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• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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• UConn Library
• Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide
• Introduction

Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide — Introduction

• Getting Started
• How to Pick a Topic
• Strategies to Find Sources
• Evaluating Sources & Lit. Reviews
• Tips for Writing Literature Reviews
• Writing Literature Review: Useful Sites
• Citation Resources
• Other Academic Writings

What are Literature Reviews?

So, what is a literature review? "A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries." Taylor, D.  The literature review: A few tips on conducting it . University of Toronto Health Sciences Writing Centre.

Goals of Literature Reviews

What are the goals of creating a Literature Review?  A literature could be written to accomplish different aims:

• To develop a theory or evaluate an existing theory
• To summarize the historical or existing state of a research topic
• Identify a problem in a field of research 

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1997). Writing narrative literature reviews .  Review of General Psychology , 1 (3), 311-320.

What kinds of sources require a Literature Review?

• A research paper assigned in a course
• A thesis or dissertation
• A grant proposal
• An article intended for publication in a journal

All these instances require you to collect what has been written about your research topic so that you can demonstrate how your own research sheds new light on the topic.

Types of Literature Reviews

What kinds of literature reviews are written?

Narrative review: The purpose of this type of review is to describe the current state of the research on a specific topic/research and to offer a critical analysis of the literature reviewed. Studies are grouped by research/theoretical categories, and themes and trends, strengths and weakness, and gaps are identified. The review ends with a conclusion section which summarizes the findings regarding the state of the research of the specific study, the gaps identify and if applicable, explains how the author's research will address gaps identify in the review and expand the knowledge on the topic reviewed.

• Example : Predictors and Outcomes of U.S. Quality Maternity Leave: A Review and Conceptual Framework:  10.1177/08948453211037398  

Systematic review : "The authors of a systematic review use a specific procedure to search the research literature, select the studies to include in their review, and critically evaluate the studies they find." (p. 139). Nelson, L. K. (2013). Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders . Plural Publishing.

• Example : The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review:  10.1057/s41599-022-01270-w

Meta-analysis : "Meta-analysis is a method of reviewing research findings in a quantitative fashion by transforming the data from individual studies into what is called an effect size and then pooling and analyzing this information. The basic goal in meta-analysis is to explain why different outcomes have occurred in different studies." (p. 197). Roberts, M. C., & Ilardi, S. S. (2003). Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology . Blackwell Publishing.

• Example : Employment Instability and Fertility in Europe: A Meta-Analysis:  10.1215/00703370-9164737

Meta-synthesis : "Qualitative meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative study that uses as data the findings from other qualitative studies linked by the same or related topic." (p.312). Zimmer, L. (2006). Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts .  Journal of Advanced Nursing , 53 (3), 311-318.

• Example : Women’s perspectives on career successes and barriers: A qualitative meta-synthesis:  10.1177/05390184221113735

Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences

• UConn Health subject guide on systematic reviews Explanation of the different review types used in health sciences literature as well as tools to help you find the right review type
• << Previous: Getting Started
• Next: How to Pick a Topic >>
• Last Updated: Sep 21, 2022 2:16 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.uconn.edu/literaturereview

• Teesside University Student & Library Services
• Subject LibGuides

Business Research Methods

• Literature Review
• Studying for your Project
• Project Outline
• Project Management
• Report Writing
• How to Reference
• Reading Lists Online

What is a literature review

“A literature review is a description of the literature relevant to a particular field or topic. It gives an overview of what has been said, who the key writers are, what are the prevailing theories and hypotheses, what questions are being asked, and what methods and methodologies are appropriate and useful" (Emerald Insight).

A literature review  is not  just a summary of everything you have read on the topic.  It is a critical analysis of the existing research relevant to your topic, and you should show how the literature relates to your topic and identify any gaps in the area of research. Our Learning Hub has lots of useful guidance for carrying out a  Literature Review .

How is it different?

It's on a much larger scale from your research for previous modules.

You may need to devise new ways of searching and managing your results.

Think about:

• Using RefWorks to manage your references
• Setting up alerts to retrieve new results for your searches

How to carry out a review

• Devise a search strategy
• Search systematically
• Read critically – i.e. deconstruct the material
• Put it all back together – reconstruct

1. Devise a search strategy

Think about the sort of research that would help your project.

1. What subject areas does you topic fall into?

2. What possible sources could you use? Think broadly, for example:

• Company reports
• Industry profiles
• Market research
• Financial reports
• Newspaper articles
• Journal articles

3. What don't you want?  What are the limits? For example, geographical restrictions or time periods.

2. Search systematically

• Plan your search first, thinking about your keywords
• Use the pages on this LibGuide to identify quality resources
• Use the tutorials and advice on those pages to improve your searches
• Use the  Inter Library Loans service  to borrow books or to obtain copies of papers which aren't in the library
• Speak to the Business Librarians for help with your searches, or to recommend new items for library stock
• Look at the programme of  Succeed @ Tees workshops , and attend any which are relevant.

3. Read critically - i.e. deconstruct your results

Read critically, argument: .

• What is the main argument?
• Is the main argument clear and logical?
• What is the evidence?
• Is the evidence valid?
• Does the evidence support the conclusions?

4. Put it all back together – reconstruct

• Group your topic areas – develop themes
• Briefly summarise key findings

- See Phrasebank for suggestions of how to phrase your sentences.

• Use the academic papers as examples of the style of academic writing as well as for their content
• Check your referencing

Succeed@Tees Workshops: Writing a Literature Review

The following workshop will help you to develop your skills in writing a literature review :

Writing a literature review

• << Previous: Project Outline
• Next: Project Management >>
• Last Updated: Feb 7, 2024 11:37 AM
• URL: https://libguides.tees.ac.uk/business_research

Marketing Library Guide: Writing a Literature Review

• Looking for books
• Looking for Journals
• Looking for article
• Theses & Dissertations
• Writing a Literature Review
• Journals & Articles
• Evaluating Information
• Reference Books
• Referencing
• Scientific and technical writing guides
• Open Educational Resources
• How to navigate the libraries' website in isi-Xhosa

Getting started

How to write a literature review.

Date published February 22, 2019 by  Shona McCombes.  Date updated: April 6, 2020

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories,  methods , and gaps in the existing research.

Conducting a literature review involves collecting, evaluating and analyzing publications (such as books and journal articles) that relate to your  research question . There are five main steps in the process of writing a literature review:

• Search  for relevant literature
• Evaluate  sources
• Identify  themes, debates and gaps
• Outline  the structure
• Write  your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources – it analyzes,  synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

Understanding your topic

The aim of this guide is to help Marketing  students find information in the library and on the internet. It is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather a starting point for your literature search.

Before you begin searching for information, you should thoroughly understand the topic you are researching. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias are a good place to begin. Dictionaries provide definitions of unfamiliar terms, whilst encyclopaedias give more detailed explanations and overviews of topics. Some useful titles can be found under the Reference Books    tab.

Now that you understand the basics of the topic think about the Key Concepts and any alternative terms to broaden or narrow your search.

Key concepts

You should choose 3 or 4 main points (Key Concepts) when searching for information covering your topic.

Try to go from general to specific, eg. Marketing  AND  branding  AND  South Africa

Suggested books on writing a literature review

Always evaluate the information you read. Be particularly careful when consulting Wikipedia and similar internet sites as the authority and reliability of the content cannot be guaranteed. Remember to work   SMART:

S ource  - is the source well known, reliable, up to date?

M otivation  - why does this site exist? Are they selling a product? Supporting a particular lobby?

A uthority  - is the author's name on the page? Is the author well known in the field?

R eview  - has the information been reviewed/checked by others working in the field?

T wo sources  - is the information supported by other reliable sources?

The databases we subscribe to generally index articles that have been peer reviewed by experts in the field before being accepted for publication.

Literature Review by Alex D'Angelo

The Literature Review Survival Guide by Alex D'Angelo

  A literature review is:

1)   A list of books and journal articles,

 2)   on a specific topic,

3)   grouped by theme,

4)   and evaluated with regard to your research. This evaluation would identify connections, contradictions and gaps in the literature you have found.

The purpose of a literature review, therefore, is:

 1)   To get a feel for the agreed academic opinion on the subject (the connections).

2)   To discover the disagreements on the subject (the contradictions).

3)   To find opportunities, (the gaps), for developing and expressing your own opinions.

 The classic pattern of academic arguments is

  THESIS, ANTITHESIS, SYNTHESIS

  An Idea (Thesis) is proposed, an opposing Idea (Antithesis) is proposed, and a revised Idea incorporating (Synthesis) the opposing Idea is arrived at.  This revised idea sometimes sparks another opposing idea, another synthesis, and so on…

If you can show this pattern at work in your literature review, and, above all, if you can suggest a new synthesis of two opposing views, or demolish one of the opposing views, then you are almost certainly on the right track.  

Steps in compiling a literature review are:   

• Select a specific topic (the more focussed, the better, or you’ll go on for ever).
• Collect the most relevant (usually “peer reviewed”) books and articles. 
• Read/skim them, using the abstract (a short summary attached to the article).
• Group the articles into the sub-themes of your topic.
•  Identify within each sub-theme those points on which the articles agree, those points on which they disagree, and those points which they don’t cover at all.  

  1)     Choosing your topic

Seek advice from a lecturer or tutor on this, if a topic is not already assigned. It is very common for students to bite off more than they can chew, simply because they have not realised the full breadth and complexity of an apparently simple topic. It is better to cover a tiny topic perfectly, than a huge topic superficially.

Look for a topic on which there is polarised opinion. It often helps to pick one in which a question is being asked, for example: Is a particular taxation policy beneficial or disadvantageous to a developing country?

When authors disagree, this provides an opportunity for you to enter the debate and argue for one side or another in your essay. Taking a hatchet to someone’s opinions (a) gives you something to write about, (b) is fun, (c) is the foundation of much modern scholarly writing.  

  2)       Collect the most relevant (usually “peer reviewed”) articles and books

 The two tools for finding these books and articles are (a) the library catalogue and (b) the library databases of electronic journal articles.

Before you search them, spend a minute thinking about the best terms to use. Make a list of alternative words that describe your subject, and also think about general terms and more specific terms. This is important because the journal databases are good for finding very specific terms in articles, but the library catalogue tends to use more general terms.

To access the library catalogue go to  www.lib.uct.ac.za  and click on “Catalogue”.

 If you find a good book reference, scroll down to the bottom of the reference and you will find the subject terms the library cataloguers have assigned to it. Click on that term to call up more books just like the one you have found.

A quick way to check the relevance of any books you find is to glance at the table of contents, the introduction and any descriptive blurbs on the back cover. The index at the back of the book not only helps you dive to very narrow topics in the book, but also gives you an indication of how much attention (i.e. how many pages) the book spends on that specific topic.

 If you are satisfied with the book, look at the bibliography in the back – this can help identify other relevant sources. Following a chain of references in a bibliography like this, whether in a book or a journal article, is one of the most basic techniques of scholarship – find something that is relevant and look at the sources it used.  

 The library’s  journal databases  are particularly helpful for literature reviews. Journal articles are short and cover very specific topics, so they are more digestible than books and more likely to deal exactly with your topic. They are also quicker to publish than books and so are more likely to be up to date.

 To find journal articles by subject go to the library home page at  www.lib.uct.ac.za  and select “Databases.”

Many of these databases allow you to restrict your search to “Peer Reviewed” journals only – these are the most scholarly journals, for which each article has to be vetted by other academics before it is accepted.

 M any of our databases are Full Text – so you can usually get the whole article on your desktop for downloading, e-mailing or printing – you don’t have to find it in print on the shelves.

 While you can search the Research Portal, or individual journal databases, as simply as you search Google, you can also type in very precise searches by using  And, Or, Not  operators,  Wildcards  and  Logical Brackets .

An example of such a search would be:

Information Technology  AND  Brain Drain  AND   ( Employ *   OR  Jobs  OR  Labo ? r ) NOT  United States

 The  AND  operator  narrows  a search –  all  listed elements must be mentioned in each article: in this example we want articles that cover both Information Technology AND the Brain Drain.

• The  OR  operator  expands  a search –  any  of the listed elements must be mentioned in each article: in this example we wanted Information Technology Brain Drain articles that discussed either Employment or Jobs or Labour. The OR operator is useful for dealing with alternative terms which different authors might use when writing on a similar topic.
• The  Brackets  tie the options to the required material. In this example they make sure that any articles we get on labour or employment are concerned with Information Technology and the Brain Drain.  If we didn’t have brackets here the search would just bring up every reference to labour in the database, whether relevant to Information Technology or not.
• The  Wildcards ,  *  and  ? ,   expand a search: The  *  deals with related words. In this example Employ* means that we get all words starting with “Employ…” – such as Employment, Employee, Employees, Employers…
• The  ?  fills in a missing letter, and is used for covering alternative spellings in British and American English, both Labour and Labor in this example.
• NOT  weeds out anything you’ve got too much of. Many of our databases are American products, for example, and you can often be flooded with reports on the American situation unless you weed it out.

  3)      Read/Skim the articles, using their abstracts

Most of the articles will have an  abstract . This is a short paragraph at the head of the article that lists the main facts and arguments in each article. By reading these you will quickly get the gist of what each article is about and where it fits into the pattern you are building up in your literature survey.

How many books and articles should you have? It’s wise to check this with your lecturer or tutor. In general, though, your aim is not to cover every single book or article, but every major opinion or theme on the topic.  Many of the books or articles will add very little that is new.

 Therefore a short list of really scholarly, relevant, comprehensive articles is often more effective than a list of hundreds of superficial or tangential articles.

What you are ideally looking for are the “ seminal ” articles (seed articles) on which most of the other authors are basing their work.

  4 )      Group the Articles into the themes and sub-themes of your topic

 Obviously, it helps to have a structure in mind already, but the articles you find will often help to suggest a structure or cause you to redesign your existing one.

  Herewith a hard-learned tip:

 There are tides and seasons in academic publishing – a topic is often hot for a few months, then dies, then is revived to be attacked from a different angle, then dies, then is revived again to be discussed from a third angle… remember, Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis?

This has two implications for studying the results on a database search:

 Just because there is nothing much in the recent articles does not mean that it was not hot a few months or years ago, so scroll back in time down the list, or jump right to the earliest reference and scroll up through time to look for a hot spot.

• The  tides of article titles often tell a story  that can help you shape your literature review.

 For example, in a list of journal articles on Information Technology and Employment you might find that:

 The earliest articles are all about how hard it is to find skilled IT workers.

• Later you get articles about UK and US firms desperately recruiting school-leavers and training them in IT skills on the job.
• A year later you get articles about how countries like India and South Africa are doing the same thing.
• And not long after that you get articles about India and South Africa having a huge, skilled IT workforce, working far more cheaply than the US and UK workforce, and lots of UK and US projects being outsourced to them.
• Then you get complaints about unemployment in the IT sector in the UK and USA.
• Then you get stories about how employers in the UK and USA have become very choosy about whom they employ, insisting on really good academic training, loads of experience and very-specialised skills.
• Then you get the latest stories which are all about how new IT entrants, without that experience, start packing their bags to gain experience elsewhere…

 See? Story!

Many database lists of academic articles tell this sort of story when they are looked at in date order. Either they reflect swings in world events or they are reflecting swings in academic debate and opinion.  Seeing such a story in the literature is a great help in structuring any literature review.

 In particular, look out for the major triggers of such changes: When did the first swing to a new track happen, and what event or article provoked it?

When you find an article that has provoked a major swing, or started a whole new debate, then you are looking at the “Seminal” (Seed) article that I mentioned earlier. This sort of article is often the best sort of article to identify in a literature review – many of the other articles will just build on, comment on, or attack its basic arguments. 

5)      Using a Citation Database

If you find a seed article, or any other really good article, we have a magic database, called the ISI Citation Database, which can find all the other articles which have cited that article, either because they support it or because they disagree with it.

 The ISI Citation Database is on our database list under ISI WEB OF SCIENCE. There are three versions of it, covering the Sciences, Social Sciences, and Arts and Humanities. You can search all three at once.

 Go to “Cited Ref Search” and type in the author’s last name, the journal in which his article appeared and the year it appeared in the appropriate boxes.  This will bring up the authors and articles that have followed or disagreed with that author.  

 Unfortunately this database is not full text, but you can often get the full text of the articles off one or other of our alternative databases.  

6)      Identify within each sub-theme those points on which the articles agree, those points on which they disagree, and those points which they don’t cover at all.   

 The abstracts can help with this, of course.  The main trick is coming up with, or spotting, the sub themes and that is simply a matter of brain work.  But if it is done well, and you have taken the trouble to find good sources, then you will find, quite magically, that you have constructed the skeleton and a good bit of the flesh and blood of your essay or research project.

In fact, a good literature review can result in an essay that virtually writes itself. 

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Antecedents and Effects of Influencer Marketing Strategies: A Systematic Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

• Conference paper
• First Online: 29 April 2023
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• Surej P. John   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8738-2133 2 &
• Sivakumari Supramaniam   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6047-8239 3  

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Over the last decade, the adoption and use of Influencer marketing strategies have grown exponentially, resulting in the growing concerns of both academics and practitioners. Researchers have investigated the characteristics of the influencers, the nature of online interactions that occur over social media, and the effects of various antecedents of influencer adoption in the past. Based on a systematic assessment of more than 20 years of social media Influencer marketing research, the current study identifies and reviews the major themes present in the influencer marketing literature. Based on the analysis, an integrative multi-dimensional framework that considers theoretical frameworks, antecedents, mediators, and moderators of potential outcomes is presented. Besides integrating and synthesising the current body of knowledge about social media influencer marketing, the study provides valuable directions for future research that have impacts on digital marketing theory and practice.

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John, S.P., Supramaniam, S. (2023). Antecedents and Effects of Influencer Marketing Strategies: A Systematic Literature Review and Directions for Future Research. In: Martínez-López, F.J. (eds) Advances in Digital Marketing and eCommerce. DMEC 2023. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31836-8_15

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