Critical literature reviews

This is what most of you will end up doing in one form or other. While these reviews may not be labelled systematic, we will adopt a systematic process in conducting them. To do that we will borrow from the general approach of doing a systematic review.

This is the basic set of steps, remembering that the process is not linear. You will back and forth between each of what follows as you do the work. That's normal, natural. Don't panic!


  • 1. Decide the topic and the question that the review will be designed to get at. Part of thinking this through is being clear about why it is important to do such a study. This will contribute to the introduction of your paper.
  • 2. Work out what types of studies you will need to collect in order to address your research question.
  • 3. Carry out a search of the literature to identify the reports of research you need. You need to be systematic about this and keep track of what you searched for (key phrases/words), where you searched (Google scholar has them all), and any variations to the searching that you did.
  • 4. You need to decide the basis of the papers you want to include. Based upon that, you separate out the papers that meet your criteria. You need to explain this in your report.
  • 5. Work through each selected paper determining those elements that are pertinent to the way you have framed your study.
  • 6. Based on your analysis you should be in a position to synthesise your findings and address your research question.
  • 7. You will likely have further questions that derive from your work, a good sign. All research is about asking better questions.

It is crucial that you keep a good record of all of your work in your trusty notebooks. If you don't, then writing your paper will be a nightmare, literally!!

And remember, the early stages of this work, the planning, you need to allow the various elements to interact, the topic, question, design, theory, methodology to interact so that you achieve a good fit for all.

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