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A literature review is critical to introducing the scope and current state of the art of your research area. It not only supports your reader’s understanding of the topic at hand, but the process of writing and analysing research within your literature review helps to refine your research questions and proposed solution.

UNSW student Vanessa shares some tips for writing a literature review:

“Don’t mention the name of every single author of the papers you reviewed. For example, instead of writing “A study by Pant et al. [1] found that stents fail haemodynamically.” you can write “One study [1] found that stents....”. or even “Stents have been shown to fail haemodynamically [1].” This brings the focus back on what was found in the research, not who wrote it.”

“If an author is really important to the work you’ve completed, then you should mention their name. For example, “One study by Smith et al. [2] found....” or “Smith et al. [2] found.....”

“A good literature review will contrast and compare the findings of different papers.”

“I found it helpful to make a table with four columns: author, date, the purpose of the paper, and critical findings. Then, I fill it out for all the papers I read, so I can easily compare them.”

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