What is a literature review? What for do we have to write a literature review? What should we include in a literature review?
 
These and many other questions will be discussed in this article to clarify the essence of a literature review to you.
 
A literature review is a so-called list of all the literature and periodicals, which you have used in your term paper, coursework or some other type of academic writing. You should have heard about such notion as plagiarism. So, literature review is used to show that you did not plagiarize somebody’s thoughts and ideas, that is put them as yours, and simply have used them in your research for clarifying some points. You should make a list of all your sources and this will make your literature review.
 
Another kind of writing, where you are to present a literature review is your research, dissertation, proposal, etc. In this case, a literature review differs a bit from that described above. Here you should make a brief description of a literary source, including: the name of the author, title of the work, date of publishing. This is very important if you want to show the proposal committee that you have found a lot of materials for your dissertation, etc.
 
As you can see, the word-combination “literature review” possesses two main meanings, which one works for you is up to you. You should only keep in mind that the essence of any literature review is to show the amount of information a student has studied for this or that type of academic writing. This may also influence your grade.