What exactly is a literature review?

Lemlin

I've been given a college assignment and as part of it have been told to write a literature review. All the lecturer has told us is that it should be 1000 words and that less than 20 references will impact on the grade.

Anyone know what exactly a literature review is?

Nukem

Lemlin wrote:

Anyone know what exactly a literature review is?

A book review of sorts. You are better wtiting this towards the end of your paper as you can say that you were able to pull information from what book and what you found relevant to the research of the paper.

From for my course guidelines:

Literature review
This section should contain an in-depth review of published work relevant to your investigation.
Where a large number of papers are reviewed it is useful to group them under different aspects of
the investigation, that is, to use a separate sub-section for each aspect. You should compare and
contrast the literature reviewed.
The important part of this section is your reporting and discussion of the literature. It is important to
distinguish what you have learnt from reading the papers from what the authors originally said.
Your conclusions, on reviewing the literature, should reinforce the aims or objectives of the
investigation given earlier.

Lemlin

Should I use just one piece of literature though or all the references I used?

irishguy

Lemlin wrote:

Should I use just one piece of literature though or all the references I used?

Use a few references, it doesn’t have to be that detailed. That’s if you have to do it before you write your theses

Lemlin

I have a 3000 word report to do. The report is to be 2000 words and the literature review is 1000. So should I talk about a few of my references?

irishguy

Lemlin wrote:

I have a 3000 word report to do. The report is to be 2000 words and the literature review is 1000. So should I talk about a few of my references?

Yes, i am writing a 20,000 - 25,000 word dissertation at the moment and my literature review was just a bit bigger than yours. I wrote a summary of the dissertation and i referenced it heavily (4+ references per page)

Lemlin

irishguy wrote:

Yes, i am writing a 20,000 - 25,000 word dissertation at the moment and my literature review was just a bit bigger than yours. I wrote a summary of the dissertation and i referenced it heavily (4+ references per page)

Should the litearure review basically be a summary of my main references then?

irishguy

Lemlin wrote:

Should the litearure review basically be a summary of my main references then?

its a summary of your dissertation so ya i suppose you could say it was a summary of your main references

Lemlin

irishguy wrote:

its a summary of your dissertation so ya i suppose you could say it was a summary of your main references

I would imagine he means it to be a summary of the references? After all, the report is only 2,000 words and the literature review has to be 1,000.