Draft a Working Statement of Purpose and Search Databases
After developing a working topic and conducting searches over all relevant databases, your role as researcher shifts to focused reading of all relevant research papers on your topic, with the greatest focus on peer-reviewed research published in the last five years.
Defining Your Aims and Purpose
To help you sort through the studies that come up in your searches, and to prioritize those that are most relevant for your purpose, take some time to pin down your purpose: answer the question of how exploring your topic is important, and what your exploration adds to our knowledge of this field. Don't be too humble here; your ideas add value, so say how.
What Kinds of Studies and Articles Can You Use?
Many fields allow for a percentage of your research consulted to be from professional sources, sometimes called "gray literature," which have not undergone a full peer-review process. If your peer review allows some gray literature, you might include books and articles from experts and published by professional associations that explore issues of concern in the field. Always take the time to check the credibility of your sources.
Use the tips in the pages of this guide to search UB's databases for reliable and relevant research that supports your project's aims.
Build a Working Annotated Bibliography to Create a Literature Review Structure
Create a working document to list each potential source by full citation, adding information that seems likely to have a place in your project. As you find sources, take accurate notes on them, including stating the purpose and summary from each source's Conclusion or Discussion. That section also has the Limitations (as in "this study was limited by a small population, and several participants failed to complete the survey") and the suggestions for future research, which can help you gaps to be filled and trends in this field of research.
To help "future you" to guard against inadvertent plagiarism when you write your literature review, use quotation marks differentiate between text language and your own in your notes. Later, you can go back and create your own summaries of the quoted materials.
Note on AI: If your instructor allows use of artificial intelligence (AI) in your research projects, add a regular note to each citation clarifying what AI you used and how you used it. When you write your literature review, protect yourself from plagiarism by composing your own paraphrase from your notes rather than cutting/pasting AI-generated writing. The specific AI must be cited for APA and MLA, and Chicago Style requires acknowledgement and notation of how AI was used. For help, see the page to the left titled, Citation Guides for Use of AI in Academic Research.
Use Your Annotated Bibliography to Create Reports on Current Research
As you read your research articles, keep adding to your running list of the citations and summaries (aka annotated bibliography). A good tip is to read the articles out of order: at first, it is helpful to read the Conclusion or Discussion first, where authors summarize their studies. Add notes to yourself about how these sources support or refute your purpose. Note also aspects that stand out such as population, method, response data, or conclusions.
When you write out your literature review, all you have to do is create a thematic order and report on the articles you choose from your list. Be careful to check that you are using your own words. If you have quoted passages in your notes, just rewrite your own summaries in your own voice and add a citation at the end of the summary (Author, date). It's also great to create summary sentences that name the authors of the studies and describe the work. Here is an example: Adams (2025) surveyed school administrators in Chicago and found a significant majority reported staffing shortages.
Try Signal Verbs to Construct Summary Sentences
Signal verbs can help you define the work that you read in your research, allowing you to report the actions of the studies clearly to your audience. Generally, literature reviews in APA papers use past tense verbs, while MLA style typically defaults to present tense
Example Signal Verbs
Studied Found Investigated
Acknowledged Emphasized Pointed out
Argued Highlighted Reported
Evaluated Illustrates Stated
Concluded Noted Suggested
Contended Observed Underscored
Identify Gaps that Appear From Your Research
Arguably, the main purpose of conducting a literature review is to show your readers what is missing from research in your field. In other words, you are teaching your readers about what studies you have found, what those papers showed you, and what you realize they have left out.
What are Gaps?
Gaps are areas that relate to your topic and relate to the available research, but these areas have been partially or completely missed. A gap could be something that has not been studied adequately, or a gap could be a valuable perspective that has been missed. For example, there could be many studies about the value teaching cardiopulmonary resuscitation (cpr) in schools, but you may have read over the body of recent studies and learned that there are too few studies measuring the value of teaching cpr specifically to high school students in rural communities.
Using your literature to point out and clarify this population gap in cpr /health and safety education can make your literature review more valuable to readers, publishers, and your fellow researchers.
Why Should I Point Out Gaps?
By finding gaps in your research and showing them to your readers, you are participating in critically important conversations to build and support future research. For example, with the cpr education example above, by seeing and showing that cpr education has proven to be life-saving but has not been applied to rural high school populations, the example highlights the needs for future research in this area. Furthermore, highlighting this gap in a literature review supports an aim (perhaps your aim) to produce a study of this population.
Where Can I State a Gap I Found?
There are many good places to state that a gap exists in the research literature on any subject. Early in the Introduction, or in the context of the statement of your aim and purpose, or in the Conclusion of your paper: each of these is a typical place for authors to note--or even repeat--that a gap exists in the literature. If you are composing a stand-alone literature review paper, then it makes sense to present the research gap you have uncovered as a key factor of the final discussion and analysis. But even if you are writing a longer paper and the literature is only a part of it, pointing out a gap--or several gaps--you have uncovered in your review is beneficial. The gap adds significance to your literature review, whether that review is background in your paper or the core purpose of your paper.
Check All Citations
Both in the text of your paper and in the Reference List, citations must be accurate. This is the core aspect of sharing, reporting, and crediting research. Course instructors, academic departments, publishers, and professional associations determine what formatting styles and guidelines to follow. Below are some links to guides from The American Psychological Association (APA), the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and The Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago).
APA In-Text and Reference List Formatting
Literature reviews require frequent referencing of relevant studies within your text. The full references are included at the Reference List at the end of your paper or in the final slides of your presentation. APA style uses (Author, Date) referencing where needed to credit source material in text, and it requires a full reference list that includes all cited sources and excludes uncited sources.
MLA Style Formatting In Text and in Reference List
Like APA, MLA formatting requires specific author citations in the text of the paper for all words and ideas drawn from source materials. Additionally, a list of Works Cited is required in the final pages of papers or the final slides of presentations.
IEEE Reference Format
Because IEEE encompasses a wide array of communications in several fields and sub-fields of engineering, it also offers specific guidance for sources including and beyond traditional academic papers and books. IEEE uses notation and referencing formats for published and unpublished material as well as professional communications, laws and court decisions, and manuals, patents, and videos.
Citing Sources with the Chicago Manual of Style
Writers using Chicago Style can choose to use footnotes--sometimes endnotes--in a notes and bibliography format or an author-date format for citing their sources. Each formatting system seeks to provide the information to make sources accessible to readers.
Conducting and Citing a Literature Review by Mary Lamothe and University of Bridgeport is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
