functions of related literature in research

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Literature reviews: functions, types and methods

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When we think of a literature review, we often forget to consider the different types of reviews and the different roles or functions that literature reviews can have.

In this short presentation I will first discuss some functions of literature reviews, and then make some points about how the function or purpose of your review should inform the type that you choose to do, and the methods that you employ.

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Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper

• 5. The Literature Review
• Purpose of Guide
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A literature review surveys prior research published in books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by so doing, provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem being investigated. Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have used in researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within existing scholarship about the topic.

Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . Fourth edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2014.

Importance of a Good Literature Review

A literature review may consist of simply a summary of key sources, but in the social sciences, a literature review usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis, often within specific conceptual categories . A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information in a way that informs how you are planning to investigate a research problem. The analytical features of a literature review might:

• Give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations,
• Trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates,
• Depending on the situation, evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant research, or
• Usually in the conclusion of a literature review, identify where gaps exist in how a problem has been researched to date.

Given this, the purpose of a literature review is to:

• Place each work in the context of its contribution to understanding the research problem being studied.
• Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration.
• Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
• Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature.
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies.
• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.
• Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research.
• Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important].

Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Jesson, Jill. Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2011; Knopf, Jeffrey W. "Doing a Literature Review." PS: Political Science and Politics 39 (January 2006): 127-132; Ridley, Diana. The Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide for Students . 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2012.

Types of Literature Reviews

It is important to think of knowledge in a given field as consisting of three layers. First, there are the primary studies that researchers conduct and publish. Second are the reviews of those studies that summarize and offer new interpretations built from and often extending beyond the primary studies. Third, there are the perceptions, conclusions, opinion, and interpretations that are shared informally among scholars that become part of the body of epistemological traditions within the field.

In composing a literature review, it is important to note that it is often this third layer of knowledge that is cited as "true" even though it often has only a loose relationship to the primary studies and secondary literature reviews. Given this, while literature reviews are designed to provide an overview and synthesis of pertinent sources you have explored, there are a number of approaches you could adopt depending upon the type of analysis underpinning your study.

Argumentative Review This form examines literature selectively in order to support or refute an argument, deeply embedded assumption, or philosophical problem already established in the literature. The purpose is to develop a body of literature that establishes a contrarian viewpoint. Given the value-laden nature of some social science research [e.g., educational reform; immigration control], argumentative approaches to analyzing the literature can be a legitimate and important form of discourse. However, note that they can also introduce problems of bias when they are used to make summary claims of the sort found in systematic reviews [see below].

Integrative Review Considered a form of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated. The body of literature includes all studies that address related or identical hypotheses or research problems. A well-done integrative review meets the same standards as primary research in regard to clarity, rigor, and replication. This is the most common form of review in the social sciences.

Historical Review Few things rest in isolation from historical precedent. Historical literature reviews focus on examining research throughout a period of time, often starting with the first time an issue, concept, theory, phenomena emerged in the literature, then tracing its evolution within the scholarship of a discipline. The purpose is to place research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the-art developments and to identify the likely directions for future research.

Methodological Review A review does not always focus on what someone said [findings], but how they came about saying what they say [method of analysis]. Reviewing methods of analysis provides a framework of understanding at different levels [i.e. those of theory, substantive fields, research approaches, and data collection and analysis techniques], how researchers draw upon a wide variety of knowledge ranging from the conceptual level to practical documents for use in fieldwork in the areas of ontological and epistemological consideration, quantitative and qualitative integration, sampling, interviewing, data collection, and data analysis. This approach helps highlight ethical issues which you should be aware of and consider as you go through your own study.

Systematic Review This form consists of an overview of existing evidence pertinent to a clearly formulated research question, which uses pre-specified and standardized methods to identify and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect, report, and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review. The goal is to deliberately document, critically evaluate, and summarize scientifically all of the research about a clearly defined research problem . Typically it focuses on a very specific empirical question, often posed in a cause-and-effect form, such as "To what extent does A contribute to B?" This type of literature review is primarily applied to examining prior research studies in clinical medicine and allied health fields, but it is increasingly being used in the social sciences.

Theoretical Review The purpose of this form is to examine the corpus of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue, concept, theory, phenomena. The theoretical literature review helps to establish what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what degree the existing theories have been investigated, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested. Often this form is used to help establish a lack of appropriate theories or reveal that current theories are inadequate for explaining new or emerging research problems. The unit of analysis can focus on a theoretical concept or a whole theory or framework.

NOTE : Most often the literature review will incorporate some combination of types. For example, a review that examines literature supporting or refuting an argument, assumption, or philosophical problem related to the research problem will also need to include writing supported by sources that establish the history of these arguments in the literature.

Baumeister, Roy F. and Mark R. Leary. "Writing Narrative Literature Reviews."  Review of General Psychology 1 (September 1997): 311-320; Mark R. Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Kennedy, Mary M. "Defining a Literature." Educational Researcher 36 (April 2007): 139-147; Petticrew, Mark and Helen Roberts. Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006; Torracro, Richard. "Writing Integrative Literature Reviews: Guidelines and Examples." Human Resource Development Review 4 (September 2005): 356-367; Rocco, Tonette S. and Maria S. Plakhotnik. "Literature Reviews, Conceptual Frameworks, and Theoretical Frameworks: Terms, Functions, and Distinctions." Human Ressource Development Review 8 (March 2008): 120-130; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016.

Structure and Writing Style

I.  Thinking About Your Literature Review

The structure of a literature review should include the following in support of understanding the research problem :

• An overview of the subject, issue, or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review,
• Division of works under review into themes or categories [e.g. works that support a particular position, those against, and those offering alternative approaches entirely],
• An explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others,
• Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research.

The critical evaluation of each work should consider :

• Provenance -- what are the author's credentials? Are the author's arguments supported by evidence [e.g. primary historical material, case studies, narratives, statistics, recent scientific findings]?
• Methodology -- were the techniques used to identify, gather, and analyze the data appropriate to addressing the research problem? Was the sample size appropriate? Were the results effectively interpreted and reported?
• Objectivity -- is the author's perspective even-handed or prejudicial? Is contrary data considered or is certain pertinent information ignored to prove the author's point?
• Persuasiveness -- which of the author's theses are most convincing or least convincing?
• Validity -- are the author's arguments and conclusions convincing? Does the work ultimately contribute in any significant way to an understanding of the subject?

II.  Development of the Literature Review

Four Basic Stages of Writing 1.  Problem formulation -- which topic or field is being examined and what are its component issues? 2.  Literature search -- finding materials relevant to the subject being explored. 3.  Data evaluation -- determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic. 4.  Analysis and interpretation -- discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature.

Consider the following issues before writing the literature review: Clarify If your assignment is not specific about what form your literature review should take, seek clarification from your professor by asking these questions: 1.  Roughly how many sources would be appropriate to include? 2.  What types of sources should I review (books, journal articles, websites; scholarly versus popular sources)? 3.  Should I summarize, synthesize, or critique sources by discussing a common theme or issue? 4.  Should I evaluate the sources in any way beyond evaluating how they relate to understanding the research problem? 5.  Should I provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history? Find Models Use the exercise of reviewing the literature to examine how authors in your discipline or area of interest have composed their literature review sections. Read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or to identify ways to organize your final review. The bibliography or reference section of sources you've already read, such as required readings in the course syllabus, are also excellent entry points into your own research. Narrow the Topic The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to obtain a good survey of relevant resources. Your professor will probably not expect you to read everything that's available about the topic, but you'll make the act of reviewing easier if you first limit scope of the research problem. A good strategy is to begin by searching the USC Libraries Catalog for recent books about the topic and review the table of contents for chapters that focuses on specific issues. You can also review the indexes of books to find references to specific issues that can serve as the focus of your research. For example, a book surveying the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may include a chapter on the role Egypt has played in mediating the conflict, or look in the index for the pages where Egypt is mentioned in the text. Consider Whether Your Sources are Current Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. This is particularly true in disciplines in medicine and the sciences where research conducted becomes obsolete very quickly as new discoveries are made. However, when writing a review in the social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be required. In other words, a complete understanding the research problem requires you to deliberately examine how knowledge and perspectives have changed over time. Sort through other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to explore what is considered by scholars to be a "hot topic" and what is not.

III.  Ways to Organize Your Literature Review

Chronology of Events If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials according to when they were published. This approach should only be followed if a clear path of research building on previous research can be identified and that these trends follow a clear chronological order of development. For example, a literature review that focuses on continuing research about the emergence of German economic power after the fall of the Soviet Union. By Publication Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend. For instance, you could order a review of literature on environmental studies of brown fields if the progression revealed, for example, a change in the soil collection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies. Thematic [“conceptual categories”] A thematic literature review is the most common approach to summarizing prior research in the social and behavioral sciences. Thematic reviews are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time, although the progression of time may still be incorporated into a thematic review. For example, a review of the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics could focus on the development of online political satire. While the study focuses on one topic, the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics, it would still be organized chronologically reflecting technological developments in media. The difference in this example between a "chronological" and a "thematic" approach is what is emphasized the most: themes related to the role of the Internet in presidential politics. Note that more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. A review organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point being made. Methodological A methodological approach focuses on the methods utilized by the researcher. For the Internet in American presidential politics project, one methodological approach would be to look at cultural differences between the portrayal of American presidents on American, British, and French websites. Or the review might focus on the fundraising impact of the Internet on a particular political party. A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed.

Other Sections of Your Literature Review Once you've decided on the organizational method for your literature review, the sections you need to include in the paper should be easy to figure out because they arise from your organizational strategy. In other words, a chronological review would have subsections for each vital time period; a thematic review would have subtopics based upon factors that relate to the theme or issue. However, sometimes you may need to add additional sections that are necessary for your study, but do not fit in the organizational strategy of the body. What other sections you include in the body is up to you. However, only include what is necessary for the reader to locate your study within the larger scholarship about the research problem.

Here are examples of other sections, usually in the form of a single paragraph, you may need to include depending on the type of review you write:

• Current Situation : Information necessary to understand the current topic or focus of the literature review.
• Sources Used : Describes the methods and resources [e.g., databases] you used to identify the literature you reviewed.
• History : The chronological progression of the field, the research literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
• Selection Methods : Criteria you used to select (and perhaps exclude) sources in your literature review. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed [i.e., scholarly] sources.
• Standards : Description of the way in which you present your information.
• Questions for Further Research : What questions about the field has the review sparked? How will you further your research as a result of the review?

IV.  Writing Your Literature Review

Once you've settled on how to organize your literature review, you're ready to write each section. When writing your review, keep in mind these issues.

Use Evidence A literature review section is, in this sense, just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence [citations] that demonstrates that what you are saying is valid. Be Selective Select only the most important points in each source to highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to mention should relate directly to the research problem, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological. Related items that provide additional information, but that are not key to understanding the research problem, can be included in a list of further readings . Use Quotes Sparingly Some short quotes are appropriate if you want to emphasize a point, or if what an author stated cannot be easily paraphrased. Sometimes you may need to quote certain terminology that was coined by the author, is not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. Do not use extensive quotes as a substitute for using your own words in reviewing the literature. Summarize and Synthesize Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each thematic paragraph as well as throughout the review. Recapitulate important features of a research study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study's significance and relating it to your own work and the work of others. Keep Your Own Voice While the literature review presents others' ideas, your voice [the writer's] should remain front and center. For example, weave references to other sources into what you are writing but maintain your own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with your own ideas and wording. Use Caution When Paraphrasing When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be sure to represent the author's information or opinions accurately and in your own words. Even when paraphrasing an author’s work, you still must provide a citation to that work.

V.  Common Mistakes to Avoid

These are the most common mistakes made in reviewing social science research literature.

• Sources in your literature review do not clearly relate to the research problem;
• You do not take sufficient time to define and identify the most relevant sources to use in the literature review related to the research problem;
• Relies exclusively on secondary analytical sources rather than including relevant primary research studies or data;
• Uncritically accepts another researcher's findings and interpretations as valid, rather than examining critically all aspects of the research design and analysis;
• Does not describe the search procedures that were used in identifying the literature to review;
• Reports isolated statistical results rather than synthesizing them in chi-squared or meta-analytic methods; and,
• Only includes research that validates assumptions and does not consider contrary findings and alternative interpretations found in the literature.

Cook, Kathleen E. and Elise Murowchick. “Do Literature Review Skills Transfer from One Course to Another?” Psychology Learning and Teaching 13 (March 2014): 3-11; Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Jesson, Jill. Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques . London: SAGE, 2011; Literature Review Handout. Online Writing Center. Liberty University; Literature Reviews. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J. and Rebecca Frels. Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2016; Ridley, Diana. The Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide for Students . 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2012; Randolph, Justus J. “A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review." Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation. vol. 14, June 2009; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016; Taylor, Dena. The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Writing a Literature Review. Academic Skills Centre. University of Canberra.

Writing Tip

Break Out of Your Disciplinary Box!

Thinking interdisciplinarily about a research problem can be a rewarding exercise in applying new ideas, theories, or concepts to an old problem. For example, what might cultural anthropologists say about the continuing conflict in the Middle East? In what ways might geographers view the need for better distribution of social service agencies in large cities than how social workers might study the issue? You don’t want to substitute a thorough review of core research literature in your discipline for studies conducted in other fields of study. However, particularly in the social sciences, thinking about research problems from multiple vectors is a key strategy for finding new solutions to a problem or gaining a new perspective. Consult with a librarian about identifying research databases in other disciplines; almost every field of study has at least one comprehensive database devoted to indexing its research literature.

Frodeman, Robert. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Another Writing Tip

Don't Just Review for Content!

While conducting a review of the literature, maximize the time you devote to writing this part of your paper by thinking broadly about what you should be looking for and evaluating. Review not just what scholars are saying, but how are they saying it. Some questions to ask:

• How are they organizing their ideas?
• What methods have they used to study the problem?
• What theories have been used to explain, predict, or understand their research problem?
• What sources have they cited to support their conclusions?
• How have they used non-textual elements [e.g., charts, graphs, figures, etc.] to illustrate key points?

When you begin to write your literature review section, you'll be glad you dug deeper into how the research was designed and constructed because it establishes a means for developing more substantial analysis and interpretation of the research problem.

Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1 998.

Yet Another Writing Tip

When Do I Know I Can Stop Looking and Move On?

Here are several strategies you can utilize to assess whether you've thoroughly reviewed the literature:

• Look for repeating patterns in the research findings . If the same thing is being said, just by different people, then this likely demonstrates that the research problem has hit a conceptual dead end. At this point consider: Does your study extend current research?  Does it forge a new path? Or, does is merely add more of the same thing being said?
• Look at sources the authors cite to in their work . If you begin to see the same researchers cited again and again, then this is often an indication that no new ideas have been generated to address the research problem.
• Search Google Scholar to identify who has subsequently cited leading scholars already identified in your literature review [see next sub-tab]. This is called citation tracking and there are a number of sources that can help you identify who has cited whom, particularly scholars from outside of your discipline. Here again, if the same authors are being cited again and again, this may indicate no new literature has been written on the topic.

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J. and Rebecca Frels. Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach . Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2016; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016.

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Literature Reviews

• What is a literature review?
• Steps in the Literature Review Process
• Define your research question
• Determine inclusion and exclusion criteria
• Choose databases and search
• Review Results
• Synthesize Results
• Analyze Results
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What is a Literature Review?

A literature or narrative review is a comprehensive review and analysis of the published literature on a specific topic or research question. The literature that is reviewed contains: books, articles, academic articles, conference proceedings, association papers, and dissertations. It contains the most pertinent studies and points to important past and current research and practices. It provides background and context, and shows how your research will contribute to the field. 

A literature review should: 

• Provide a comprehensive and updated review of the literature;
• Explain why this review has taken place;
• Articulate a position or hypothesis;
• Acknowledge and account for conflicting and corroborating points of view

From  S age Research Methods

Purpose of a Literature Review

A literature review can be written as an introduction to a study to:

• Demonstrate how a study fills a gap in research
• Compare a study with other research that's been done

Or it can be a separate work (a research article on its own) which:

• Organizes or describes a topic
• Describes variables within a particular issue/problem

Limitations of a Literature Review

Some of the limitations of a literature review are:

• It's a snapshot in time. Unlike other reviews, this one has beginning, a middle and an end. There may be future developments that could make your work less relevant.
• It may be too focused. Some niche studies may miss the bigger picture.
• It can be difficult to be comprehensive. There is no way to make sure all the literature on a topic was considered.
• It is easy to be biased if you stick to top tier journals. There may be other places where people are publishing exemplary research. Look to open access publications and conferences to reflect a more inclusive collection. Also, make sure to include opposing views (and not just supporting evidence).

Source: Grant, Maria J., and Andrew Booth. “A Typology of Reviews: An Analysis of 14 Review Types and Associated Methodologies.” Health Information & Libraries Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 91–108. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/j.1471-1842.2009.00848.x.

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Periodically, UT Libraries runs a workshop covering the basics and library support for literature reviews. While we try to offer these once per academic year, we find providing the recording to be helpful to community members who have missed the session. Following is the most recent recording of the workshop, Conducting a Literature Review. To view the recording, a UT login is required.

• October 26, 2022 recording
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What Is A Literature Review?

A plain-language explainer (with examples).

By:  Derek Jansen (MBA) & Kerryn Warren (PhD) | June 2020 (Updated May 2023)

If you’re faced with writing a dissertation or thesis, chances are you’ve encountered the term “literature review” . If you’re on this page, you’re probably not 100% what the literature review is all about. The good news is that you’ve come to the right place.

Literature Review 101

• What (exactly) is a literature review
• What’s the purpose of the literature review chapter
• How to find high-quality resources
• How to structure your literature review chapter
• Example of an actual literature review

What is a literature review?

The word “literature review” can refer to two related things that are part of the broader literature review process. The first is the task of  reviewing the literature  – i.e. sourcing and reading through the existing research relating to your research topic. The second is the  actual chapter  that you write up in your dissertation, thesis or research project. Let’s look at each of them:

Reviewing the literature

The first step of any literature review is to hunt down and  read through the existing research  that’s relevant to your research topic. To do this, you’ll use a combination of tools (we’ll discuss some of these later) to find journal articles, books, ebooks, research reports, dissertations, theses and any other credible sources of information that relate to your topic. You’ll then  summarise and catalogue these  for easy reference when you write up your literature review chapter. 

The literature review chapter

The second step of the literature review is to write the actual literature review chapter (this is usually the second chapter in a typical dissertation or thesis structure ). At the simplest level, the literature review chapter is an  overview of the key literature  that’s relevant to your research topic. This chapter should provide a smooth-flowing discussion of what research has already been done, what is known, what is unknown and what is contested in relation to your research topic. So, you can think of it as an  integrated review of the state of knowledge  around your research topic. 

What’s the purpose of a literature review?

The literature review chapter has a few important functions within your dissertation, thesis or research project. Let’s take a look at these:

Purpose #1 – Demonstrate your topic knowledge

The first function of the literature review chapter is, quite simply, to show the reader (or marker) that you  know what you’re talking about . In other words, a good literature review chapter demonstrates that you’ve read the relevant existing research and understand what’s going on – who’s said what, what’s agreed upon, disagreed upon and so on. This needs to be  more than just a summary  of who said what – it needs to integrate the existing research to  show how it all fits together  and what’s missing (which leads us to purpose #2, next). 

Purpose #2 – Reveal the research gap that you’ll fill

The second function of the literature review chapter is to  show what’s currently missing  from the existing research, to lay the foundation for your own research topic. In other words, your literature review chapter needs to show that there are currently “missing pieces” in terms of the bigger puzzle, and that  your study will fill one of those research gaps . By doing this, you are showing that your research topic is original and will help contribute to the body of knowledge. In other words, the literature review helps justify your research topic.  

Purpose #3 – Lay the foundation for your conceptual framework

The third function of the literature review is to form the  basis for a conceptual framework . Not every research topic will necessarily have a conceptual framework, but if your topic does require one, it needs to be rooted in your literature review. 

For example, let’s say your research aims to identify the drivers of a certain outcome – the factors which contribute to burnout in office workers. In this case, you’d likely develop a conceptual framework which details the potential factors (e.g. long hours, excessive stress, etc), as well as the outcome (burnout). Those factors would need to emerge from the literature review chapter – they can’t just come from your gut! 

So, in this case, the literature review chapter would uncover each of the potential factors (based on previous studies about burnout), which would then be modelled into a framework. 

Purpose #4 – To inform your methodology

The fourth function of the literature review is to  inform the choice of methodology  for your own research. As we’ve  discussed on the Grad Coach blog , your choice of methodology will be heavily influenced by your research aims, objectives and questions . Given that you’ll be reviewing studies covering a topic close to yours, it makes sense that you could learn a lot from their (well-considered) methodologies.

So, when you’re reviewing the literature, you’ll need to  pay close attention to the research design , methodology and methods used in similar studies, and use these to inform your methodology. Quite often, you’ll be able to  “borrow” from previous studies . This is especially true for quantitative studies , as you can use previously tried and tested measures and scales. 

How do I find articles for my literature review?

Finding quality journal articles is essential to crafting a rock-solid literature review. As you probably already know, not all research is created equally, and so you need to make sure that your literature review is  built on credible research . 

We could write an entire post on how to find quality literature (actually, we have ), but a good starting point is Google Scholar . Google Scholar is essentially the academic equivalent of Google, using Google’s powerful search capabilities to find relevant journal articles and reports. It certainly doesn’t cover every possible resource, but it’s a very useful way to get started on your literature review journey, as it will very quickly give you a good indication of what the  most popular pieces of research  are in your field.

One downside of Google Scholar is that it’s merely a search engine – that is, it lists the articles, but oftentimes  it doesn’t host the articles . So you’ll often hit a paywall when clicking through to journal websites. 

Thankfully, your university should provide you with access to their library, so you can find the article titles using Google Scholar and then search for them by name in your university’s online library. Your university may also provide you with access to  ResearchGate , which is another great source for existing research. 

Remember, the correct search keywords will be super important to get the right information from the start. So, pay close attention to the keywords used in the journal articles you read and use those keywords to search for more articles. If you can’t find a spoon in the kitchen, you haven’t looked in the right drawer. 

Need a helping hand?

How should I structure my literature review?

Unfortunately, there’s no generic universal answer for this one. The structure of your literature review will depend largely on your topic area and your research aims and objectives.

You could potentially structure your literature review chapter according to theme, group, variables , chronologically or per concepts in your field of research. We explain the main approaches to structuring your literature review here . You can also download a copy of our free literature review template to help you establish an initial structure.

In general, it’s also a good idea to start wide (i.e. the big-picture-level) and then narrow down, ending your literature review close to your research questions . However, there’s no universal one “right way” to structure your literature review. The most important thing is not to discuss your sources one after the other like a list – as we touched on earlier, your literature review needs to synthesise the research , not summarise it .

Ultimately, you need to craft your literature review so that it conveys the most important information effectively – it needs to tell a logical story in a digestible way. It’s no use starting off with highly technical terms and then only explaining what these terms mean later. Always assume your reader is not a subject matter expert and hold their hand through a journe y of the literature while keeping the functions of the literature review chapter (which we discussed earlier) front of mind.

Example of a literature review

In the video below, we walk you through a high-quality literature review from a dissertation that earned full distinction. This will give you a clearer view of what a strong literature review looks like in practice and hopefully provide some inspiration for your own. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we’ve (hopefully) answered the question, “ what is a literature review? “. We’ve also considered the purpose and functions of the literature review, as well as how to find literature and how to structure the literature review chapter. If you’re keen to learn more, check out the literature review section of the Grad Coach blog , as well as our detailed video post covering how to write a literature review . 

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling short course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

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16 Comments

Thanks for this review. It narrates what’s not been taught as tutors are always in a early to finish their classes.

Thanks for the kind words, Becky. Good luck with your literature review 🙂

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Timothy T. Chol [email protected]

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This was so useful. Thank you so much.

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Great Brief Explanation, thanks

So helpful to me as a student

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This is an amazing talk. I paved way for myself as a researcher. Thank you GradCoach!

Well-presented overview of the literature!

This was brilliant. So clear. Thank you

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What is the Purpose of a Literature Review?

4-minute read

• 23rd October 2023

If you’re writing a research paper or dissertation , then you’ll most likely need to include a comprehensive literature review . In this post, we’ll review the purpose of literature reviews, why they are so significant, and the specific elements to include in one. Literature reviews can:

1. Provide a foundation for current research.

2. Define key concepts and theories.

3. Demonstrate critical evaluation.

4. Show how research and methodologies have evolved.

5. Identify gaps in existing research.

6. Support your argument.

Keep reading to enter the exciting world of literature reviews!

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a critical summary and evaluation of the existing research (e.g., academic journal articles and books) on a specific topic. It is typically included as a separate section or chapter of a research paper or dissertation, serving as a contextual framework for a study. Literature reviews can vary in length depending on the subject and nature of the study, with most being about equal length to other sections or chapters included in the paper. Essentially, the literature review highlights previous studies in the context of your research and summarizes your insights in a structured, organized format. Next, let’s look at the overall purpose of a literature review.

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Literature reviews are considered an integral part of research across most academic subjects and fields. The primary purpose of a literature review in your study is to:

Provide a Foundation for Current Research

Since the literature review provides a comprehensive evaluation of the existing research, it serves as a solid foundation for your current study. It’s a way to contextualize your work and show how your research fits into the broader landscape of your specific area of study.  

Define Key Concepts and Theories

The literature review highlights the central theories and concepts that have arisen from previous research on your chosen topic. It gives your readers a more thorough understanding of the background of your study and why your research is particularly significant .

Demonstrate Critical Evaluation 

A comprehensive literature review shows your ability to critically analyze and evaluate a broad range of source material. And since you’re considering and acknowledging the contribution of key scholars alongside your own, it establishes your own credibility and knowledge.

Show How Research and Methodologies Have Evolved

Another purpose of literature reviews is to provide a historical perspective and demonstrate how research and methodologies have changed over time, especially as data collection methods and technology have advanced. And studying past methodologies allows you, as the researcher, to understand what did and did not work and apply that knowledge to your own research.  

Identify Gaps in Existing Research

Besides discussing current research and methodologies, the literature review should also address areas that are lacking in the existing literature. This helps further demonstrate the relevance of your own research by explaining why your study is necessary to fill the gaps.

Support Your Argument

A good literature review should provide evidence that supports your research questions and hypothesis. For example, your study may show that your research supports existing theories or builds on them in some way. Referencing previous related studies shows your work is grounded in established research and will ultimately be a contribution to the field.  

Literature Review Editing Services 

Ensure your literature review is polished and ready for submission by having it professionally proofread and edited by our expert team. Our literature review editing services will help your research stand out and make an impact. Not convinced yet? Send in your free sample today and see for yourself! 

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Libraries | Research Guides

Literature reviews, what is a literature review, learning more about how to do a literature review.

• Planning the Review
• The Research Question
• Choosing Where to Search
• Organizing the Review
• Writing the Review

A literature review is a review and synthesis of existing research on a topic or research question. A literature review is meant to analyze the scholarly literature, make connections across writings and identify strengths, weaknesses, trends, and missing conversations. A literature review should address different aspects of a topic as it relates to your research question. A literature review goes beyond a description or summary of the literature you have read. 

• Sage Research Methods Core Collection This link opens in a new window SAGE Research Methods supports research at all levels by providing material to guide users through every step of the research process. SAGE Research Methods is the ultimate methods library with more than 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, and instructional videos by world-leading academics from across the social sciences, including the largest collection of qualitative methods books available online from any scholarly publisher. – Publisher

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• Last Updated: Jan 17, 2024 10:05 AM
• URL: https://libguides.northwestern.edu/literaturereviews

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What is a literature review?

A literature review is a critical analysis of the literature related to your research topic. It evaluates and critiques the literature to establish a theoretical framework for your research topic and/or identify a gap in the existing research that your research will address.

A literature review is not a summary of the literature. You need to engage deeply and critically with the literature. Your literature review should show your understanding of the literature related to your research topic and lead to presenting a rationale for your research.

A literature review focuses on:

• the context of the topic
• key concepts, ideas, theories and methodologies
• key researchers, texts and seminal works
• major issues and debates
• identifying conflicting evidence
• the main questions that have been asked around the topic
• the organisation of knowledge on the topic
• definitions, particularly those that are contested
• showing how your research will advance scholarly knowledge (generally referred to as identifying the ‘gap’).

This module will guide you through the functions of a literature review; the typical process of conducting a literature review (including searching for literature and taking notes); structuring your literature review within your thesis and organising its internal ideas; and styling the language of your literature review.

The purposes of a literature review

A literature review serves two main purposes:

1) To show awareness of the present state of knowledge in a particular field, including:

• seminal authors
• the main empirical research
• theoretical positions
• controversies
• breakthroughs as well as links to other related areas of knowledge.

2) To provide a foundation for the author’s research. To do that, the literature review needs to:

• help the researcher define a hypothesis or a research question, and how answering the question will contribute to the body of knowledge;
• provide a rationale for investigating the problem and the selected methodology;
• provide a particular theoretical lens, support the argument, or identify gaps.

Before you engage further with this module, try the quiz below to see how much you already know about literature reviews.

Research and Writing Skills for Academic and Graduate Researchers Copyright © 2022 by RMIT University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Research Guides

How to Write a Literature Review

What's a literature review.

• Literature Reviews: A Recap
• Reading Journal Articles
• Does it Describe a Literature Review?
• 1. Identify the Question
• 2. Review Discipline Styles
• Searching Article Databases
• Finding Full-Text of an Article
• Citation Chaining
• When to Stop Searching
• 4. Manage Your References
• 5. Critically Analyze and Evaluate
• 6. Synthesize
• 7. Write a Literature Review

What's a Literature Review? 

A literature review (or "lit review," for short) is an in-depth critical analysis of published scholarly research related to a specific topic. Published scholarly research (aka, "the literature") may include journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations and thesis, or conference proceedings. 

A solid lit review must:

• be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you're developing
• synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known
• identify areas of controversy in the literature
• formulate questions that need further research

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Library Guide to Capstone Literature Reviews: Role of the Literature Review

The role of the literature review.

Your literature review gives readers an understanding of the scholarly research on your topic.

In your literature review you will:

• demonstrate that you are a well-informed scholar with expertise and knowledge in the field by giving an overview of the current state of the literature
• find a gap in the literature, or address a business or professional issue, depending on your doctoral study program; the literature review will illustrate how your research contributes to the scholarly conversation
• provide a synthesis of the issues, trends, and concepts surrounding your research

Be aware that the literature review is an iterative process. As you read and write initial drafts, you will find new threads and complementary themes, at which point you will return to search, find out about these new themes, and incorporate them into your review.

The purpose of this guide is to help you through the literature review process. Take some time to look over the resources in order to become familiar with them. The tabs on the left side of this page have additional information.

Short video: Research for the Literature Review

Short Video: Research for the Literature Review

(4 min 10 sec) Recorded August 2019 Transcript 

Literature review as a dinner party

To think about the role of the literature review, consider this analogy:  pretend that you throw a dinner party for the other researchers working in your topic area. First, you’d need to develop a guest list.

• The guests of honor would be early researchers or theorists; their work likely inspired subsequent studies, ideas, or controversies that the current researchers pursue.
• Then, think about the important current researchers to invite. Which guests might agree with each other?  Which others might provide useful counterpoints?
• You likely won’t be able to include everyone on the guest list, so you may need to choose carefully so that you don’t leave important figures out. 
• Alternatively, if there aren’t many researchers working in your topic area, then your guest list will need to include people working in other, related areas, who can still contribute to the conversation.

After the party, you describe the evening to a friend. You’ll summarize the evening’s conversation. Perhaps one guest made a comment that sparked a conversation, and then you describe who responded and how the topic evolved. There are other conversations to share, too. This is how you synthesize the themes and developments that you find in your research. Thinking about your literature research this way will help you to present your dinner party (and your literature review) in a lively and engaging way.

Short video: Empirical research

Video: How to locate and identify empirical research for your literature review

(6 min 16 sec) Recorded May 2020 Transcript 

Here are some useful resources from the Writing Center, the Office of Research and Doctoral Services, and other departments within the Office of Academic Support. Take some time to look at what is available to help you with your capstone/dissertation.

• Familiarize yourself with Walden support
• Doctoral Capstone Resources website
• Capstone writing resources
• Office of Student Research Administration
• Office of Research and Doctoral Services
• Visit the Writing Center

You can watch recorded webinars on the literature review in our Library Webinar Archives .

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What is Literature Review? Importance, Functions, Process,

• Post last modified: 13 August 2023
• Reading time: 12 mins read
• Post category: Research Methodology

What is Literature Review?

A literature review is a critical and comprehensive analysis of existing research, studies, articles, books, and other relevant sources on a specific topic or subject. It serves as a foundational step in the research process, helping researchers understand the current state of knowledge, identify gaps in the literature, and establish a context for their own study.

Table of Content

• 1 What is Literature Review?
• 2 Importance of a Literature Review
• 3 Functions of a Literature Review
• 4.1 Search the Existing Literature in Your Field of Interest
• 4.2 Review the Literature Obtained
• 4.3 Develop a Theoretical Framework
• 4.4 Write the Literature Review
• 5 How to Write a Literature Review
• 6 Types of Sources for Review

In most research reports or research papers, you will see that literature review is an essential element and it forms the basis for advancing knowledge, facilitates theory development, discovers new research areas and closes old ones. When researchers want to understand the management dilemma, they study various books, articles and all other available sources.

In the research reports, the researchers present a summary of their search, study and evaluation of the literature that is already available related to the research topic. When the researcher presents a summary of their study of present literature in addition to their analysis of how this literature is related to or essential for the current research report; then, this process is known as literature review.

For example, in a research paper titled ‘Attrition Analysis in a Leading Sales Organisation in India’, authored by Mamta Mohapatra (International Management Institute, New Delhi, India), Amisha Gupta (Birlasoft, New Delhi, India) and Nikita Lamba (Genpact, New Delhi, India), literature review is presented as follows:

Organisations and researchers usually conduct literature review in order to establish how their own research fits within the context of existing literature.

Apart from these, some other objectives of carrying out literature review are:

• Develop an understanding of how each source of literature helps in understanding the research problem
• Examine the interrelationships among different variables
• Find out ways to interpret earlier similar researches on the topic under study
• Rectify the conflicts that exist among previously conducted studies
• Get an idea regarding the required sample size
• Get an estimate of how much variance is there in the variables of interest
• Understand the type of relationship that exists among variables
• Determine the research method that can be used in the research

Importance of a Literature Review

There are various reasons for carrying out literature review. Majorly, literature review helps in:

• Assessing the current state and level of research on a given topic
• Identifying experts related to particular research
• Identifying questions that need further research and exploration
• Identifying what methodologies have been used in the related past studies and what methodology should be used in current research
• Justifying a proposed research methodology
• Indicating the originality and relevance of the given research problem
• Demonstrating the preparedness of a researcher to complete the research

Functions of a Literature Review

Some of the major functions of literature review are:

• Establishing a context for the research
• Demonstrating that the researcher has actually read related literature extensively and is aware of most theory and methodology related to the given research topic
• Providing a shape for the research under consideration
• Establishing a connection between what the researcher is proposing and what he has already read
• Demonstrating how the findings of researcher can be integrated with the already existing research findings.
• Revealing the differences or areas of gap between present and earlier research findings
• Improving researcher’s research methodology
• Expanding researcher’s knowledge base
• Ensuring that the researcher is carrying out new research that has not been carried out earlier

Process of a Literature Review

The second step in the research process is to carry out the review of already existing literature. Before engaging in literature review, the researcher must be clear as to what is the area and topic of research. There are four steps involved in the literature review process as shown in Figure:

Search the Existing Literature in Your Field of Interest

In the literature review process, the first step is to find out what research has already been done in the area that the researcher has chosen. This step involves preparing a list or bibliography of existing sources of relevant literature such as books, journals, abstracts of articles on your research topic, citation indices and digital libraries.

Review the Literature Obtained

After the researcher has identified related literature including journals, books, research papers, etc.; the next step is to study, evaluate and analyse the literature critically. This study of literature helps a researcher identify themes and issues related to the research topic.

An evaluation of literature helps in:

• Identifying the different theories and their criticism
• Identifying different methodologies used in different studies including their sample size, data used, measurement methods
• Assessing if the researcher’s theory is confirmed beyond doubt
• Preparing a list of different opinions of different researchers and researcher should also add his/her opinion about the validity of these different opinions

Develop a Theoretical Framework

Since carrying out literature review is a time-consuming activity but the researcher has to do it within a limited time. In order to do so, the researcher usually establishes a boundary and parameters for the research work. Also, the researcher must sort information obtained from all the sources of literature. For a researcher, the theoretical framework acts as a base on which he can further or extend his research. At times, the researchers may modify their research framework after analysing the available literature.

Write the Literature Review

The last step in literature review is to make a summary of all the literature that the researcher has studied and reviewed. Usually, writing a literature review starts with a write-up on the main theme of research followed by the important ideas on which the research would focus. After this, the all the major themes and sub-themes to be discussed are organised and related. This will help the researcher in structuring the literature review. The researcher should also identify and describe the theories and studies that are relevant for the study under consideration. The researcher should then list and describe all the gaps that are present in the current body of knowledge. In addition, the researcher may also explain the recent advances and trends in the given research field. To conclude, the researcher should compare and evaluate his findings on the basis of research assumptions, related research theories, hypotheses, applied research designs, variables selected and potential future work speculated by the researchers. Finally, the researcher must acknowledge, cite and quote all the sources that he/she has used in his research. One specific characteristic of literature review is that the researcher must ensure that he gives due credit to all people who have contributed in the research work.

How to Write a Literature Review

While writing the literature review, the researcher must adopt or adhere to certain strategies as follows:

• Establish a focus around the central theme and ideas of the research
• Describe what a reader can expect from the given research study
• Organise the literature research to include basic elements such as introduction, body and conclusions

Types of Sources for Review

A researcher usually uses secondary data for literature review. Some of the major and widely used sources for literature reviews include articles in professional journals, statistical data from government websites and website material from professional organisations.

Apart from the previously mentioned sources, certain other sources of data can also be used by researchers that provide them first-hand information that is important for the study. These sources include reports, theses, emails, letters, conference proceedings, company reports, autobiographies, official reports, research articles, etc.

Apart from these, the researcher may also refer to other such as review articles, academic journals, books, newspapers, documentaries, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, bibliographies and citation indexes.

Business Ethics

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• What is Ethics?
• What is Business Ethics?
• Values, Norms, Beliefs and Standards in Business Ethics
• Indian Ethos in Management
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• What is Corporate Governance?
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• What is Corporate Ethics?

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• Six Sigma Implementation at Ford
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• What is Research?
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Application of Business Research

• Levels of Measurement
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• What is Coordination?
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Operations Research

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• What is Service?
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Procurement Management

• What is Procurement Management?
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• Transportation and Logistics Strategy
• What is Capital Equipment?
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• What is E-Procurement?
• E-marketplace and Online Catalogues
• Fixed Price and Cost Reimbursement Contracts
• Contract Cancellation in Procurement
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• Intermediaries and Countertrade in Procurement

Strategic Management

• What is Strategic Management?
• What is Value Chain Analysis?
• Mission Statement
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• What is SWOT Analysis?
• What is Competitive Advantage?
• What is Vision?
• What is Ansoff Matrix?
• Prahalad and Gary Hammel
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• What is Competitive Rivalry?
• Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy
• What is PESTLE Analysis?
• Fragmentation and Consolidation Of Industries
• What is Technology Life Cycle?
• What is Diversification Strategy?
• What is Corporate Restructuring Strategy?
• Resources and Capabilities of Organization
• Role of Leaders In Functional-Level Strategic Management
• Functional Structure In Functional Level Strategy Formulation
• Information And Control System
• What is Strategy Gap Analysis?
• Issues In Strategy Implementation
• Matrix Organizational Structure
• What is Strategic Management Process?

Supply Chain

• What is Supply Chain Management?
• Supply Chain Planning and Measuring Strategy Performance
• What is Warehousing?
• What is Packaging?
• What is Inventory Management?
• What is Material Handling?
• What is Order Picking?
• Receiving and Dispatch, Processes
• What is Warehouse Design?
• What is Warehousing Costs?

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What is a related work? A typology of relationships in research literature

Shayan doroudi.

School of Education, University of California, Irvine, 401 E. Peltason Drive, Suite 3200, Irvine, CA 92617 USA

Associated Data

An important part of research is situating one’s work in a body of existing literature, thereby connecting to existing ideas. Despite this, the various kinds of relationships that might exist among academic literature do not appear to have been formally studied. Here I present a graphical representation of academic work in terms of entities and relations, drawing on structure-mapping theory (used in the study of analogies). I then use this representation to present a typology of operations that could relate two pieces of academic work. I illustrate the various types of relationships with examples from medicine, physics, psychology, history and philosophy of science, machine learning, education, and neuroscience. The resulting typology not only gives insights into the relationships that might exist between static publications, but also the rich process whereby an ongoing research project evolves through interactions with the research literature.

Introduction

An important part of the research process is literature search: identifying prior work that is of relevance to the present idea being investigated. In many cases, this is an activity that a researcher may defer until writing up the results of the project, in which case, it is primarily an activity one does because one “has to” rather than an activity that can substantially change the course of the research. In some cases, whether due to negligence or the difficulty of finding related works, a researcher may never come across the fact that someone had previously tackled the same problem or made a similar discovery, and perhaps only years later (if ever) it may be realized (Merton, 1963 ; Ke et al., 2015 ; Sacks, 2002 ). But at its best, this is an activity that leads to new insights into the research problem, generates new ideas, and alters the course of the research. In fact, in some cases, searching for related work can become the research process itself; through connecting various pieces of research literature alone, one can discover previously undiscovered public knowledge (Swanson, 1986 ).

Despite the importance of prior literature in the research process, there has been little effort, if any, dedicated to developing a typology of related works, that is, a typology of relationships that might exist among different pieces of research literature. (Of course, it is entirely possible that such a typology has been constructed, but I have missed it due to an inadequate search of the literature!) In this paper, I propose such a typology to help us better understand the kinds of prior work that might have bearing on a research project. I first present a form of knowledge representation that can theoretically be used to represent any piece of research literature or research project. I then present a typology of relationships that can connect two pieces of research in terms of operations that can apply to the two representations, thereby resulting in a representation of the relationship. I will demonstrate the various operations and how they might be employed with a variety of examples from different fields, including medicine, physics, psychology, history and philosophy of science, machine learning, education, and neuroscience. The same form of representation applies to both published research literature and research projects or topics, whether nascent or fully-fledged. In fact, some of the relationships discussed below make more sense in the context of research projects (or broader research agendas) that can dynamically evolve as relevant literature is encountered, rather than research papers whose underlying representations are static. As such, I will use the terms publication, literature, project, and topic somewhat interchangeably.

The specific representation I use is borrowed from structure-mapping theory (Gentner, 1983 ; Falkenhainer et al., 1989 ), which was originally developed as a way to structurally represent analogies. Structure-mapping theory is particularly useful here, both because we can use it when discussing abstractions and analogies, and because the underlying representation can also handle other types of relationships among literature. I could have instead used other forms of knowledge representation, such as conceptual graphs (Sowa, 1976 ), entailment meshes (Pask et al., 1975 ; Pask, 1988 ), or category theoretic representations like ologs (Spivak & Kent, 2012 ). There may be relative advantages to each of these, but the representation used here is both simple and powerful enough to clearly demonstrate the typology. The exact choice of representation may need further consideration if one wants to perform inference on the representations or utilize them in information retrieval tools. For now, we are not concerned with how one might construct these representations or even the fidelity with which it is possible (though we revisit these questions in Sect. 6 ). The possibility that research projects could in theory be represented in the way described below is sufficient to formulate the typology.

While the form of representation and typology presented below may not be directly used in information retrieval tools, I contend that they may be useful in guiding the overall direction that research on such tools might take (e.g., what kinds of papers should a tool search for?). Moreover, the typology may provide some clarity to researchers going through the literature search process for a project. Constructing a graphical representation of one’s paper may be a useful exercise, and can possibly illuminate different searches that are needed to find related work. Seeing how the representation of one’s paper changes over time can also be a useful documentation of the research and literature search process. Beyond such potential practical uses of the typology, I believe it can simply be beneficial to understand the various ways in which one product of research may relate to another. If alongside the physical and social worlds, the world of research literature “also qualifies as an endless frontier” (Swanson, 1986 , p. 115), then our efforts to make sense of the former should be accompanied by efforts to make sense of the latter.

Related work on related work

Related work on related work exists in a number of different disciplines. Literature search is central to all research after all! Fittingly, the typology we develop combines research that exists in different, largely isolated, strands.

In the information sciences and medicine, work on “literature-based discovery” (LBD), dating back to Swanson ( 1986 ), is concerned with making new scientific discoveries by establishing novel connections between different pieces of literature. Swanson ( 1986 ) describes literature-based discovery as a form of scientific discovery that takes place in Karl Popper’s world 3—the “world of the products of the human mind” (Popper, 1978 , p. 144)—whereby search functions are likened to scientific theories and the “logic of undiscovered public knowledge” (p. 116) is analogous to the logic of scientific discovery. In doing so, Swanson ( 1986 ) made a contribution to the philosophy of science, though it seems to have not been recognized in the philosophy of science community. A number of different information-retrieval techniques have been proposed to aid in LBD (Smalheiser, 2017 ; Sebastian et al., 2017 ). Some authors have presented categorizations of different types of “undiscovered public knowledge” or different forms of LBD (Davies, 1989 ; Smalheiser, 2017 ). While these categorizations can be useful in aiding researchers who want to perform literature-based discovery, our typology has a somewhat broader scope in that not all related work necessarily results in LBD. LBD is one potential use case of literature search, and its various methods span across the relationships in the typology presented here, as discussed below.

More broadly, in information retrieval, the notion of “relevance” is central, and some researchers have tried to develop theories around what relevance is—typically conceived of as the relationship between an information need and a document (Saracevic, 1975 , 2016 ; Huang & Soergel, 2013 ). Green ( 1995 ) and Huang and Soergel ( 2013 ) pointed out that most discussions of relevance are around “topic matching,” but that this is only one form of relevance. Green and Bean ( 1995 ) then constructed a typology of different notions of relevance, and Huang ( 2009 ) expanded this to a typology consisting of over 200 notions of relevance. Huang ( 2009 ) considers three broad categories of relationships: (1) “What functional role a piece of information plays in the overall structure of a topic,” (2) “How information contributes to users’ reasoning about a topic,” and (3) “How information connects to a topic semantically” (p. 411). As examples of functional roles, an information source might present a solution to a problem, the cause of an effect, etc. As examples of contributing to reasoning, an information source might provide an analogy to the topic or might be used to deduce something about the topic. While this work is very relevant to the present paper, there are two key differences. First, their work is about the broader concept of relevance between information and needs, while this paper focuses on relevance in academic literature. One would expect that many of the kinds of broader relevance typologies would also hold for research publications, but given the particularities of literature search and the role it plays in the broader process of scientific research, it seems worth studying in its own right. Second, these prior typologies largely focus on the variety of semantic relationships between two topics, while the approach we present here views relevance in terms of operations that operate on knowledge representations of topics. In this sense, the typology I present here can express how to relate different research topics in terms of a small number of mathematically precise operations (that are hopefully easy to remember), rather than a plethora of different possible semantic relationships. The two approaches are complementary, but I contend that the approach taken here is more useful for conceptualizing the evolution of a research project over time.

In computer science and artificial intelligence, there has been a recent thread of work on citation recommendation, concerned with identifying relevant citations given a piece of text and possibly other meta-data (e.g., authors, etc.) (Strohman et al., 2007 ; Liang et al., 2011 ; Ren et al., 2014 ; Bhagavatula et al., 2018 ). Interestingly, this work has not really considered automated techniques for LBD, and it does not cite the vast literature on LBD or on relevance. Indeed, most of the work in this area is concerned with topic matching (finding citations that topically overlap). One notable exception is work by Chan et al. ( 2018 ) and Kang et al. ( 2022 ). Chan et al. ( 2018 ) presented a technique that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to find analogies between different papers. They utilize a “soft” relational schema, a very coarse-grained representation of a research paper; they explicitly avoid using representations like the one described below, because they can be very difficult to construct for many publications. Kang et al. ( 2022 ) built on this work by training deep learning algorithms on the crowdsourced representations of abstracts to be able to automatically detect the “purpose” and “mechanism” of a paper. An analogy in this context is two papers that have a similar underlying purpose but achieve that purpose through a different mechanism. Kang et al. ( 2022 ) used this to prototype an analogical search engine for scientific literature. While their representation may be useful for LBD, I contend that it can only capture certain kinds of relationships between papers, and, as I discuss further below, some of their methods do not appear to actually look for analogies as per the typology we develop below. As such, our typology can potentially be useful in classifying the different kinds of relationships that various existing LBD and citation recommendation methods can uncover, and the kinds of relationships that they cannot.

A representation of a research project

In our representation, a research project or publication P ∈ Π is represented as a set of entities and relations, P = ( E , R ) . An entity conceptually represents any specific topic of relevance to the project, usually expressed as a noun or a noun phrase (e.g., DNA, the civil rights movement, high blood pressure, theorems). Notice that entities can come in different degrees of specificity (e.g., theorems vs. Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem); the important thing is that entities across all topics and publications are represented at the same level of granularity. We allow entities to be hierarchically defined as functions of other entities (e.g., the entity “volume of a cup” can be thought of as the “volume of” function applied to “cup”).

Relations define a relationship between some number of entities, such that the predicate R ( e 1 , e 2 , ⋯ , e n ) indicates that e 1 , e 2 , ..., e n are related as specified by the relation R . Binary relations are perhaps the most common. For example, in the sentence “stress causes high blood pressure”, “causes” is a relation that takes relates two entities (in this case, “stress” and “high blood pressure”). We might represent this as causes (stress, high blood pressure). As an example of a tertiary relation, consider the sentences “ribosomes translate mRNA into sequences of amino acids” and “Arab translators translated Greek texts into Arabic translations”; they could both be said to use the relation x-translates-y-into-z (though if we think the word “translates” has a very different semantic meaning in these two cases, we could suggest there are two different relations at play here). We also allow for unary relations; for example, “blood pressure is high” can be represented as is-high (blood pressure). Unary relations are called attributes in structure-mapping theory and they effectively allow assigning adjectives to entities; for example, high (blood pressure) would mean “high blood pressure.” With slight abuse of notation, I will use unary relations both as relations (e.g., is-high (blood pressure)) and as attributes (e.g., high (blood pressure)). Finally, we allow for higher-order relations, which take relations as input instead of, or in addition to, entities. causes is a higher-order relation because we can say, for example, causes ( provided ( treatment (subjects), New Curriculum), learn-more-than ( treatment (subjects), control (subjects))).

As with Gentner’s ( 1983 ) structure-mapping theory, the classification of relationships between research has more to do with the structure of the representation (i.e., the presence of certain entities and relations) rather than the semantic meaning of the nodes. However, semantics still play an important role in informing whether a particular relationship is sensible or important in a particular situation. That is, someone without a semantic understanding of a given domain can still apply the operators described below in the sense that one can execute 4 + 7 and 4 × 7 , without regard to which operation makes more sense in the given situation. Furthermore, one aspect of semantics is necessary in the application of some of the operators. Namely, there is a general relation, “is a” (or “is an instance of”), which can capture any situation where a particular entity can be categorized as a special case or instance of another entity. Consistent with earlier work on knowledge representation, we will refer to this relation as is-a (Brachman, 1983 ). For example, is-a (Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem, theorem) and is-a (the civil rights movement, historical occurrence). A single entity can be an instance of many entities (e.g., a cat can be considered an animal, a pet, and an Internet phenomenon). The is-a operator is also reflexive (e.g., is-a (cat, cat)). Finally, with slight abuse of notation, we will also have is-a be a higher-order relation that can designate when one relation is an instance of another. For example, is-a ( holds (person, ball), possesses (person, object)), because holding something is a special case of possessing it and a ball is an object. Some of the operators below can only be applied with an understanding of what things are instances of other things; however, when the relationship is more abstract, sometimes even a domain expert will not readily see these connections.

The set of entities and relations that are used in the representation of a research publication will likely not include all entities and relations included in that publication (e.g., all nouns and verbs), but rather they should include the concepts that are focal to that publication. Of course, that is somewhat subjective, but a useful heuristic is to include all entities and relations that are involved in a system of relationships that might be worth providing citations in reference to, as well as any new entities and relations that are being introduced in the paper. For example, in a paper that runs an experiment with seven conditions, the number of seven is probably not an entity that should be included, but in Miller’s ( 1956 ) paper on working memory capacity or a paper on the religious symbolism of the number seven, it likely should be included.

As suggested above, there is no single correct way to represent a research project. In fact, there can be multiple different views of a research project, which induce different representations. Each of these views can be more or less useful depending on how they are to be used. Moreover, even simple relations can be expressed in different ways. For our purposes, there is a relationship between two research projects if there is at least some view of each that permits the relationship. Since we are not concerned with the practical side of how to best represent projects here, we do not worry about how one would go about discovering the “right” views. In practice though, seeing two related papers from the “wrong” viewpoint is one reason why researchers and information retrieval tools might not notice an important relationship.

We can represent these representations graphically using a graph-like structure as shown in Fig.  1 a. Boxes indicate entities, and the text outside of boxes indicate relations. The arrows coming out of a relation point to its arguments in order from left to right. Nested boxes (e.g., “some part of a new thing”) show hierarchically defined entities. For simplicity, we show binary relations as labeled directed edges for asymmetric relations and labeled undirected edges for symmetric relations, as shown in Fig.  1 b.

Examples of how to graphically represent research projects/publications. a An example of a tertiary relation with three entities that would be read as “An old thing can become some part of a new thing through some process.” There are also two unary relations: is-old and is-new . b Two examples of binary relations. The causes relation is asymmetric while the correlated relation is symmetric

This representation could be couched in the language of model-theoretic philosophy of science (Suppes, 1957 , 1960 ), in particular using the partial structures formalism (French, 2000 ; Da Costa & French, 1990 ), which is also often expressed in terms of entities and (partial) relations. Doing so may be appealing since it would connect literature search to an existing framework for discussing scientific theories. The partial structures formalism has also been used in describing analogies and abstractions in science and provides a way to formalize research undergoing change. However, the ideas presented here not only apply to formal scientific theories, but also to non-scientific literature and more nascent representations of scientific topics, and I do not want to associate the typology presented here with a particular interpretation of scientific theories.

A typology of related works

We can now describe the different kinds of relationships that can exist between a research project and prior work. Suppose we have a research project P = ( E P , R P ) and a piece of literature L = ( E L , R L ) . We assume that P is an ongoing project that can potentially change, while L is already published literature and hence static. Below we describe a set of operations that can be used to describe the relationship between P and L . These operations are functions that take the representations of P and L as inputs and output a representation ρ of the relationship between P and L (as defined by the operation). Since we allow for composing these operations in sequence, some of the operations will actually take as input P , L , and our current representation of the relationship between the two ( ρ i ), and will output a modified representation of the relationship ( ρ i + 1 ). Moreover, when applying multiple operations in sequence, we may want to keep track of the ongoing relationship, which we can do by merging multiple relationships (i.e., taking the union of entities and the union of relations in the sequence of relationships). After each operation is applied, we can also potentially modify P 1 , thereby modifying the relationship between P and L as well. The series of operations and modifications reflects the iterative and influential nature of literature search in the research process. The operations, described below, are called intersection, interpretation, expansion, abstraction, reification, analogy, and substitution. Table  1 lists some basic information about the operations, which may be useful when reading the sections below. I do not make any claims that the typology presented here is complete. There might be other operations, or perhaps more useful categorizations of the operations presented here, which can be elucidated upon in future work. In what follows, I will describe each of the operators in words as well as mathematical formalism when needed; readers can safely skip the mathematical formalism and still grasp the key ideas.

A list of the operations in the typology along with their inputs and outputs

For the meaning of the terms used in the Output column, see the appropriate section

Intersection

The first and probably most prevalent operation is intersection , which outputs a subset of entities that are shared by P and L and a subset of relations shared by the two. Specifically, intersection outputs a representation ρ = ( E PL , R PL ) , where E PL ⊆ E P ∩ E L and R PL ⊆ R P ∩ R L . The exact subset depends on what is determined to be relevant between the two representations. A simple special case of this would be when P and L share just a single entity. For example, suppose P and L both have to do with DNA, but one is about DNA to solve computational problems (Adleman, 1994 ) and the other is about DNA vaccines for coronavirus (Callaway, 2020 ). It is unlikely that these publications have other entities in common. In many such cases, publications are not worth citing, and such an intersection would actually not be relevant. A relationship is worth noting when the degree of overlap is large enough; this can be measured by associating some degree of importance to each entity in P and taking the sum (or some non-linear function) of importances across all the entities in ρ .

In some cases, overlap in a single entity may be enough to warrant citation or even to alter the course of a research project. For example, one of the examples that Swanson ( 1986 ) gives for undiscovered public knowledge has to do with a potential research publication on the “all swans are white hypothesis,” a hypothesis that states that all swans are white. This hypothesis could be supported inductively if there was a lack of any documented evidence of black swans. As Swanson ( 1986 ) says:

Suppose for the sake of argument that scientists living in a remote part of the world were to publish, in a local wildlife journal, some observations about a family of black swans living on a nearby lake. We suppose further that the report comes from a half-dozen people who are reliable observers, and that they are unaware that other people in the world think that all swans are white. (p. 109)

As shown in Fig.  2 , the potential all-swans-are-white hypothesis publication ( P ) is represented using three entities and two relations, although it can be interpreted as two entities and the relationship between them (“the all-swans-are-white hypothesis is proved by the fact that there is no evidence of black swans”); on the other hand, the article in the wildlife journal ( L ) only concerns itself with black swans and possibly other topics of local interest. As such, the two articles overlap in only one entity: black swans. It just so happens that the existence of black swans is a critical refutation of the theory (i.e., “evidence of black swans” is a very important entity in P ), and so this single article can change the course of the research project (e.g., the authors publish a refutation of the all-swans-are-white hypothesis rather than a proclamation of it).

Swanson’s ( 1986 ) black swans example as an example of intersection

Notice that the intersection of the two articles was “black swans” not “evidence of black swans.” (The wildlife journal is not trying to present evidence of black swans; it is discussing a piece of wildlife whose existence they never called into question.) The intersection of “black swans” by itself is not necessarily meaningful. Another paper that discusses black swans but provides no evidence for them is of less value to P . How then can we capture the obvious fact that L presents evidence of black swans, even though it is not captured in its representation? The answer lies in the interpretation operation.

Interpretation

An interpretation takes an existing relationship between P and L and adds additional entities and/or relations from P (not included in L ) that can help interpret the current relationship. Namely, if ρ i = ( E ρ i , R ρ i ) is the output of a previous operation, then ρ i + 1 = ( E ρ i ∪ E PS , R ρ i ∪ R PS ) , where E PS ⊆ E P \ E L and R PS ⊆ R P \ R L . (I use PS and LS as subscripts to denote subsets of P and L .) A natural use of interpretation is to apply it after an intersection. For example, in the black swans example above, we can interpret the intersection of P and L as being “evidence of black swans.” Clearly, L does present evidence of black swans, but it was not interpreted that way until it was interpreted in light of P . Notice that if a researcher conducting project P were to construct the representation of L , they might do so according to their interpretation, whereby “evidence of black swans” would appear in L . Therefore, interpretation steps may often be implicit or hidden in the particular view of L that a researcher adopts. In this paper, I try to represent prior work in a way that is faithful to the original authors’ meaning, though we must recognize that views of prior work will always be informed by our worldview.

An expansion takes an existing relationship between P and L and adds additional entities and/or relations from L (not included in P ) to potentially expand the content of P or to bring new insights into the picture. Notice that structurally, the expansion operation is equivalent to the interpretation operation with P and L swapped; however, semantically, the two are often quite different. An expansion will often result in a change in P . As a result, it makes the most sense when P is an ongoing research topic (or a follow-up investigation to published work), rather than a final publication. Once P has changed to P ′ to incorporate the new entities and relations, what was once an expansion between P and L may be viewed as an intersection between P ′ and L . Therefore expansions play developmental roles in the research process, which are often not captured in publications. That is, many research projects may have changed course as a result of particular publications, but the final publication may only refer to the relationship to prior work at the time of publication, rather than the developmental influence of that prior work.

For example, in the related works section above, I acknowledged connections to Chan et al. ( 2018 ); these connections would be viewed as intersections (e.g., both papers have to do with academic literature, analogies, knowledge representation, etc.). However, what I did not state was that reading Chan et al. ( 2018 ) led me to read about structure-mapping theory (Gentner, 1983 ), and the two publications combined (and considered in relation to Swanson ( 1986 )) resulted in the beginnings of this paper. That is, before this paper was even conceived of, the aforementioned prior works resulted in a series of expansions, which turned into the present piece only after many iterations, which involved a series of other operations applied to various publications (some of which are cited, and some of which may not be). This reflects the role of literature search in the messy process that is research. I suspect that researchers rarely document the series of expansions (and other steps) that lead to the final state of a publication.

In fact, at times, some prior work may only play the role of a stepping stone to discovering other, more relevant, prior works. That is, an expansion of P by L 1 may result in an exploration of the new entities in the expansion, which results in discovering L 2 , which intersects with P . At that point, L 1 may no longer really be relevant; that is, the extent of L 1 ’s relevance may be better captured by L 2 .

One broad category of expansions falls under Swanson’s ( 1986 ) second example—“A Missing Link in the Logic of Discovery” or what is often referred to as the ABC model. As Swanson ( 1986 ) originally expressed it:

Suppose the following two reports are published separately and independently, the authors of each report being unaware of the other report: (i) a report that process A causes the result B, and (ii) a separate report that B causes the result C. It follows of course that A leads to, causes, or implies C. That is, the proposition that A causes C objectively exists, at least as a hypothesis. (p. 110)

Swanson gave a specific example of a discovery he made (the first of his several literature-based discoveries in medicine): connecting (a) literature on how fish oil causes a reduction of blood viscosity with (b) literature on how reducing blood viscosity leads to an improvement in symptoms of Raynaud’s syndrome. The intersection of these two literatures is the entity “reduction of blood viscosity.” An expansion adds the causal link to “relief from Raynaud’s syndrome” and that link is then interpreted in light of the connection to “dietary fish oil.” Connecting these two literatures via these steps can result in a change in P as shown in Fig.  3 . Notice that the addition of a new causal relation between dietary fish oil and relief from Raynaud’s syndrome was inferred from this expansion, but had never been experimentally shown or even published about. Two years later, a clinical trial independently confirmed this hypothesis (Swanson & Smalheiser, 1996 ).

Swanson’s ( 1986 ) example of the ABC model as an example of expansion

Literature-based discovery often involves this kind of linking between two “non-interactive literatures,” literatures that are rarely, if ever, cited in the same publications (Swanson & Smalheiser, 1996 ). However, expansion need not always be between two non-interactive literatures. Indeed, researchers may often be unaware of highly relevant work within their own research community (or other interactive literatures) that build upon the concepts they are investigating. Such cases can often be caught by the researchers themselves when conducting a more expansive literature review, or by reviewers during the peer review process, but likely often go undetected.

Abstraction

An abstraction applies if P contains a subset of entities and relations that are instances of entities and relations in L . In other words, we have an abstraction when L contains a more abstract or generalized representation of part of P . An abstraction can still consist of concrete entities and relations as long as they are more general or more abstract than the entities and relations in P (e.g., as suggested above is-a (cat, animal), is-a (cat, Internet phenomenon), and is-a (the civil rights movement, historical occurrence) can all be single entity abstractions).

Describing an abstraction mathematically requires a bit more care than for previous operations since abstractions must be semantically “consistent” across the entities and relations involved. Formally, an abstraction applies if there is a subset of entities and relations in P —say E PS ⊆ E P and R PS ⊆ R P —and a subset of entities and relations in L —say E LS ⊆ E L and R LS ⊆ R L —such that the following four conditions hold:

• For all e ∈ E PS , there exists a e ~ ∈ E LS such that e is an instance of e ~ .
• For all R ∈ R PS , there exists a R ~ ∈ R LS such that R is an instance of R ~ .
• For all R ∈ R PS , if R ( e 1 , e 2 , ⋯ , e n ) , then R ~ ( e ~ 1 , e ~ 2 , ⋯ , e ~ n ) , where R , e 1 , ⋯ , e n are instances of R ~ , e ~ , 1 ⋯ , e ~ n respectively.
• At least some e ≠ e ~ or some R ≠ R ~ .

The last condition is required to make sure the abstraction is not simply mapping identical representations (in which case it would just be an intersection). The resulting representation is ρ = ( E PS ∪ E LS , R PS ∪ R LS ∪ I S - A ) , where I S - A ( e , e ~ ) and I S - A ( R ( e 1 , e 2 , ⋯ , e n ) , R ~ ( e ~ 1 , e ~ 2 , ⋯ , e ~ n ) ) , for all e , e ~ , R , and R ~ as defined in the conditions above.

Abstractions need not be profound. Consider the black swans example again. The way I presented it above was actually a bit disingenuous: black swans are not the only evidence that disproves the all-swans-are-white hypothesis; any non-white swans would. Thus it might be more accurate to replace the “black swans” entity with “non-white swans” in Fig.  2 a. The relationship between P and L then first involves an abstraction (instead of an intersection)—namely is-a (black swans, non-white swans)—followed by an interpretation, as shown in Fig.  4 . This is a rather trivial kind of abstraction, which likely happens all the time when interpreting prior work in the context of current work.

The black swans example revisited. The relationship between P and L is now an interpretation of an abstraction of L . Notice that we used “are” instead of “is a” simply because the entities are expressed in plural

A more substantial form of abstraction is whenever P reports on empirical findings that can be subsumed into an existing theory described by L . For example, if researchers find that students in a collaborative problem-solving activity learned more than students who were working on the activity on their own, then they might see the ICAP hypothesis (Chi & Wylie, 2014 ), which posits that interactive learning is better than constructive learning, as an abstraction.

Finally, perhaps the most interesting (but also rarest) form of abstraction is when a body of research is interpreted or a problem is solved using some abstract formalism or framework that exists in the literature (often in a different field). For example, a notable example in the history of science is the introduction of group theory to quantum mechanics to solve certain problems related to symmetry (French, 2000 ; Scholz, 2006 ). According to French ( 2000 ):

the relationship between mathematics and physics is represented in terms of an embedding of a scientific theory into a mathematical structure. This effectively gives the theory access to ‘surplus’ mathematical structure which can play an essential role in the further development of theory. (p. 104)

This “surplus structure”—a term originally from Redhead ( 1975 )—is represented in our typology by expansion steps that can follow the abstraction. Namely, once a connection is made between L (say group theory) and P (a particular problem in physics), an expansion can be applied to bring new mathematical machinery from L to bear on P . Furthermore, an interpretation of the abstraction of L in light of P might result in new insights that could lead to further developments in L (if we do not consider L to be static literature). As French ( 2000 ) states, “it is important to acknowledge that both group theory and quantum mechanics were in a state of flux at the time they were brought into contact and both subsequently underwent further development” (p. 110).

Reification

A reification is the inverse of an abstraction. That is, a reification has the same definition of an abstraction, except that P and L are exchanged. We can say P is reified by L if L is abstracted by P . A reification can occur when prior work might contain a concrete example of a phenomenon, which one’s present work presents in more abstract or general terms. Reifications will often be used when interpreting prior empirical findings in light of a new theoretical framework. For example, when articulating his theory of the structure of scientific revolutions, Kuhn ( 2012 ) drew on myriad concrete historical examples from the history of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and other fields. These findings are reifications of particular components of Kuhn’s theory (e.g., paradigms, anomalies, paradigm shifts, etc.).

A reification can also make sense when one is in a formative stage of a project where some of the specifics have not yet been determined. For example, consider Tu Youyou’s work on finding a cure for malaria in the 1970s for which she won the Nobel Prize in 2015. The problem that Tu and her team were working on is represented in Fig.  5 a. According to Tu ( 2015 ):

After thoroughly reviewing the traditional Chinese medical literature and folk recipes and interviewing experienced Chinese medical practitioners, I collected over two thousand herbal, animal and mineral prescriptions within three months after initiation of the project.

One of the substances that showed some initial promise was sweet wormwood ( qinghao ), which was shown in the literature to cure intermittent fevers, as shown in Fig.  5 b. Therefore sweet wormwood is a reification of a potential cure for malaria, as shown in Fig.  5 c, and this can be interpreted in the broader research of finding a cure for malaria, as shown in Fig.  5 d. Yu went on to identify artemisinin as an actual cure for malaria, but there was an additional step of literature-based discovery needed first, which we will return to later.

The discovery of sweet wormwood as a cure for malaria as an example of reification

An analogy applies when P and L both have a subset of entities and relations that have a shared abstraction. More formally, using the same notation as above, an analogy applies if there exists some other representation A = ( E A , R A ) (representing an abstraction) and the following four conditions hold 2 :

• For all e ~ ∈ E A , there exists an e ∈ E PS and an e ′ ∈ E LS such that e and e ′ are both instances of e ~ .
• For all R ~ ∈ R A , there exists an R ∈ R PS and an R ′ ∈ R LS such that R and R ′ are both instances of R ~ .
• For all R ~ ∈ R A and for every pair R ∈ R PS and R ′ ∈ R LS such that R and R ′ are both instances of R ~ , if R ~ ( e ~ 1 , e ~ 2 , ⋯ , e ~ n ) then R ( e 1 , e 2 , ⋯ , e n ) and R ′ ( e 1 ′ , e 2 ′ , ⋯ , e n ′ ) , where e i and e i ′ are instances of e ~ i for all i and R and R ′ are instances of R ~ .
• At least some e ≠ e ′ or some R ≠ R ′ .

We say that A N A L O G O U S ( e , e ′ ) if and only if condition 1 holds for e and e ′ and similarly we say that A N A L O G O U S ( R ( e 1 , e 2 , ⋯ , e n ) , R ′ ( e 1 ′ , e 2 ′ , ⋯ , e n ′ ) ) if and only if the conditions 2 and 3 above hold for those entities and relations. The representation that results from an analogy operation is ρ = ( E PS ∪ E LS , R PS ∪ R LS ∪ A N A L O G O U S ) .

Analogies can span from shallow analogies between two instances of a similar phenomenon in the same field to deep analogies across scientific fields that share little apparent relation to one another on the surface. The further removed that P and L are from the abstraction A , the deeper the analogy becomes (and typically, the harder to notice). Concretely identifying the abstraction implicit in an analogy is not necessary, and in some cases, it can actually be difficult to do, but I suggest that doing so may be a useful exercise (and could lead to refining the analogy).

Like expansions, analogies can sometimes result in modifying P by looking at the research project in a whole new light. Like expansions, this also means the way in which an analogy might have helped develop P over time may not always be apparent from the final product. Even if a publication discusses an analogy, it may not always be clear if that analogy was instrumental in developing the idea in the first place or if it was an afterthought that the two ideas were related.

An example of an analogy where the impact of prior work on a research project is actually made explicit is the analogy between Thomas Kuhn’s historical philosophy of science and Jean Piaget’s psychological and epistemological theory of how a child develops knowledge. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Kuhn ( 2012 ) gives us a brief sense of his indebtedness to Piaget:

A footnote encountered by chance led me to the experiments by which Jean Piaget has illuminated both the various worlds of the growing child and the process of transition from one to the next. (p. xi)

The extent of this has recently been clarified by historians examining Kuhn’s other works and archival materials (Galison, 2016 ; Burman, 2020 ). For example, Kuhn ( 1977 , as cited in Burman, 2020) states:

Almost twenty years ago I first discovered, very nearly at the same time, both the intellectual interest of the history of science and the psychological studies of Jean Piaget. Ever since that time the two have interacted closely in my mind and in my work. (p. 21)

So what was the nature of this close interaction? One can draw a clear analogy between the two. At risk of oversimplification, a representation of the analogy between Kuhn’s theory and Piaget’s is shown in Fig.  6 , adapted from a mapping given by MacIsaac ( 1991 ). This is not at all to say that this is the precise analogy that Kuhn drew which led to a refinement of his theory as presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . However, he probably made similar mappings that changed over time as he developed his theory. Similar analogies can also be drawn from Kuhn’s theory to gestalt theory and Bruner and Postman’s ( 1949 ) psychological theory of how people perceive incongruities, both of which Kuhn ( 2012 ) explicitly builds off of. Interestingly enough, the Piagetian analogy, while very influential on the development of Kuhn’s theory, was not retained in the final representation of his book, while the analogies to gestalt theory and Bruner and Postman ( 1949 ) were explicitly an important part of his narrative. Note that the relations in P and L are identical in this case, but this need not be the case in general; in fact, they may only be identical because I constructed them that way, but perhaps if the representations were to be derived independently, the relations would be non-identical, but share a common abstraction.

The representation of the analogy between Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Piagetian theory. The analogous relations are shown as dotted lines without labels for ease of reading

To provide a more recent example of analogy, we can consider the relationship between the recent machine learning literature on fairness ( P ) in relation to older literature from the 1960s-1970s on fairness in educational and employment testing ( L ). As Hutchinson and Mitchell ( 2019 ) point out, the two literatures share much in common including many mathematical definitions of fairness. To formalize this, Hutchinson and Mitchell ( 2019 ) explicitly construct an analogy between the two literatures:

Test items (questions) are analogous to model features, and item responses analogous to specific activations of those features. Scoring a test is typically a simple linear model which produces a (possibly weighted) sum of the item scores....Because of this correspondence, much of the math is directly comparable; and many of the underlying ideas in earlier fairness work trivially map on to modern day ML fairness. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”; and by hearing this rhyme, we hope to gain insight into the future of ML fairness. (p. 49)

Their last sentence suggests that the goal of pointing out the relationship between these two literatures are further steps of expansion and interpretation, or in other words, exploiting the “surplus of structure.” Indeed, the authors surface several definitions from test fairness that had not been proposed in machine learning (i.e., an expansion). Notice that in this case, the underlying abstraction may not be immediately obvious (e.g., what is the abstraction underlying both a test item and a feature?); in fact, in some cases, there may not be a simple word or phrase to describe the abstraction, but the fact that a clear analogy can be drawn indicates that there must be some more abstract underlying representation.

Finally, in my own research, I have found that there is an analogy between debates in education research and the bias-variance tradeoff in machine learning (Doroudi, 2020 ). Here an analogy was determined by directly formulating the abstraction (a generalized version of the bias-variance decomposition theorem). This abstraction has four components that any instance must specify: a target, an approximator, a random mechanism, and a source of randomness; once these components are specified, one can derive other phenomena (e.g., the meaning of bias, variance, etc.). This naturally sounds very abstract, but it is more concrete once instantiated in specific contexts. Table  2 gives an example of the analogy between these concepts in machine learning and debates around pedagogy. Once this analogy is drawn, it may be possible to expand techniques that are developed in machine learning to bear on educational debates (Doroudi, 2020 ). One benefit of making the abstraction concrete is that the same abstraction can be used to draw analogies to other fields as well.

A mapping of the bias-variance decomposition from machine learning ( L ) to its analog in the study of pedagogy ( P ), along with the abstraction that connects the two ( A )

Note that the last two rows are only examples of mechanisms that are often viewed as having high bias and low variance or high variance and low bias. See Doroudi ( 2020 ) for more details

Substitution

The analogy operator as described above can be applied in cases that do not semantically appear to be analogies. For example, consider two papers that use different methods to achieve the same outcome; many of the entities and relations may be the same across the two representations, but the entity (or entities) representing the methods would be different. Colloquially we would probably not say there is an analogy between the two approaches. For this reason, we make a distinction between substitutions and analogies. A substitution operates exactly in the same way as an analogy, but it should be applied when it is more sensible. The analogous relation can be replaced with the substitutes relation for semantic clarity. Therefore, unlike the other operators, the distinction between the analogy and substitution operators is semantic. However, there are typically clear structural differences between the two. In a substitution, typically only one or a few entities and relations will change, and the rest will be identical across P and L . Moreover, a substitution is similar to what Gentner ( 1983 ) terms a literal similarity. Namely, Gentner ( 1983 ) suggests that the difference between a literal similarity and an analogy is typically that a literal similarity will involve a greater number of identical attributes (or unary relations).

Consider the following four scenarios that loosely describe different papers:

• Convolutional neural networks are trained to classify histopathological images of breast tissue as benign or malignant (Spanhol et al., 2016 ).
• Support vector machines are trained to classify histopathological images of breast tissue as benign or malignant (Aswathy & Jagannath, 2021 ).
• Human crowdworkers are trained to classify histopathological images of breast tissue as benign or malignant (Eickhoff, 2014 ).
• Pigeons are trained to classify histopathological images of breast tissue as benign or malignant (Levenson et al., 2015 ).

In cases 1 and 2, it would be a stretch to say that there is an analogy between “convolutional neural networks” and “support vector machines,” which are both machine learning algorithms that can be applied to the same classification tasks. Thus, here is a clear case of substitution. However, with case 4, even though one could argue a pigeon is being substituted for a machine learning algorithm, the idea of training pigeons and the idea of training machine learning algorithms both have long histories and are often used for different purposes. Thus, it seems more natural to say pigeons are analogical to neural networks or support vector machines in these scenarios (with the underlying abstraction being a learning agent). Pigeons and support vector machines have a lot fewer attributes in common than convolutional neural networks and support vector machines. Unlike pigeons, the latter two are both algorithms implemented in computer code that were designed specifically for classification tasks. Pigeons, on the other hand, are animals, fly, eat, and make sounds. Some attributes of pigeons are actually important for the training process but not shared by any standard machine learning algorithms, such as their hunger. While we might say getting hungry is analogous to the “reward seeking” or “loss minimizing” property of machine learning algorithms, there is no literal hunger in those algorithms.

Case 3 is less clear-cut. While human crowdworkers are also significantly different from machine learning algorithms, crowdsourcing is often used for tasks where state-of-the-art machine learning is not good enough or a machine learning engineer might want to compare the performance of their algorithm against crowdworkers. On the other hand, human crowdworkers and pigeons share a lot of similar attributes that are lacking in machine learning algorithms. These ambiguities point out that ultimately the decision of whether an analogy or a substitution applies is in the eyes of the beholder. In other words, the degree of overlap in attributes depends on what attributes are most salient to the researcher. If a crowdworker is seen as an alternative to artificial intelligence and its humanity is not at the forefront, then perhaps a substitution would apply. On the other hand, researchers interested in using pigeons’ visual properties as a substitute for human labelers (Levenson et al., 2015 ) could also see a substitution between crowdworkers and pigeons.

As mentioned earlier, Kang et al.’s ( 2022 ) analogical search engine looks for papers that overlap in terms of purpose with a researchers’ study (as represented in the form of a search query). However, if the purpose is virtually identical, then replacing one mechanism for another may often be a substitution, not an analogy, as seen in cases 1 and 2 above. In some cases, such as using pigeons vs. neural networks to classify images, swapping mechanisms may result in an analogy. On the other hand, when the purpose is only similar (but not identical), there is no guarantee that the purpose-mechanism relationship will be analogical across different papers. 3 Thus, while Kang et al. ( 2022 ) find that their search engine is more likely to identify papers that trigger creative adaptations of the original idea (when compared to a standard keyword-based search engine), it is important to distinguish related work that might result in generating novel ideas and related work that actually has an analogical relationship with the present work.

Returning to Tu’s work on discovering a cure for malaria, she found that wormwood “showed some effects in inhibiting malaria parasites during initial screening, but the result was inconsistent and not reproducible.” Scouring over the relevant literature, she then identified a relevant sentence in Ge Hong’s fifth century A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies : “A handful of Qinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all” (Tu, 2015 ). Tu realized that while herbs are typically boiled, Ge’s recipe did not advocate for boiling it so perhaps the heat killed the active components in the wormwood. This led to a new method for extracting artemisinin from wormwood. To model this we would have to add entities to Fig.  5 that account for the method by which the drug is extracted. In that case, Ge’s method can be seen as a substitution for Tu’s original method. This substitution led to a drastic change in the research direction, eventually resulting in a cure for malaria.

Putting the pieces together

Now that we have seen the various operations that can relate two pieces of research to one another, it is worth discussing how these operations might be used in sequence over the scope of a research project. To do so, I provide a hypothetical example. As a disclaimer, the example is not from an area I have any expertise in; in fact, I encountered the relationships described below in the process of writing this paper (although not in the exact sequence described below). On the one hand, this suggests that the example may be oversimplified; on the other hand, perhaps it gives a somewhat authentic account of a non-expert navigating a new research field.

Suppose we are interested in conducting a literature review related to the question “how are memories stored in synapses?” This research question can be represented as “memories are stored in synapses through some mechanism” as shown at the top of Fig.  7 . Some of the steps described below are also represented in Fig.  7 ; in those cases, I will mention the number of the step in parentheses. Operator names are italicized below. If the reader wants to assess their understanding of the operators (or perhaps assess the degree to which there could be subjectivity in which operators apply), the reader can guess which operator applies for each step of the figure before reading the rest of this section.

Example of literature search as a sequence of operators applied to a research question on how memory is stored in synapses

When embarking on this literature search process, we are likely already aware of some answers to the question. For example, “some mechanism” could be reified by “synaptic plasticity” (Step 1). But synaptic plasticity is quite broad and could be reified further by several more specific forms of plasticity, such as “long-term potentiation” (Step 2) and “long-term depression.” Further literature search might reveal a plethora of other mechanisms such as “protein synthesis,” “epigenetic mechanisms,” or “the standard model of synaptic consolidation.” However, these mechanisms are not necessarily mutually exclusive, perhaps leading to a revision of the question formulation to “memories are stored in synapses through a combination of X, Y, ...” (or some more hierarchical representation). On the other hand, some proposed mechanisms may be competing, like “the standard model of synaptic consolidation” and “multiple trace theory” (i.e., one can be substituted for the other). Moreover, we might realize that the “memory” entity can also be reified into particular kinds of memory, like “episodic memory” or “semantic memory.”

Searching the literature further may reveal that there are recent suggestions that memory is not (only) stored in synapses, but could be stored in sub-cellular materials. This might result in a substitution of certain molecules (e.g., “RNA”) for synapse (Step 3 ′ ). Alternatively, to keep our options open we may apply an abstraction of “synapse,” such as “parts of the brain” (Step 3). “Parts of the brain” can then be reified with many different entities, like “RNA” (Step 4). But it can also be substituted for regions of the brain where memories are stored, like the hippocampus. This may subsequently lead to the realization that rather than just asking how memories are stored, we should also be asking where memories are stored, leading to an expansion of the initial representation.

So far we have primarily considered literature that directly bears on the initial question. But sometimes surprising related works can also be discovered through intersections . For example, once we have established that RNA may be involved in memory, a colleague who is a molecular biologist might point out that there is an intersection with the literature on RNA interference (Step 5). Indeed, Smalheiser et al. ( 2001 ) noticed connections between a series of controversial 1960s studies on RNA-mediated memory transfer and RNAi; Smalheiser was a pioneer of literature-based discovery. We might then posit a relation that was neither present in our initial representation nor in related work: RNAi is potentially involved in the memory storage mechanism (i.e., “some mechanism” in our representation). Although it took over a decade, Smalheiser eventually found evidence to suggest that RNAi could indeed be involved in memory transfer (Smalheiser, 2017 ).

Finally, upon contemplating the initial representation further, the researcher may recognize an analogy to “how is memory stored in computer hardware?” (Step 6) or “how is memory stored in artificial neural networks?” Studying the literature in either of these areas may lead to the addition of new hypothesized mechanisms through an interpretation in light of the analogies. Notice that while in some cases a researcher notices an analogy when examining related literature, in other cases a researcher might think of an analogy, and then search for related literature. The related literature could either be about the analog (e.g., how memory is encoded in artificial neural networks) or about the analogy itself (Langille & Gallistel, 2020 ,e.g., how do theories of memory storage in the human brain relate to theories of memory storage in computer science). In the latter case, we have an intersection applied to the entire analogy .

The typology in practice

In this section, we discuss some important considerations for how the representation and typology could be used in practice. In theory, an understanding of the various ways in which one piece of literature may relate to a research topic can inform directions in information retrieval and citation recommendation. Such systems could potentially represent papers in terms of entities and relations by using named entity recognition (Nadeau & Sekine, 2007 ) and relation extraction (Bach & Badaskar, 2007 ); they can also leverage a growing body of work on using knowledge graphs for information retrieval (Reinanda et al., 2020 ). The typology can then inform the kinds of relationships that such systems can explore and possibly recommend to users. However, we reiterate that there is no single way to represent a paper or single way of applying the operators to identify relationships to prior work. As noted above, the choice of what operators apply and hence which relationships to related works will be noticed depends on the view one takes of one’s work and related work. One way to potentially mitigate this challenge is by having users specify their current view of their work in terms of its representation, or perhaps by allowing them to simultaneously represent their work in multiple ways. Furthermore, recognizing that different researchers and papers will use slightly different terms to refer to identical or very similar entities and relations, search engines could try to treat semantically similar phrases as being identical or provide a pre-selected set of entities and relations that they recommend users use.

However, even if the representations of papers are completely aligned, the task of retrieving good analogies and abstractions may be computationally intractable in the worst case (Wareham et al., 2011 ). Indeed, in automated analogical search, simplifications are made to make finding potential analogies more tractable. For example, the MAC/FAC algorithm—which is rooted in structure-mapping theory—first finds several examples that have the most surface-level overlap in terms of relations and then identifies the analogy 4 that is structurally strongest (Forbus et al., 1995 ). In Kang et al.’s ( 2022 ) analogical search engine, they look for papers that have a similar purpose, where similarity is measured by neural network embeddings rather than looking for a formally analogical structure. Although such algorithms may not be perfect, they could still potentially surface candidate analogies that would be given to a researcher who would ultimately identify when an analogy operator is applicable and useful.

Given the ongoing challenges in automated search, perhaps the typology would be more useful as a conceptual tool for researchers. Huang and Soergel ( 2013 ) found that “teaching users about the different kinds of topical relevance relationships may open their minds and make them better searchers and users of information.” Similarly, perhaps the typology presented here could be used as a tool to familiarize researchers with the different ways in which their research may relate to prior work, and how to use search tools to find such works. As mentioned before, simply representing one’s paper as a network of entities and relations may be a useful exercise to help researchers realize new insights about their research; future experimental studies could confirm whether this is true. Moreover, in discussing the potential value of their analogical search engine, Kang et al. ( 2022 ) mention the importance of “how deeply the human users can reflect on the retrieved analogs...and recognize how different notions of relevance may exist for their own problem context, despite potential dissimilarity on the surface” (p. 125). They suggest that “one approach to explaining relevance might be to surface a small number of core common features between an analog and a problem query” (p. 126). The representation presented here provides a natural way of showing users the potential relevance of related work. For example, when one searches for literature (even using a traditional search engine), representations could be generated on demand for the resulting papers such that they maximally align with the user’s query (at least in terms of number of entities and relations, if not in terms of higher-order relationships). Moreover, if the user specifies multiple research projects, a search engine could potentially represent each paper in terms of the representation that best aligns with each project.

I have tried to make the case that literature search is a complex process that can influence and be influenced by research in a variety of ways. By describing research papers and projects in terms of concrete representations, we can formally articulate how different pieces of research might relate to one another. As discussed in the last section, this could have practical ramifications in terms of how search engines could better support the literature search process or how to design training for researchers to improve the way they approach literature search.

Beyond practical applications, the typology presented here could give us insight into the ways in which literature search might iteratively change the course of a research project as a sequence of operations. Although it goes beyond the scope of this paper, it might be worth briefly considering some of the ways in which a research project might be modified as a result of these operations. One form of modification is simply adding new entities and relations to P as a result of an expansion; we can view this as a natural extension of the expansion operator. Several other forms of modifications can fall under the category of logical inference (i.e., deduction , induction , and abduction ). For example, in the black swans example, evidence of black swans triggers a modus ponens argument that proves the “all-swans-are-white” hypothesis is false, thereby changing P . Similarly, in Swanson’s ABC model, we can discern the presence of a new relation through the transitivity of the causal relation. If the representations are well-specified, one can imagine creating an inference engine that can automatically detect such changes in P after coming into contact with related work.

However, literature search cannot be considered in isolation from the other aspects of scientific discovery. Another form of modification to P might be the result of an experimentation operation, whereby a deduced relation is tested. We saw this both in the case of medical research that confirmed the causal link deduced by Swanson, and Tu’s experimental confirmation that wormwood can cure malaria. Finally, there is the construction operation, whereby a new entity or relation is created. Construction can result from either literature search (e.g., where an interpretation of some finding results in the discovery of a new finding, or where the expansion of an analogy results in an analogous entity that was not previously conceived of) or from research itself (e.g., the discovery of a new molecule or a new experimental finding). A thorough understanding of the processes of inference, experimentation, and construction is beyond the scope of this paper, but they begin to give us a hint as to how literature search is an iterative process that interacts with other aspects of the research process.

As pointed out by Swanson ( 1986 ), world 3 is also a world where scientific discovery takes place, by interacting with world 1 (the physical world) and world 2 (the subjective world of mental states). Philosophy of science should try to understand how these worlds interact in the process of scientific discovery; this paper is a step in that direction.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (2033868). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Author Contributions

Sole authored publication

Provided by National Science Foundation, Award Number: 2033868

Availability of data and material:

Declarations.

1 This can be formalized using the partial structures formalism mentioned above (Da Costa & French, 1990 ).

2 Gentner ( 1983 ) did not explicitly define an analogy in terms of an abstraction, but I believe it is useful to recognize that there is always implicitly an abstraction present, and in many cases, it might be useful to reason about what that abstraction is. Gentner ( 1983 ) further differentiates between abstractions, analogies, and literal similarities. These are differentiated by how many attributes and relations are shared between the two and the degree of abstractness of the entities (i.e., in an abstraction, entities are more abstract). While this is sensible, we allow for abstractions that are more concrete, so long as the entities in one representation are still instances of the entities in the other.

3 For example, one participant’s research question was how to “Grow plants better by optimizing entry of nanoparticle fertilizers into the plant” (p. 14). One paper identified by analogical search was about identifying plants by applying image analysis techniques to their leaves. It is not clear what the similar purpose is in this case, but regardless, the paper does not obviously share an analogical relationship with the research question. While this paper inspired a novel idea that the researcher thought would be relevant to her project, the relationship is captured by an intersection (through the “plant” entity) and possibly the application of interpretation and expansion operators.

4 Technically it looks for matches in terms of literal similarity to mimic people’s tendencies to find literally similar matches, but the algorithm could be easily modified to search for analogies.

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Why are related literature and studies important in research what are their functions?

Table of Contents

• 1 Why are related literature and studies important in research what are their functions?
• 2 Why is related literature important in research?
• 3 What are the functions of related literature and studies?
• 4 What is the importance of literature in our daily life?
• 5 What are the three purposes of literature?
• 6 Why is the review of related literature and studies important?
• 7 What’s the best way to do a literature review?

It establishes the authors’ in-depth understanding and knowledge of their field subject. It gives the background of the research. Demonstrates how the research fits within a larger field of study. Provides an overview of the sources explored during the research of a particular topic.

Why is related literature important in research?

The literature review is important because: • It describes how the proposed research is related to prior research in statistics. It shows the originality and relevance of your research problem. Specifically, your research is different from other statisticians. It demonstrates your preparedness to complete the research.

What is the importance of literature?

Literature allows a person to step back in time and learn about life on Earth from the ones who walked before us. We can gather a better understanding of culture and have a greater appreciation of them. We learn through the ways history is recorded, in the forms of manuscripts and through speech itself.

What are the sources of related literature and studies?

Original documents such as diaries, speeches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, records, eyewitness accounts, autobiographies. Empirical scholarly works such as research articles, clinical reports, case studies, dissertations. Creative works such as poetry, music, video, photography.

What are the functions of related literature and studies?

• Provide foundation of knowledge on topic.
• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication and give credit to other researchers.
• Identify inconstancies: gaps in research, conflicts in previous studies, open questions left from other research.

What is the importance of literature in our daily life?

What are the five sources of literature?

When we talk about information sources for a literature review in education or nursing, we generally mean these five areas: the internet, reference material and other books, empirical or evidence-based articles in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and papers, dissertations and theses, and grey …

How can we make related literature and studies?

Write a Literature Review

• Narrow your topic and select papers accordingly.
• Search for literature.
• Read the selected articles thoroughly and evaluate them.
• Organize the selected papers by looking for patterns and by developing subtopics.
• Develop a thesis or purpose statement.
• Write the paper.
• Review your work.

What are the three purposes of literature?

Provide foundation of knowledge on topic. Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication and give credit to other researchers. Identify inconstancies: gaps in research, conflicts in previous studies, open questions left from other research. Identify need for additional research (justifying your research)

Why is the review of related literature and studies important?

Why is it important to justify the relevance of related studies?

Which is an example of a related literature?

What’s the best way to do a literature review?

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