Lit reviews
How to review the literature on your topic, including how to write lit reviews in your papers.
16 min
writing
| Abstract |
So you’ve heard that you need to “do a lit review”? Maybe you need help finding papers, or figuring out a strategy for how to read papers?
Reviewing the literature is an essential part of any research project, because reading (and responding to) existing scholarly literature is one of the primary ways that your work joins the scholarly conversation. But how and when do you do a lit review? Doing lit reviews can be intimidating for emerging scholars, and your first lit review in a new subject can be hard to get started. In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps of a literature review, including guidelines for how many papers to read, how to read papers quickly, and at what stage of your project you should be searching for literature. |