145–160). Jossey-Bass.

Page, M. J., McKenzie, J. E., Bossuyt, P. M., Boutron, I., Hoffmann, T. C., Mulrow, C. D., … Moher, D. (2021). The PRISMA 2020 statement: An updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ, 372, n71. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71

Rocco, T. S., Plakhotnik, M. S., McGill, C. M., Huyler, D., & Collins, J. C. (2023). Conducting and writing a structured literature review in human resource development. Human Resource Development Review, 22(1), 104–125.

Taylor, D. (n.d.). The literature review: A few tips on conducting it. University of Toronto. https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/types-of-writing/literature-review/

Torraco, R. J. (2005). Writing integrative literature reviews: Guidelines and examples. Human Resource Development Review, 4(3), 356–367.

Torraco, R. J. (2016). Writing integrative literature reviews: Using the past and present to explore the future. Human Resource Development Review, 15(4), 404–428.

Tricco, A. C., Lillie, E., Zarin, W., O’Brien, K., Colquhoun, H., Kastner, M., … Straus, S. E. (2016). A scoping review on the conduct and reporting of scoping reviews. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 16, 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-016-0116-4

Turner, J. R. (2023). Literature reviews: An overview of systematic, integrated, and scoping reviews. In G. Jagadeesh, P. Balakumar, & F. Senatore (Eds.), The quintessence of basic and clinical research and scientific publishing. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1284-1_38

Yorks, L. (2008). What we know, what we don’t know, what we need to know—Integrative literature reviews are research. Human Resource Development Review, 7(2), 139–141.