The literature review provides your readers with a summary of all the relevant books, academic articles and other sources you have consulted while researching your chosen topic. This summary is an important function of your literature review because readers need to be able to consult these sources for themselves if they wish to do so. However, this is not its only or even its most important function. Above all, you need to indicate the relative merits of the various studies you have used as sources, show how your work fits into this body of literature and describe the contribution you are making. To do this, you need to adopt a critical approach to the work you are reviewing.

Do not just list all the books and articles you consulted. First, select only those sources that are most relevant and then try to organize the section in a way that best serves your purposes. One way to do this is to discuss your sources in terms of the school of thought or intellectual tradition they belong to. If you are an anthropologist, you may divide the literature into the traditions of functionalism, structuralism and cultural materialism. If you are an economist, you may divide it into Marxian, neo-classical and Keynesian approaches. At the end of the section, state which of these traditions your research belongs to. Another way is to organize the section chronologically so that readers can see how your chosen topic first became an issue of debate and how understanding has developed over time. Situate the work you are reviewing in its historical context, describe strengths and weaknesses, point out whether the findings can be generalized or are limited to a particular situation, provide solutions to apparent conflicts and ensure that the connection between the literature and your research question is clear. You should also include studies in your literature review that do not support your hypotheses and assumptions. Good critical research must be able to provide explanations for alternative findings and respond to different interpretations in the literature.