BIOL 486: Seminar on Health & Environment

• A literature review is a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the principal research about the topic being studied.
• The review helps form the intellectual framework for the study.
• The review need not be exhaustive; the objective is not to list as many relevant books, articles, reports as possible.
• However, the review should contain the most pertinent studies and point to important past and current research and practices in the field.

You'll often hear "explore the literature" or "what does the literature say?"  So, what is "the literature?"

Most simply put, "the literature" is a collection of scholarly writings on a topic. This includes:

• peer-reviewed journal articles
• books
• conference proceedings
• dissertations

Synthesis in a literature review involves combining information from multiples sources to create a new, cohesive understanding of the research topic, rather than just summarizing individual studies.

Knowledge Syntheses - Differences and Similarities

The following table, developed by the University of Toronto Libraries, displays the similarities and differences between the most common types of reviews. This table was adapted from a variety of sources (Booth, 2016; Grant and Booth, 2009; Higgins & Green, 2011; Pham et al., 2014; and Tricco et al., 2015)