What is a literature review in the field of academic research?

A comprehensive summary of early research on a specific topic is known as a literature review. To write a perfect literature review you need to go through scholarly articles, magazines, books, and other reading materials relevant to your topic of study. You will have to evaluate, describe, and summarise this previous data. If found correct information then, this will prepare the theoretical base of your research and help you understand the nature of your study. Writing a literature review shows that you have read, evaluated and assimilated the previous work on the topic. The purpose of writing a literature review is to make the reader aware of the already established knowledge and ideas on a topic and what are its strengths and weaknesses. Your literature review must define the objective of your research, the problems you are going to resolve in your research, and your arguments on it.

Types, components & length of a literature review

Though there are various types of literature review papers, we are going to talk about only those which are based on their structure and formulation.

1. Narrative or Traditional literature review
  
  The purpose of writing a traditional literature review is to give the author and reader an overview of the research topic and attract their attention to the significant areas of the research. Narrative reviews help to determine the gaps in the research and develop the research questions.
2. Scoping reviews
  
  In the case of scoping reviews, there is no restriction on the materials resourced & reserved. The main idea behind writing a scoping review is to collect all the materials relevant to your topic of research and then sort these materials and information in a well-organised manner.
3. Systematic style literature review
  
  You need to make in-depth notes based on your search to write a systematic style literature review. Add the inclusion and exclusion criteria of papers you read in your final literature review and it is not necessary to collect qualitative or quantitative pieces of evidence from your readings.
  Now let us know about the components of a literature review. Irrespective of the type of literature review, the following components remain the same for all kinds of reviews, and those components are:
  - 1. Introduction
    2. Paragraphs of the content (Main body)
    3. Conclusion
  While constructing a literature review, these above-mentioned components are must-haves or mandatory to include and they do not affect the length or the word limit of the review. The word length of the literature review depends on the purpose of your research, your targeted audience, and the discipline of your research. But ideally, the full chapter length of a literature review written for research is 20 pages.

Points to avoid for literature review writing

You should avoid writing a poor literature review because an undeveloped literature review can harm your thesis research and the significance of the literature review in the following ways:

1. If you can’t illustrate your background efforts made for your research, then it raises questions and doubts about your credibility as a researcher.
2. If you are not aware of the depth and breadth of the available materials then you won’t be able to develop the foundation of your work.
3. Without a complete summary of the material you are using, you won’t be able to justify the position of your work. Your work must answer the questions like, is your work filling the identified research gap, is your work able to address the weaknesses of former research, and is your research a broader or extended version of the previous research?