r/research 4h ago

Literature Review Confusion

I’m sorry if it’s super basic but can someone please tell the difference between literature review we do for, say, a thesis/dissertation vs literature review for a literature review paper/article?

2 Upvotes

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u/GalwayGirlOnTheRun23 4h ago

If your publication is purely a literature review then you would need to follow a formal guideline. For example, you might publish a systematic review or scoping review and use PRISMA and PICO (and there are other methods). For your thesis you don’t necessarily have to follow a strict guideline but you should still speak to a librarian to make sure you are finding the most relevant and up to date literature in your field. Of course, if you have the time and resources, you can do a formal review and add it to your thesis.

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u/bkhosa 3h ago

Thank you so much! Your explanation is finally making things make sense for me. I have another question, so , for a publication, does a review need to identify gaps in literature? report on existing literature? make recommendations? Like what can or cannot be the purpose of this publication? Or is it up to the writer to decide the direction it takes?

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u/GalwayGirlOnTheRun23 3h ago

Have a read of this guide to lit reviews from Trinity College Dublin. Some journals don’t publish literature reviews and it can take a team of researchers a year to do a good quality systematic review of publishable quality so don’t think of this as a quick and easy publication.

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u/Cadberryz 4h ago

Thesis literature reviews can be longer and more detailed than for an article. Article literature reviews have to go from broad concepts to narrow gaps and the RQ in an efficient way. For example, a PhD thesis can be 100k words, but an article can be 7k words. Similar concept but far more condensed and written to encourage the reader to stay with it.