A dissertation literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers.
In writing the dissertation literature review for your dissertation, your purpose is to express to your reader what information and ideas have been recognized on a topic, and what their strength and weaknesses are? As a piece of writing, the dissertation literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your dissertation research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing or your challenging thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summary.
Besides enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a literature review lets you gain and demonstrate skills in two areas:
- Information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of useful articles and books
- Critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies.
A literature review must do these things:
- 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
- Formulate questions that need further research
A dissertation literature is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It's usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the dissertation literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. You are not trying to list all the material published, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question.
