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Difference Between Introduction and Literature Review

Main difference – introduction vs literature review.

Although introduction and literature review are found towards the beginning of a text, there is a difference between them in terms of their function and purpose. The main difference between introduction and literature review is their purpose; the purpose of an introduction is to briefly introduce the text to the readers whereas the purpose of a literature review is to review and critically evaluate the existing research on a selected research area. 

In this article, we will be discussing,

     1. What is an Introduction?           – Definition, Features, Characteristics

     2. What is a Literature Review?           – Definition, Features, Characteristics

What is an Introduction

An introduction is the first part of an article, paper, book or a study that briefly introduces what will be found in the following sections. An introduction basically introduces the text to the readers. It may contain various types of information, but given below some common elements that can be found in the introduction section.

• Background/context to the paper
• Outline of key issues
• Thesis statement
• Aims and purpose of the paper
• Definition of terms and concepts

Note that some introductions may not have all these elements. For example, an introduction to a short essay will only have several lines. Introductions can be found in nonfiction books, essays, research articles, thesis, etc. There can be slight variations in these various genres, but all these introductions will provide a basic outline of the whole text. 

Introduction of a thesis or dissertation will describe the background of the research, your rationale for the thesis topic, what exactly are you trying to answer, and the importance of your research.

What is a Literature Review

A literature review, which is written at the start of a research study, is essential to a research project. A literature review is an evaluation of the existing research material on a selected research area. This involves reading the major published work (both printed and online work) in a chosen research area and reviewing and critically evaluating them. A literature review should show the researcher’s awareness and insight of contrasting arguments, theories, and approaches. According to Caulley (1992) a good literature review should do the following:

• Compare and contrast different researchers’ views
• Identify areas in which researchers are in disagreement
• Group researchers who have similar conclusions
• Criticize the research methodology
• Highlight exemplary studies
• Highlight gaps in research
• Indicate the connection between your study and previous studies
• Indicate how your study will contribute to the literature in general
• Conclude by summarizing what the literature says

Literature reviews help researchers to evaluate the existing literature, to identify a gap in the research area, to place their study in the existing research and identify future research.

Introduction is at the beginning of a text.

Literature Review is located after the introduction or background.

Introduction introduces the main text to the readers.

Literature Review critically evaluates the existing research on the selected research area and identifies the research gap.

Introduction will have information such as background/context to the paper, outline of key issues, thesis statement, aims, and purpose of the paper and definition of terms and concepts. 

Literature Review will have summaries, reviews, critical evaluations, and comparisons of selected research studies.

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Introduction vs. Literature Review — What's the Difference?

Difference Between Introduction and Literature Review

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How to write a literature review introduction (+ examples)

The introduction to a literature review serves as your reader’s guide through your academic work and thought process. Explore the significance of literature review introductions in review papers, academic papers, essays, theses, and dissertations. We delve into the purpose and necessity of these introductions, explore the essential components of literature review introductions, and provide step-by-step guidance on how to craft your own, along with examples.

Why you need an introduction for a literature review

In academic writing , the introduction for a literature review is an indispensable component. Effective academic writing requires proper paragraph structuring to guide your reader through your argumentation. This includes providing an introduction to your literature review.

It is imperative to remember that you should never start sharing your findings abruptly. Even if there isn’t a dedicated introduction section .

When you need an introduction for a literature review

There are three main scenarios in which you need an introduction for a literature review:

What to include in a literature review introduction

It is crucial to customize the content and depth of your literature review introduction according to the specific format of your academic work.

Academic literature review paper

The introduction of an academic literature review paper, which does not rely on empirical data, often necessitates a more extensive introduction than the brief literature review introductions typically found in empirical papers. It should encompass:

Regular literature review section in an academic article or essay

In a standard 8000-word journal article, the literature review section typically spans between 750 and 1250 words. The first few sentences or the first paragraph within this section often serve as an introduction. It should encompass:

Introduction to a literature review chapter in thesis or dissertation

Some students choose to incorporate a brief introductory section at the beginning of each chapter, including the literature review chapter. Alternatively, others opt to seamlessly integrate the introduction into the initial sentences of the literature review itself. Both approaches are acceptable, provided that you incorporate the following elements:

Examples of literature review introductions

Example 1: an effective introduction for an academic literature review paper.

To begin, let’s delve into the introduction of an academic literature review paper. We will examine the paper “How does culture influence innovation? A systematic literature review”, which was published in 2018 in the journal Management Decision.

Example 2: An effective introduction to a literature review section in an academic paper

The second example represents a typical academic paper, encompassing not only a literature review section but also empirical data, a case study, and other elements. We will closely examine the introduction to the literature review section in the paper “The environmentalism of the subalterns: a case study of environmental activism in Eastern Kurdistan/Rojhelat”, which was published in 2021 in the journal Local Environment.

Thus, the author successfully introduces the literature review, from which point onward it dives into the main concept (‘subalternity’) of the research, and reviews the literature on socio-economic justice and environmental degradation.

Examples 3-5: Effective introductions to literature review chapters

Numerous universities offer online repositories where you can access theses and dissertations from previous years, serving as valuable sources of reference. Many of these repositories, however, may require you to log in through your university account. Nevertheless, a few open-access repositories are accessible to anyone, such as the one by the University of Manchester . It’s important to note though that copyright restrictions apply to these resources, just as they would with published papers.

Master’s thesis literature review introduction

Phd thesis literature review chapter introduction.

The second example is Deep Learning on Semi-Structured Data and its Applications to Video-Game AI, Woof, W. (Author). 31 Dec 2020, a PhD thesis completed at the University of Manchester . In Chapter 2, the author offers a comprehensive introduction to the topic in four paragraphs, with the final paragraph serving as an overview of the chapter’s structure:

PhD thesis literature review introduction

The last example is the doctoral thesis Metacognitive strategies and beliefs: Child correlates and early experiences Chan, K. Y. M. (Author). 31 Dec 2020 . The author clearly conducted a systematic literature review, commencing the review section with a discussion of the methodology and approach employed in locating and analyzing the selected records.

Steps to write your own literature review introduction

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Introductions and Literature Reviews

• Author By Troy Mikanovich
• Publication date December 16, 2022
• Categories: Academic Publication , Research Writing
• Categories: academic journal , CARS , introduction , literature review , research , research question

Writing literature reviews is one of the trickiest things you’ll have to do in graduate school.  It is even more tricky because a lot of professors will want you to do things that are pedagogically valuable but so tailored to the specific class they are teaching that it can be hard to generalize the lessons you are meant to take away.

This page is meant to be a general overview to the goals and purposes of introductions and literature reviews (or an introduction that contains a literature review–we’ll talk about that), so even if it doesn’t exactly match what you have been asked to do in an assignment, I hope it’ll be helpful.

What is the difference between an introduction and a literature review?

As of writing this, the year is 2022 and words mean nothing. Rather than getting caught up on what these things are in some kind of objective sense, let’s look at what they are supposed to do.

The introduction and the literature review of your paper have the same job. Both are supposed to justify the question(s) you are asking about your topic and to demonstrate to your audience that the thing you are writing about is interesting and of some importance.  However, while they have the same job, they do it in two different ways.

An introduction should demonstrate that there is some broader real-world significance to the thing that you are writing about. You can do this by establishing a problem or a puzzle or by giving some background information on your topic to show why it is important.  Here’s an example from Brian E. Bride’s “Prevalence of Secondary Traumatic Stress among Social Workers” (2007, link below), where he begins by establishing a problem:

“ In the United States, the lifetime prevalence of exposure to traumatic events ranges from 40 percent to 81 percent, with 60.7 percent of men and 51.2 percent of women having been exposed to one or more traumas and 19.7 percent of men and 11.4 percent of women reporting exposure to three or more such events (Breslau, Davis, Peter-son, & Schultz, 1997; Kessler, Sonnega, Bromet, & Nelson, 1995; Stein, walker, Hazen, & Forde, 1997). Although exposure to traumatic events is high in the general population, it is even higher in subpopulations to whom social workers are likely to provide services…

Although not exhaustive of the populations with whom social workers practice, these examples illustrate that social workers face a high rate of professional contact with traumatized people. Social workers are increasingly being called on to assist survivors of childhood abuse, domestic violence, violent crime, disasters, and war and terrorism. It has become increasingly apparent that the psychological effects of traumatic events extend beyond those directly affected.”

So, Bride (2007) starts with a broad problem (lots of people with exposure to traumatic events) and narrows it to a more specific problem (social workers who work with those people are exposed to secondary trauma as they assist them) .

A literature review should demonstrate that there is some academic significance to the thing you are writing about. You can do this by establishing a scholarly problem (i.e. a “research gap”) and by demonstrating that the state of the existing scholarship on your topic needs to develop in a particular way.

As Bride (2007) transitions to talking about the scholarship on the topic of social workers and secondary trauma, he establishes what scholarship has done and identifies what it has not done .

“Figley (1999) defined secondary traumatic stress as “the natural, consequent behaviors and emotions resulting from knowledge about a traumatizing event experienced by a significant other. It is the stress resulting from helping or wanting to help a traumatized or suffering person” (p. 10). Chrestman (1999) noted that secondary traumatization includes symptoms parallel to those observed in people di-rectly exposed to trauma such as intrusive imagery related to clients’ traumatic disclosures (Courtois, 1988; Danieli, 1988; Herman, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1990); avoidant responses (Courtois; Haley, 1974); and physiological arousal (Figley, 1995; McCann & Pearlman, 1990). Thus, STS is a syndrome of symptoms identical to those of PTSD, the characteristic symptoms of which are intrusion, avoidance, and arousal (Figley, 1999)…

Collectively, these studies have provided empirical evidence that individuals who provide services to traumatized populations are at risk of experiencing symptoms of traumatic stress (Bride). However, the extant literature fails to document the prevalence of individual STS symptoms and the extent to which diagnostic criteria for PTSD are met as a result of work with traumatized populations.”

Taken together, Bride (2007) justifies its existence–the research that the author has undertaken in order to read the article that you are now reading–like this:

Broad real world background: Lots of people are suffering from traumatic stress.

Narrowed real world background: People who have suffered traumatic experiences often work with social workers.

Real world problem: Many social workers may through their work suffer from secondary exposure to traumatic experiences.

Broad academic background: There has been a lot of research on secondary traumatic stress

Narrowed academic background: Particularly, this research has shown that social workers are at risk of experiencing symptoms of secondary traumatic stress.

Academic problem/gap : We don’t know how prevalent individual symptoms of secondary traumatic stress are.

Introductions, then, give you space to explain why you are writing about the thing you are writing about, and literature reviews are where you explain what prior scholarship has said about the topic and what the consequences of that prior scholarship are. In an introduction you are writing about the topic; in a literature review you are writing about people writing about the topic.

So does a literature review need to be a separate section from an introduction? Or is a literature review part of an introduction?

It depends on your field, tbh. And on the expectations of the assignment/journal/outlet that you are writing for.

For instance, in the above example (Bride, 2007) the literature review is a part of the introduction. Here’s that paper and some other examples of other places where this is the case. Notice that they do not differentiate between an introductory section and a distinct “Literature Review” as they outline their topic/questions before describing their methodology:

Bride, B. E. (2007) Prevalence of secondary traumatic stress among social workers.  Social Work, 52 (1), 63-70. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/52.1.63

Wei, X., Teng, X., Bai, J., & Ren, F. (2022). Intergenerational transmission of depression during adolescence: The mediating roles of hostile attribution bias, empathetic concern, and social self-concept.  The Journal of Psychology, 157 (1), 13-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2022.2134276

Stephens, R., Dowber, H., Barrie, A., Sannida, A., & Atkins, K. 2022) Effect of swearing on strength: Disinhibition as a potential mediator.  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221082657

However, plenty of other articles have distinct “Literature Review” sections separate from their introductions. The first two examples name it as such, while the third organizes its literature review with thematic sub-sections:

Schraedley, M.K., & Dougherty, D.S. (2021). Creating and disrupting othering during policymaking in a polarized context.  Journal of Communication, 72 (1), 111-140. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab042

Gil de Zúñiga, H., Cheng, Z., & González-González, P. (2022). Effects of the news finds me perception on algorithmic news attitudes and social media political homophily. Journal of Communication, 72 (5), 578-591. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqac025

Brandão, T., Brites, R., Hipólito, J., & Nunes O. (2022) Attachment orientations and family functioning: The mediating role of emotion regulation. The Journal of Psychology , 157 (1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2022.2128284

Whether you separate your literature review into its own distinct section is mostly a function of what you’ve been asked to do (if you are writing for a class) or what the conventions and constraints are of your field.

• 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

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Methodology

• 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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See an example

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.

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.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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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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What is a Literature Review? How to Write It (with Examples)

A literature review is a critical analysis and synthesis of existing research on a particular topic. It provides an overview of the current state of knowledge, identifies gaps, and highlights key findings in the literature. 1 The purpose of a literature review is to situate your own research within the context of existing scholarship, demonstrating your understanding of the topic and showing how your work contributes to the ongoing conversation in the field. Learning how to write a literature review is a critical tool for successful research. Your ability to summarize and synthesize prior research pertaining to a certain topic demonstrates your grasp on the topic of study, and assists in the learning process. 

Table of Contents

What is the purpose of literature review , a. habitat loss and species extinction: , b. range shifts and phenological changes: , c. ocean acidification and coral reefs: , d. adaptive strategies and conservation efforts: .

• Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question: 
• Decide on the Scope of Your Review: 
• Select Databases for Searches: 
• Conduct Searches and Keep Track: 
• Review the Literature: 
• Organize and Write Your Literature Review: 
• How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal? 

Frequently asked questions 

What is a literature review .

A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with the existing literature, establishes the context for their own research, and contributes to scholarly conversations on the topic. One of the purposes of a literature review is also to help researchers avoid duplicating previous work and ensure that their research is informed by and builds upon the existing body of knowledge.

A literature review serves several important purposes within academic and research contexts. Here are some key objectives and functions of a literature review: 2  

1. Contextualizing the Research Problem: The literature review provides a background and context for the research problem under investigation. It helps to situate the study within the existing body of knowledge. 

2. Identifying Gaps in Knowledge: By identifying gaps, contradictions, or areas requiring further research, the researcher can shape the research question and justify the significance of the study. This is crucial for ensuring that the new research contributes something novel to the field.

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3. Understanding Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks: Literature reviews help researchers gain an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in previous studies. This aids in the development of a theoretical framework for the current research. 

4. Providing Methodological Insights: Another purpose of literature reviews is that it allows researchers to learn about the methodologies employed in previous studies. This can help in choosing appropriate research methods for the current study and avoiding pitfalls that others may have encountered. 

5. Establishing Credibility: A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with existing scholarship, establishing their credibility and expertise in the field. It also helps in building a solid foundation for the new research. 

6. Informing Hypotheses or Research Questions: The literature review guides the formulation of hypotheses or research questions by highlighting relevant findings and areas of uncertainty in existing literature. 

Literature review example 

Let’s delve deeper with a literature review example: Let’s say your literature review is about the impact of climate change on biodiversity. You might format your literature review into sections such as the effects of climate change on habitat loss and species extinction, phenological changes, and marine biodiversity. Each section would then summarize and analyze relevant studies in those areas, highlighting key findings and identifying gaps in the research. The review would conclude by emphasizing the need for further research on specific aspects of the relationship between climate change and biodiversity. The following literature review template provides a glimpse into the recommended literature review structure and content, demonstrating how research findings are organized around specific themes within a broader topic. 

Literature Review on Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity:  

Climate change is a global phenomenon with far-reaching consequences, including significant impacts on biodiversity. This literature review synthesizes key findings from various studies: 

Climate change-induced alterations in temperature and precipitation patterns contribute to habitat loss, affecting numerous species (Thomas et al., 2004). The review discusses how these changes increase the risk of extinction, particularly for species with specific habitat requirements. 

Observations of range shifts and changes in the timing of biological events (phenology) are documented in response to changing climatic conditions (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003). These shifts affect ecosystems and may lead to mismatches between species and their resources. 

The review explores the impact of climate change on marine biodiversity, emphasizing ocean acidification’s threat to coral reefs (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007). Changes in pH levels negatively affect coral calcification, disrupting the delicate balance of marine ecosystems. 

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the literature review discusses various adaptive strategies adopted by species and conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change on biodiversity (Hannah et al., 2007). It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for effective conservation planning. 

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How to write a good literature review 

Writing a literature review involves summarizing and synthesizing existing research on a particular topic. A good literature review format should include the following elements. 

Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your literature review, providing context and introducing the main focus of your review. 

• Opening Statement: Begin with a general statement about the broader topic and its significance in the field. 
• Scope and Purpose: Clearly define the scope of your literature review. Explain the specific research question or objective you aim to address. 
• Organizational Framework: Briefly outline the structure of your literature review, indicating how you will categorize and discuss the existing research. 
• Significance of the Study: Highlight why your literature review is important and how it contributes to the understanding of the chosen topic. 
• Thesis Statement: Conclude the introduction with a concise thesis statement that outlines the main argument or perspective you will develop in the body of the literature review. 

Body: The body of the literature review is where you provide a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, grouping studies based on themes, methodologies, or other relevant criteria. 

• Organize by Theme or Concept: Group studies that share common themes, concepts, or methodologies. Discuss each theme or concept in detail, summarizing key findings and identifying gaps or areas of disagreement. 
• Critical Analysis: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each study. Discuss the methodologies used, the quality of evidence, and the overall contribution of each work to the understanding of the topic. 
• Synthesis of Findings: Synthesize the information from different studies to highlight trends, patterns, or areas of consensus in the literature. 
• Identification of Gaps: Discuss any gaps or limitations in the existing research and explain how your review contributes to filling these gaps. 
• Transition between Sections: Provide smooth transitions between different themes or concepts to maintain the flow of your literature review. 

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Conclusion: The conclusion of your literature review should summarize the main findings, highlight the contributions of the review, and suggest avenues for future research. 

• Summary of Key Findings: Recap the main findings from the literature and restate how they contribute to your research question or objective. 
• Contributions to the Field: Discuss the overall contribution of your literature review to the existing knowledge in the field. 
• Implications and Applications: Explore the practical implications of the findings and suggest how they might impact future research or practice. 
• Recommendations for Future Research: Identify areas that require further investigation and propose potential directions for future research in the field. 
• Final Thoughts: Conclude with a final reflection on the importance of your literature review and its relevance to the broader academic community. 

Conducting a literature review 

Conducting a literature review is an essential step in research that involves reviewing and analyzing existing literature on a specific topic. It’s important to know how to do a literature review effectively, so here are the steps to follow: 1  

Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question:  

• Select a topic that is relevant to your field of study. 
• Clearly define your research question or objective. Determine what specific aspect of the topic do you want to explore? 

Decide on the Scope of Your Review:  

• Determine the timeframe for your literature review. Are you focusing on recent developments, or do you want a historical overview? 
• Consider the geographical scope. Is your review global, or are you focusing on a specific region? 
• Define the inclusion and exclusion criteria. What types of sources will you include? Are there specific types of studies or publications you will exclude? 

Select Databases for Searches:  

• Identify relevant databases for your field. Examples include PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. 
• Consider searching in library catalogs, institutional repositories, and specialized databases related to your topic. 

Conduct Searches and Keep Track:  

• Develop a systematic search strategy using keywords, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and other search techniques. 
• Record and document your search strategy for transparency and replicability. 
• Keep track of the articles, including publication details, abstracts, and links. Use citation management tools like EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley to organize your references. 

Review the Literature:  

• Evaluate the relevance and quality of each source. Consider the methodology, sample size, and results of studies. 
• Organize the literature by themes or key concepts. Identify patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing research. 
• Summarize key findings and arguments from each source. Compare and contrast different perspectives. 
• Identify areas where there is a consensus in the literature and where there are conflicting opinions. 
• Provide critical analysis and synthesis of the literature. What are the strengths and weaknesses of existing research? 

Organize and Write Your Literature Review:  

• Literature review outline should be based on themes, chronological order, or methodological approaches. 
• Write a clear and coherent narrative that synthesizes the information gathered. 
• Use proper citations for each source and ensure consistency in your citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). 
• Conclude your literature review by summarizing key findings, identifying gaps, and suggesting areas for future research. 

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How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal?  

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A literature review is a critical and comprehensive analysis of existing literature (published and unpublished works) on a specific topic or research question and provides a synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a particular field. A well-conducted literature review is crucial for researchers to build upon existing knowledge, avoid duplication of efforts, and contribute to the advancement of their field. It also helps researchers situate their work within a broader context and facilitates the development of a sound theoretical and conceptual framework for their studies.

Literature review is a crucial component of research writing, providing a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. The aim is to keep professionals up to date by providing an understanding of ongoing developments within a specific field, including research methods, and experimental techniques used in that field, and present that knowledge in the form of a written report. Also, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the scholar in his or her field.  

Before writing a literature review, it’s essential to undertake several preparatory steps to ensure that your review is well-researched, organized, and focused. This includes choosing a topic of general interest to you and doing exploratory research on that topic, writing an annotated bibliography, and noting major points, especially those that relate to the position you have taken on the topic. 

Literature reviews and academic research papers are essential components of scholarly work but serve different purposes within the academic realm. 3 A literature review aims to provide a foundation for understanding the current state of research on a particular topic, identify gaps or controversies, and lay the groundwork for future research. Therefore, it draws heavily from existing academic sources, including books, journal articles, and other scholarly publications. In contrast, an academic research paper aims to present new knowledge, contribute to the academic discourse, and advance the understanding of a specific research question. Therefore, it involves a mix of existing literature (in the introduction and literature review sections) and original data or findings obtained through research methods. 

Literature reviews are essential components of academic and research papers, and various strategies can be employed to conduct them effectively. If you want to know how to write a literature review for a research paper, here are four common approaches that are often used by researchers.  Chronological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the chronological order of publication. It helps to trace the development of a topic over time, showing how ideas, theories, and research have evolved.  Thematic Review: Thematic reviews focus on identifying and analyzing themes or topics that cut across different studies. Instead of organizing the literature chronologically, it is grouped by key themes or concepts, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of various aspects of the topic.  Methodological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the research methods employed in different studies. It helps to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies and allows the reader to evaluate the reliability and validity of the research findings.  Theoretical Review: A theoretical review examines the literature based on the theoretical frameworks used in different studies. This approach helps to identify the key theories that have been applied to the topic and assess their contributions to the understanding of the subject.  It’s important to note that these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and a literature review may combine elements of more than one approach. The choice of strategy depends on the research question, the nature of the literature available, and the goals of the review. Additionally, other strategies, such as integrative reviews or systematic reviews, may be employed depending on the specific requirements of the research.

The literature review format can vary depending on the specific publication guidelines. However, there are some common elements and structures that are often followed. Here is a general guideline for the format of a literature review:  Introduction:   Provide an overview of the topic.  Define the scope and purpose of the literature review.  State the research question or objective.  Body:   Organize the literature by themes, concepts, or chronology.  Critically analyze and evaluate each source.  Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the studies.  Highlight any methodological limitations or biases.  Identify patterns, connections, or contradictions in the existing research.  Conclusion:   Summarize the key points discussed in the literature review.  Highlight the research gap.  Address the research question or objective stated in the introduction.  Highlight the contributions of the review and suggest directions for future research.

Both annotated bibliographies and literature reviews involve the examination of scholarly sources. While annotated bibliographies focus on individual sources with brief annotations, literature reviews provide a more in-depth, integrated, and comprehensive analysis of existing literature on a specific topic. The key differences are as follows: 

References 

• Denney, A. S., & Tewksbury, R. (2013). How to write a literature review.  Journal of criminal justice education ,  24 (2), 218-234. 
• Pan, M. L. (2016).  Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches . Taylor & Francis. 
• Cantero, C. (2019). How to write a literature review.  San José State University Writing Center . 

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Writing a Literature Review

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A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

• An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
• A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
• Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
• 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 sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

• Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
• Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

• Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
• Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
• Qualitative versus quantitative research
• Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
• Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

• It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
• Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
• Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
• Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

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 .

16 Comments

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

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Research Skills

Introduction and literature review.

This section is the beginning of the article, but don’t expect it to contain any sort of position or argument. In academic articles, this section has one, overarching purpose: to demonstrate that the authors are familiar with all previous relevant research on the issue they are writing about. Therefore, this section is usually the most “citation-heavy” section of the paper. It is not uncommon to have one or more citations at the end of each sentence. You will likely also encounter a number of compound citations: parentheticals in which not one source, but two or more are cited at one time. Each sentence that precedes a citation in this section is typically a very brief paraphrase of the relevant methods or applicable findings of the other articles that have come before. This review of prior studies is a very important exercise for scholars because it demonstrates the depth of their understanding. None of the articles you read occur in a vacuum; they are usually part of an evolving web of scholarship. Each new article picks up the thread (or, usually, several threads) left by articles published recently. Another important thing to realize is that, in a very real sense, the authors have not really begun; they do not make an argument or say much that is new in this section. It is designed to provide an academic history and theoretical context for the topic of discussion.

At the very end of every literature review section, however, the authors do something important. After having demonstrated their familiarity with previous research, authors indicate that, even though much research has been done, there are still gaps in the research that need filling. You should try to find language such as, “While many studies have examined this subject, no one has looked at this particular issue in this way.” The authors then announce their intention to address that gap in knowledge with the research that follows. This rhetorical move always appears at the end of this section, and often gives the reader the clearest and most detailed description of what exactly the authors are looking at—and why. This is not a thesis, however. Academic articles are not like the essays you may be used to writing, in which the thesis appears at the end of the introduction. The research gap is more akin to a hypothesis than a thesis. It does not make an argument, which comes much later—usually in the discussion or conclusion.

There are also articles that are stand-alone literature reviews; these are sometimes called “Review Articles” or “Meta-analyses.” Rather than engaging in original research, these articles, if they are recent and on point, can provide you with the bibliographic information of all the important, recent sources on your topic. There are many ways to find sources that don’t involve a search engine of any kind. Look at your articles’ references lists to see if they contain any relevant-sounding articles that you haven’t found by other means. You can save a great deal of time this way.

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Literature reviews

What this guide covers, what is a literature review, literature review resources, types of literature reviews, what is the difference between a literature review and a systematic review, related information and guides, further help.

• Conduct your search
• Store and organise the literature
• Evaluate and critique the literature
• Different subject areas
• Find literature reviews

Reusing content from this guide

Attribute our work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The literature review process involves a number of steps.

This guide focuses on:

• evaluating.

A literature review is a survey and critical analysis of what has been written on a particular topic, theory, question or method.

"In writing the literature review, the purpose is to explore what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, what approaches and viewpoints have been adopted, and what are their strengths and weaknesses."

Source: "Focus and frame". (2008). In Eriksson, P. & Kovalainen, A. Introducing Qualitative Methods: Qualitative methods in business research (pp. 44) . London: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: 10.4135/9780857028044.

Get an overview on doing a literature review:

• Sage research methods online - Literature review methods map Information on the literature review methodology with links to further resources - the Project Planner, books, articles, videos and more.
• Ten simple rules for writing a literature review Gives 10 tips on how to approach and carry out a literature review. By Pautasso M (2013) Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review. PLoS Comput Biol9(7): e1003149.
• The literature review. In: Doing your undergraduate program This chapter looks at the purpose of literature reviews, how it is done, setting the boundaries of your search and more.

• More books on literature reviews A selection of literature review books available via UQ Library Search.

The type of literature review you do will depend on a variety of factors:

• Your discipline
• The purpose - undergraduate assessment, PHD thesis, journal article?
• Your lecturer or supervisor's requirements.

Always follow the guidelines outlined by your lecturer or supervisor or consult the instructions for authors (for journal articles), when conducting your literature review.

• is an overview of the significant literature on a topic
• typically includes a critical analysis of each work included
• demonstrates the reviewers knowledge of the topic.
• is a list of citations of research sources (books, journal articles, websites etc) on a topic
• includes a brief summary and analysis or evaluation of each citation = the annotation.
• a critical assessment of all research studies on a particular research question
• has specific criteria for collecting and evaluating the literature
• includes a synthesis of the findings of the included studies.
• This method developed by Griffith University's School of Environment bridges the gap between traditional narrative review methods and meta-analyses to enable students to produce results that are reliable, quantifiable and reproducible.

The requirements of narrative literature reviews are usually quite different than systematic reviews . However, you may be required to adopt some of the characteristics of a systematic approach when doing your literature review. Check the guidelines or criteria that have been set by your supervisor so you know what is expected of you.

Characteristics of reviews

• Meeting the review family: Exploring review types and associated information retrieval requirements This article defines different review types and discusses appropriate search methods for each type.
• Writing literature reviews - Student Support Student Support provides information on how to write effective literature reviews.
• Writing skills Learn strategies for good writing from the Graduate School.
• Systematic reviews An overview of systematic reviews and resources to support producing one.
• Subject guides See recommended resources in different subject areas.
• Grey literature Find literature that is not available in traditional channels of publishing and distribution.
• How to find guides Techniques and resources to find specific information formats.

Contact the Librarian team .

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• Last Updated: Aug 9, 2024 8:34 AM
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How do I Write a Literature Review?: #5 Writing the Review

• Step #1: Choosing a Topic
• Step #2: Finding Information
• Step #3: Evaluating Content
• Step #4: Synthesizing Content
• #5 Writing the Review
• Citing Your Sources

WRITING THE REVIEW 

You've done the research and now you're ready to put your findings down on paper. When preparing to write your review, first consider how will you organize your review.

The actual review generally has 5 components:

Abstract  -  An abstract is a summary of your literature review. It is made up of the following parts:

• A contextual sentence about your motivation behind your research topic
• Your thesis statement
• A descriptive statement about the types of literature used in the review
• Summarize your findings
• Conclusion(s) based upon your findings

Introduction :   Like a typical research paper introduction, provide the reader with a quick idea of the topic of the literature review:

• Define or identify the general topic, issue, or area of concern. This provides the reader with context for reviewing the literature.
• Identify related trends in what has already been published about the topic; or conflicts in theory, methodology, evidence, and conclusions; or gaps in research and scholarship; or a single problem or new perspective of immediate interest.
• Establish your reason (point of view) for reviewing the literature; explain the criteria to be used in analyzing and comparing literature and the organization of the review (sequence); and, when necessary, state why certain literature is or is not included (scope)  - 

Body :  The body of a literature review contains your discussion of sources and can be organized in 3 ways-

• Chronological -  by publication or by trend
• Thematic -  organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time
• Methodical -  the focusing factor usually does not have to do with the content of the material. Instead, it focuses on the "methods" of the literature's researcher or writer that you are reviewing

You may also want to include a section on "questions for further research" and discuss what questions the review has sparked about the topic/field or offer suggestions for future studies/examinations that build on your current findings.

Conclusion :  In the conclusion, you should:

Conclude your paper by providing your reader with some perspective on the relationship between your literature review's specific topic and how it's related to it's parent discipline, scientific endeavor, or profession.

Bibliography :   Since a literature review is composed of pieces of research, it is very important that your correctly cite the literature you are reviewing, both in the reviews body as well as in a bibliography/works cited. To learn more about different citation styles, visit the " Citing Your Sources " tab.

• Writing a Literature Review: Wesleyan University
• Literature Review: Edith Cowan University
• << Previous: Step #4: Synthesizing Content
• Next: Citing Your Sources >>
• Last Updated: Aug 22, 2023 1:35 PM
• URL: https://libguides.eastern.edu/literature_reviews

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• What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

Published on 22 February 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 7 June 2022.

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.

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 summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

Why write 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, frequently asked questions about literature reviews, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a dissertation or thesis, you will 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 scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.

The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

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 objectives and questions .

If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. 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 if 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 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 use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:

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.

To identify the most important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.

You probably won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic – you’ll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.

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?
• How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
• 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 find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.

The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).

Remember that you can use our template to summarise and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using!

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’s important to keep track of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full reference 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.

You can use our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations.

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To begin organising your literature review’s argument and structure, you need to 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 organising the body of a literature review. You should have a rough idea of your strategy before you start writing.

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 summarising sources in order.

Try to analyse 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 organise 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.

If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic (“many recent studies have focused on the problem of x”) or highlight a gap in the literature (“while there has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration”).

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, make sure to follow these tips:

• Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
• Analyse and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations, 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 transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.

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

If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This can lead directly into your methodology section.

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 dissertation , thesis, research paper , or proposal .

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

• To familiarise 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  dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

McCombes, S. (2022, June 07). What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 18 September 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/thesis-dissertation/literature-review/

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• What is a literature review?
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The structure of a literature review

• How to do a literature search

Introduction

• What is a dissertation? How is it different from an essay?
• Getting it down on paper
• Drafting and rewriting
• Planning your dissertation
• Planning for length
• Planning for content
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A literature review should be structured like any other essay: it should have an introduction, a middle or main body, and a conclusion.

The introduction should:

• define your topic and provide an appropriate context for reviewing the literature;
• establish your reasons – i.e. point of view – for
• reviewing the literature;
• explain the organisation – i.e. sequence – of the review;
• state the scope of the review – i.e. what is included and what isn’t included. For example, if you were reviewing the literature on obesity in children you might say something like: There are a large number of studies of obesity trends in the general population. However, since the focus of this research is on obesity in children, these will not be reviewed in detail and will only be referred to as appropriate.

The middle or main body should:

• organise the literature according to common themes;
• provide insight into the relation between your chosen topic and the wider subject area e.g. between obesity in children and obesity in general;
• move from a general, wider view of the literature being reviewed to the specific focus of your research.

The conclusion should:

• summarise the important aspects of the existing body of literature;
• evaluate the current state of the literature reviewed;
• identify significant flaws or gaps in existing knowledge;
• outline areas for future study;
• link your research to existing knowledge.

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Literature review process, what is a literature review, why do a literature review, read some lit reviews.

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• Select a Topic
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• Search the Literature
• Plan Before Reviewing
• Review the Literature
• Write the Review

A literature review is a synthesized account that evaluates the publications in a subject area, which are written by scholars or researchers. Literature reviews are used in a variety of contexts:

• standalone article
• introduction to a research paper
• introduction to a research prospectus
• an early chapter in a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation

A literature review is NOT:

• an annotated bibliography
• descriptive list of readings
• summary of your readings

You need to be evaluate the literature and explain how it leads to your research question or supports your thesis statement.

You may have been told you're required to do literature review, but don't know why you have to go through the process. Remembering some of the "whys" may help you focus and write your literature review.

Standalone article:

• Updates readers and the author on the current research, theories and methodologies in a subject area
• Demonstrates that you can evaluate the literature

Research paper:

• Sets the context for your thesis statement for the reader
• Focuses your thesis statement
• Demonstrates you can evaluate the literature

Prospectus:

• Explains the context of your research proposal and definitions in the field for a general audience
• Demonstrates to professionals in the field that you are familiar with the literature relevant to your proposal and can evaluate it

Updates you on current research, theories and methodologies that will help focus your proposal

Thesis or Dissertation:

• Allows you to find gaps in your field's knowledge and to determine whether your research question is original
• Helps you focus your research question and hypothesis
• Teaches you the important historical and current facts, theories, models, and methods in your topic area
• Sets the context for your research question
• Demonstrates to professionals in the field that you know how to do advanced literature searches and evaluate literature

A good starting point is to read some literature reviews in your field and become familiar with the organization and evaluation strategies in them. Here are some ways to find literature reviews:

• Find research or review articles written by faculty in your department, or on your thesis/dissertation committee, to see how they wrote their lit reviews
• Search in ProQuest Dissertations and Theses , which contains full text dissertations and theses in all fields. Do a search for your topic or a related one and read the literature reviews in some of the resulting documents
• Search a journal article database, such as Academic Search Complete , for your topic plus the word "review" to find standalone literature reviews 
• Search Google Scholar for your topic plus the word "review" to find standalone literature reviews

Need help? Then use the library's  Ask Us service. Get help from real people face-to-face, by phone, by email, or by live chat.

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3 Literature Review

Charitianne Williams

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

• Understand the purpose and function of a literature review.
• Structure a literature review according to basic genre expectations.
• Synthesize ideas from multiple sources using a synthesis matrix.
• Choose between narrative or parenthetical citation and direct quoting, or paraphrase with intent and purpose.

I. Introduction

The purpose of a literature review is just that—it reviews. This means that literature reviews examine a text after it was produced, with all the benefits that hindsight allows a reader. In popular culture, we commonly review movies, restaurants, vacation spots, products, etc. In those reviews, you look back at the single thing you are reviewing and your experience with it. You focus on the strengths and weaknesses of your experience and judge the experience as positive or negative while recommending or not recommending the place or product and explaining why.

An academic literature review does something different, although some of the skills and strategies you use remain the same. The job of a literature review is to examine a collection of research or scholarship (not a single thing or text) on a given topic and show how that scholarship fits together. Literature reviews summarize, describe, evaluate, and synthesize the work of other authors and researchers while looking for common trends/patterns, themes, inconsistencies, and gaps in this previous research. The main strategy writers of a literature review use is synthesis.

SYNTHESIS: the combination of ideas and elements to form a complete system or theory.

A good metaphor for synthesis is cooking! Imagine the ingredients for a loaf of bread laid out on a kitchen cabinet. Each ingredient—eggs, milk, flour, sugar, salt, yeast—have their own purpose and can be combined in different ways to form food other than bread. Knowing all of those individual attributes that make an egg an egg, or the difference between yeast and flour, is what makes you a chef. When you combine all these ingredients according to the recipe, you get something different than all the ingredients on their own: and most of us would rather eat a slice of bread than a spoonful of flour. The product of synthesis is like bread. Synthesis takes a list of ingredients and makes them into something more than the ingredients alone.

Usually, the writers of a literature review will start with a question that they want to answer through informed and research-based evidence gathered while reading others’ work on related topics. The “thesis” or controlling idea of a literature review may be that same question ( “This review seeks to answer…” ) or it may be a statement describing the reviewed research. The thesis reflects the purpose of the literature review as a genre and is different from the thesis you will write for the research paper that argues a claim or asserts a new idea.

Example 3.1: Look at this thesis statement taken from the introduction of a literature review in environmental psychology on the relationship between “nature sounds” and restorative environments:

From this example, we can learn many things about literature reviews:

• They are explicit and focused on their topic. The opening states an observable truth about the current research ( emphasizes nature ), is followed by a general condition ( positive psychological experiences) within that research, and then finally focuses on describing how a particular outcome is achieved (listening to nature sounds is restorative).
• They seek to pre vent or eliminate misunderstanding. Note the use of specialized key terms, exacting transitional phrases, and meaningful verbs in the thesis such as “ restorative environments,” “in particular,” and “ generate .”
• They seek to forward understanding. In other words, literature reviews examine and link together evidence described and validated in the research of others so a reader can learn how a field is developing. ( Research seems to agree that nature sounds can relieve stress and fatigue–this review will examine that conclusion so readers can understand/ build on how and why.)

Moving from the beginning to the very end of the literature review, we can also learn many things about literature reviews from the sources used. Think of each text listed in the References section of a literature review as contributing pieces to a gigantic puzzle.

Example 3.2: Look at the first three articles listed in the References for the article excerpted above:

Abbott, L. C., Taff, D., Newman, P., Benfield, J. A., and Mowen, A. J. (2016). The influence of natural sounds on attention restoration. J. Park Recreation Adm. 34, 5–15. doi: 10.18666/JPRA-2016-V34-I3-6893

Aletta, F., and Kang, J. (2019). Promoting healthy and supportive acoustic environments: going beyond the quietness. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 16:4988. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16244988

Aletta, F., Oberman, T., and Kang, J. (2018). Associations between positive health-related effects and soundscapes perceptual constructs: a systematic review. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 15:2392. doi: 10.3390/ijerph15112392

None of these sources are exactly the same. One focuses on sound and attention, the next two on sound and health, and none of them are quite the same as sound and restoration —but they are all pieces of the puzzle that give a full understanding of how sound and restorative environments relate.

As the author of the literature review, it is your job to join the pieces together, giving your reader a complete picture of what researchers know about your topic.

Literature reviews are an indispensable tool for researchers. Instead of having to read dozens of articles on a topic, a researcher could instead read a literature review that synthesizes what is known and puts each piece of scholarship into conversation with the others. This could be not only quicker, but also more valuable.

Have you heard the saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts? The knowledge constructed by a well-written literature review often outweighs the knowledge constructed by simply reading each article in the References section on its own because the author of a literature review processes and analyzes the information for the reader.

Literature reviews occur in two general forms—as a background section in a scholarly work or as a stand-alone genre in and of itself. In both situations, the basic purpose and structure of the literature review is similar: it is the length and the scope that varies. For example, consider the previous chapter, the Proposal. In most proposals, you will want to convince your audience that you are informed on the background of your topic—a literature review is how you would do that. Since a proposal is commonly a short text, you do not have the space to summarize every piece of research. You must select an important set and synthesize that information into a small section signaling your expertise.

On the other hand, consider a professional journal intended to keep its readers up to date on new technologies and findings in a specific field or career. New ideas and discoveries are emerging every day, and it can be difficult to stay on top of all of these new findings, understand how they fit together, and also keep track of your own career responsibilities! A magazine might hire an author to read all the new research on a specific topic and synthesize it into a single article, a state-of-the-art review, so that practitioners in a field can read a single 25-page article instead of 100 25-page articles.

More Resources 3.1: Literature Reviews

II. Rhetorical Considerations: Voice

Using the scholarship of other writers and researchers is one of the things that differentiates academic writing from other types of writing. Using others’ scholarship in a meaningful way that creates new knowledge without mischaracterizing the original findings takes effort, attention, and usually several rounds of revision and rewriting. One of the issues is voice , which refers to the attitude and tone of a text—think of it as what the text “sounds like” in your head as you read it. Voice is an important element of cohesion , or what some people think of as “flow.” Creating a consistent voice in the mind of your reader helps them fit all the information in a text together in the way the author intends. Check out this advice from APAstyle.org about academic style and voice.

Think back to your annotated bibliography and how you created your summaries. You probably used key terms from the original authors’ texts, but because you had to take whole articles and restate the meaning in a short paragraph, there wasn’t room to just repeat the words of the original author. So you had to write the summaries in your voice . If you used those key terms correctly and in ways similar to original authors, those key terms probably did not interfere with cohesiveness and voice. However, in the literature review, you have many more voices to synthesize than you did to summarize in the annotated bibliography. Maintaining a consistent and cohesive voice will be challenging. An important way to maintain voice is through paraphrasing, discussed later in this chapter.

More Resources 3.2: Transitions

Another important way to maintain cohesion is through the use of metadiscourse (see Chapter 2) and transitional phrases. See this link for the use and meaning of transitional phrases, sometimes called signposts .

III. The Literature Review Across the Disciplines

Example 3.3: Academic and Professional Examples

Structure of Literature Reviews

While the details vary across disciplines, all literature reviews tend to have similar basic structure. The introduction of a literature review informs the reader on the topic by defining key terms, citing key researchers or research periods in the field, and introducing the main focus of the review in a descriptive thesis statement. The introduction also explains the organization of the review. In a literature review, you organize your discussion of the research by topic or theme— not article or author. This is in direct contrast to the annotated bibliography, which is often the first step in the writing process for a literature review.

In the annotated bibliography, you organize your entries in alphabetical order by authors’ last names. Each annotation is directly connected to a single text. A literature review is connected to a collection of texts, and therefore must be organized in a way that reflects this.

Example 3.4: Let’s examine the full paragraph that the thesis statement we analyzed earlier came from:

A systematic review by Aletta et al. (2018) has identified links between positive urban soundscapes (which may also include nature sounds) and health and well-being, including stress recovery. Given the emphasis on nature w ithin restorative environments (see Hartig et al., 2014 ), the present narrative literature review focuses on evidence for positive psychological experiences of nature sounds and soundscapes specifically, and in particular how listening to these can generate perceptions and outcomes of restoration from stress and fatigue. This review has five key objectives, summarized in Figure 1 [in the article] . First, it explores literature regarding the impact of nature sounds on perceptions and experiences of wider natural environments. Second, it examines evidence regarding cognitive and affective appraisals of nature sounds and their contributions to overall perceptions of restorative environments. Third, literature regarding restorative outcomes in response to nature sounds is assessed. Fourth, the relevance of key restoration theories to this top ic is examined and areas where these theories are limited are identified. Fifth, a possible new theoretical area of interest—semantic associations with nature—is discussed and exemplified by recent acoustics research (Ratcliffe, 2021, emphasis added).

Notice how the thesis statement (in bold ) is followed by an explicit description of the five key objectives—which correspond to the titles (usually called headings ) of the five major sections of the body of the literature review. The introduction basically outlines the body of the literature review to make it easier for a researcher to find the specific information they are looking for. What follows each of these headings is an analysis and synthesis of the topic described in the heading—which is what we mean when we say a literature review is organized by topic.

Example 3.5: See how the body sections of a literature review synthesize research and evidence in relation to a focused topic. Read this example taken from a literature review in another discipline, nursing.

The introduction states that the review’s purpose is to understand the issues facing nurses in situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found several themes in the research that all contributed to nurses’ experiences. This paragraph describes one of those themes which the authors label “Professional collegiality”:

3.2.2. Professional collegiality

Professional camaraderie amongst nursing colleagues working during a pandemic was high (Ives et al., 2009, Kim, 2018, Liu a nd Liehr , 2009). Nurses acknowledged the importance of caring for their co-workers and in sharing the load. Some nurses associated the experience with working on a battlefield, whereby they worked together as a team protecting one another (Chung et al., 20 05, Kang et al., 2018, Liu and Liehr , 2009). Appreciation of their nursing colleagues was demonstrated through sharing their experiences, willingness to work together and encouraging a team spirit (Shih et al., 2007, Chung et al., 2005, Chiang et al., 2007 ). (Ratcliffe, 2021, p.4)

In this single paragraph, there are seven different research articles cited, and some of them are cited twice. There is no way to write a coherent paragraph summarizing seven different research articles at once—instead, the authors of this paragraph reviewed what the researchers said about collegiality, found where their findings pointed in the same direction, and put those connections into their own words. This is the importance of the review’s body section: it is here where you really dig into the content, meaning, and implications of the scholarship you are discussing.

The end of a literature review looks different from the one- or two-paragraph conclusion we are used to in other texts. The end is often made up of multiple sections, each with a slightly different purpose, although all are probably recognizable to you. A “Discussion” section is almost always present, where the author summarizes the most important findings of each section. In most cases, the “Discussion” section does not contain new information, but ties the different body sections together in ways that provide a deeper analysis.

The end of a literature review may also contain an “Implications for Future Research” or “Resolution” after the Discussion—sometimes this final section is even called “Conclusion.” What this last section looks like is often dependent upon the type of review you are writing, and whether the review is standing alone as a complete text or part of a larger project.

In any situation, across all disciplines, it is important to understand how your literature review is meant to inform the reader and what kind of review is appropriate for the context, in order to decide how you should structure the beginning and end of your review.

Types of Literature Reviews

There are different types of literature reviews, although in undergraduate study the Traditional or Narrative Review is most common. Narrative reviews are somewhat exploratory in their content—in a narrative review you are synthesizing the results of specific texts selected for their connection to your topic. Narrative reviews almost always end with a section describing areas for future research if they are a stand-alone text, or a section describing why the author’s research is so needed if part of a larger research article. The chart below outlines the key differences between three major literature review types. Notice that each type has a slightly different purpose. You might think about which type best fits your project as you read.

Table 3.1: Types of Literature Reviews

More Resources 3.3: Literature Review Structures

IV. Research Strategies: Developing a Methodology

Systematic and scoping reviews should always contain a Research Methodology that explains to your reader exactly how you found the research you are reviewing. Often Narrative Reviews will also contain a research methodology, although it will be slightly different since they are not comprehensive reviews, meaning, they do not attempt to find all the research on a topic—by design, they cover only a specific portion. Even if you are not required to write up your methodology, you need clear research strategies to find the appropriate scholarship for your literature review.

Example 3.6: Check out this excerpt from the methods sections from a psychology literature review. Note how the authors clearly describe what types of sources they’ll be using as well as their steps throughout the research process.

Drawing on individual case studies, archival reports, correlational studies, and laboratory and field experiments, this monograph scrutinizes a sequence of events during which confessions may be obtained from criminal suspects and used as evidence. First, we examine the pre-interrogation interview, a process by which police …( Kassin and Gudjonsson , 2004, p.33)

Example 3.7: Here is another example from the field of education. In it the authors describe two separate searches they performed to gather the literature—the first search used key terms they decided upon before reading any scholarship, and the second search used the terms that they found were common to that first set of texts (see more about key terms here and in the Annotated Bibliography chapter).

We conducted two rounds of literature searches, utilizing the following databases: World CAT (general search), EB SCO Academic Search Complete, EBSCO Education Source, and Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (ProQuest). In the first round, we searched using every possible combination of the following terms: ‘race,’ ‘language teaching,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘language p edagogy,’ ‘Whiteness,’ ‘racialized,’ ‘antiracism,’ and ‘ nativeness .’ For the second round of our literature search, we searched using terms that we saw emerging from the literature such as ‘racial identities of language learners,’ ‘racial identities of lan guage teachers,’ ‘language varieties and language teaching,’ ‘race and language teacher education,’ ‘race and educational policy,’ ‘race and language programs,’ and ‘race and language curriculum’ and also repeated our earlier searches in order to keep the literature updated. (Von Esch et al., 2020, p. 392)

No matter the type of research (see a description of qualitative vs. quantitative research ), the specific genres (see descriptions of academic research genres ), or the time frame (see a discussion on the importance of publication date ) you use for your review, it is important to think through the options, make a decision, and incorporate all your research knowledge—use of key terms, use of subject filters, use of specialized databases, etc.—into a coherent and meaningful process that results in the best scholarship for your inquiry and review.

Here’s a video to help you get started on using databases for research:

Library Referral: Connecting the Conversation with Scholarly Sources and Beyond​

(by Annie R. Armstrong)

Research involves drawing from numerous voices from a range of source types. The sources you choose to include in your conversation are context-specific and might vary depending on your topic or the parameters of your assignment. Review your assignment description and talk to your instructor about guidelines. While most research papers emphasize scholarly sources, expertise isn’t always equated with scholarliness and you might want to branch out. For example, a research paper focusing on exploitation of Native American land and communities by the mining industry should make some attempt to include sources generated by the communities under discussion, especially if their point of view is not represented in the peer-reviewed, scholarly sources you’ve found. Think about who the stakeholders are as related to various aspects of your topic and how you can tap into their voices through available resources. You may want to consult a librarian about this.

The chart below summarizes the breadth of source types available through library websites versus the open web:

Table 3.2: Scholarly Sources and Beyond

V. Reading Strategies: Intertextuality and Graphic Organizers

Typically we think of reading as something we do to learn the content of a text—and this is absolutely true! But true understanding means knowing the relationships between and impact of separate but related topics, which might mean understanding how different texts—generally focused on one topic—overlap or differ.

Intertextuality refers to the connections that exist between texts. Intertextuality as a reading strategy means looking for the connections between the text you are reading and others you have already read; anticipating connections with other texts that you have not yet read, but plan to; as well as connections to whole disciplines, fields, and social phenomena. Reading for intertextuality means looking for opportunities to connect texts with each other, and keeping track of those connections in a productive way.

This means note-taking is essential to intertextual reading. Once you have thought carefully about why you are reading a text, what types of information to look for, and what you will do with that information, you can better decide how to keep track of that information. In regards to literature reviews, one type of graphic organizer dominates: the Synthesis Matrix.

The synthesis matrix is a way to keep track of the themes, concepts, and patterns that are emerging from your reading—NOT all the individual content of each article. This is important, yes, and you will need the citations, but literature reviews move one step further into the topic than simply identifying the pieces. You will need to synthesize.

If you have an annotated bibliography of sources already, it is the perfect way to start your synthesis matrix. An annotated bibliography is often the first step in preparing for a literature review, and is quite similar to an ingredient list, if we are using the metaphor from the introduction. (For a detailed description of how to write an annotated bibliography, see Chapter 1 ).

In your annotations, you will have selected the most important information that text supplies in relation to your topic. For an example, let’s take the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s statement “ Students’ Right to Their Own Language ,” which contains two annotated bibliographies. The second uses more recent sources and looks most like the annotated bibliographies you will write as a student, so let’s start there.

Example 3.8: Here are three annotations from that bibliography. As you read, take notice of the different highlighted colors. Phrases italicized and highlighted green identify ideas related to linguistic identity , phrases bolded and highlighted in blue identify concepts related to grammar analysis , and phrases underlined and highlighted orange identify groups and ideas related to educational objectives :

Fought, Carmen. Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Based primarily on data collected from adolescent and young adult native speakers in Los Angeles , this book is a comprehensive sociolinguistic study of language and language change in Latino/a communities. It provides the basics of Chicano English (CE) structure (phonology, syntax, and semantics) and its connection to the social and cultural identity of its speakers, along with detailed analyses of particular sociolinguistic variables. Emphasis is given to the historical, social, and linguistic contexts of CE. In addition, the differences between native and non-native CE speakers are covered. A final chapter discusses the future of research on CE.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States . London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

The author examines linguistic facts about the structure and function of language , explores commonly held myths about language, and develops a model of “the language subordination process.” Then, using a case-study approach, she applies the model to specific institutional practices (e.g., in education, news media, business) to show how false assumptions about language lead to language subordination. The author analyzes specific groups and individuals (speakers of African American English, Southern U.S. English, and the foreign-language accent of Latinos and Asian Americans) and discusses why and how some embrace linguistic assimilation while others resist it.

Nero, Shondel J. Englishes in Contact: Anglophone Caribbean Students in an Urban College. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001.

This qualitative study of four anglophone Caribbean students at a New York City college offers an in-depth examination of the students’ written and spoken language and the challenges faced by both students and teachers as such students acquire academic literacy. Case studies of the four participants include excerpts from tape-recorded interviews, which reflect their linguistic self-perception, and sociolinguistic and educational experiences in their home countries and in New York City. Samples of their college writing over four semesters are represented and analyzed on morphosyntactic and discourse levels to determine the patterns that emerge when Creole English speakers attempt to write Standard Written English. Related issues such as language and identity , language attitudes, and educational responses to ethnolinguistic diversity are also discussed.

Once you have identified a concept like “language and identity” for your literature review, you can start getting “intertextual”! Review your other annotated sources and your new sources for their discussion of language and identity, as well as parallel concepts—what else do researchers address when they discuss language and identity? What do they discuss instead? Go back to the methods you used to come up with key terms for your literature search—the same strategies now apply to your reading. Also look for “umbrella” concepts, patterns in methodologies—anything that emerges while you read intertextually, focusing on the text in front of you while also remembering all the others you read before. Look for the themes in your annotated bibliography and keep track of the page numbers where these themes appear—plan to go back to those pages several times as you write your literature review.

This is a different type of reading than you did for the annotated bibliography, and might mean you go back and reread your sources several times in this new way—don’t think of this as just repeating labor you have already performed. This is new work, designed to uncover new things in the research. Re-reading articles multiple times is something all serious writers do, and something you should do, too. It isn’t redundant, it is recur sive .

Table 3.3: Synthesis Matrix for Individuals’ Choices in Linguistic Identity

Put your sources into conversations around your themes, as shown in the table above. Notice that the top row names the themes covered in that column, put into original wording similar, but not identical, to the wording in the annotated bibliographies. Not every source will address every topic—not every article is the same. The last row starts to describe what is happening in each column across the whole collection of texts. In this way, your synthesis matrix takes the ingredient list provided by the annotated bibliography and makes it into a recipe for your final product—the literature review.

More Resources 3.4: Synthesis Matrix

VI. Writing Strategies: Citation, Quotation, and Paraphrase

Citation is when you use the work of other authors in your writing and mark that portion of your writing so your reader understands what idea is being “borrowed.” Citation also tells your reader where they could find that original idea in the original text, and how your text fits together with the web of other texts related to your topic: in other words, citations help create intertextuality. A citation placed in your sentences should refer directly to the full bibliographic information in your Works Cited or References page.

As you read in Chapter 1, there are different styles of citation including AMA, APA, CMS, and MLA. You can refer back to that chapter for a more detailed explanation of each. In this section, we’ll cover the basics that are common to citation practices. Most academic styles use the original author’s last name as the central part of the in-text citation, since References pages usually list cited works alphabetically by last name, but some use footnotes or endnotes instead, listing works in the order they were cited. It is important to know which academic style you are using for your literature review so that you can make the right choice.

In-text citation takes one of two forms: parenthetical or narrative. In a narrative citation the author of the original work is mentioned in the sentence.

Example 3.9: Here’s an example taken from the introduction of the same literature review discussed in the Research Strategies: Developing a Methodology section of this chapter.

Several pieces offered a comprehensive review of the historical literature on the formation of Black English as a construct in the context of slavery and Jim Crow, and the historical teaching of Black English within the U .S. context, including Wheeler ( 2016 ) and Alim and Baugh (2007). Wheeler (2016) equated Standard English with ‘White’ English and challenged its hegemony in dialectically diverse classrooms. She named the “racism inherent in [fostering] bidialectalism [th rough teaching]” (p. 380), arguing that we are acknowledging that the only way for African-Americans to be upwardly mobile was to learn how to speak ‘White’ English. Alim (2010) , explained, “By uncritically presenting language varieties as ‘equal’ but diff ering in levels of ‘appropriateness,’ language and Dialect Awareness programs run the risk of silently legitimizing ‘Standard English’” (p. 215)…. Current work addressing AAVE studies has been shifting focus to translingualism and to promoting such pedag ogies as code-meshing (Young, Barrett, Young Rivera and Lovejoy, 2014) and translanguaging (García & Wei, García and Wei, 2014) , embedded in a critical analysis of the racial logics underpinning the denigration of some languages. This work, combined with e xtensive examinations of the connections between race, language, teaching, and identity ( e.g. Flores & Rosa, 2015; Alim et al., 2016 ), has laid a foundation for a raciolinguistics approach to teaching, which we return to later in this article. (Von Esch et al., 2020, p. 399, emphasis added .)

In the first sentence, we see two narrative citations just before the period. These citations state the authors’ names as a part of the sentence, and put the publication date of the articles in parenthesis. It makes sense to use a narrative citation in the topic sentence, since most of the paragraph is a synthesis of Wheeler and Alim’s research. The second sentence starts with Wheeler’s name in the subject position, and the fourth sentence starts with Alim’s name in the subject position—both are narrative citations, a form chosen by the author to emphasize the importance and similarities in the two articles.

In the last two sentences, we see parenthetical citations. The citation information is in parenthesis within the sentences, which focuses the reader on the ideas, not the research itself. Imagine you were reading this article out loud—you would most certainly say the narrative citations “Wheeler” and “Alim”; you might choose not to say “Young, Barrett, Young-Rivera, & Lovejoy, 2014,” though, and no one listening to you would notice the omission. This is the most important difference between narrative and parenthetical citation—narrative draws attention to the researchers, while parenthetical allows a focus on ideas. In academic writing, you often have reason to use both, but it is important to note that using parenthetical citation is less disruptive to your voice—it keeps a reader focused on the ideas you are explaining.

Usually you are citing a type of quotation in your text (although different disciplines have other situations that they cite). Direct quotation and paraphrase are usually what we talk about when we talk about using resources in your writing, although summary is cited as well.

Direct quotation is when you take the original words of one author and place them in your own text. When you quote in your own writing, you mark the copied text—usually with quotation marks “” around the text and a citation afterwards. Quoting is useful when the original author is an important authority on a topic or if you want to define/describe another’s point of view in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation.

In a literature review, a direct quote will almost always be accompanied by a narrative citation. But direct quoting can cause some issues in your own text, such as a sudden shift in voice and a loss of cohesion; the potential for misunderstanding and misrepresentation, since the quote has been separated from its original context; and wordiness —quotes can take up too much space both in terms of the quote itself, and of the explanation and context you must provide for the introduced idea. For these reasons, literature reviews do not contain much direct quoting.

Paraphrasing is a way to accomplish similar goals to direct quoting without causing the same problems. Paraphrasing is when you use only the original author’s key terms and ideas, but your own words. Paraphrasing still contains a citation afterwards that directs the reader to the full bibliographic information in your Works Cited, but does not require quotation marks since the language is yours. Paraphrase may be longer or shorter than the original author’s text, and uses both narrative and parenthetical citation. Paraphrase also allows you to cite more than one piece of research containing the same idea in a single sentence, such as the last sentence in the example paragraph above. This kind of citation string is important to literature reviews because it clearly identifies patterns and trends in research findings.

Key Takeaways

• Literature reviews are a synthesis of what other researchers have discovered on your topic. Think of reviews as “the big picture.”
• Taking so much information from other sources can get confusing–use section headings to keep your review organized and clear.
• Diverse citation, quotation, and paraphrasing techniques are necessary to help your reader understand where the ideas are coming from, AND to help make the ideas “stick together.”
• Keeping all the new knowledge you are learning from your sources organized is hard! Take notes using citations and use a graphic organizer to keep yourself on track.

Fernandez, Lord, H., Halcomb, E., Moxham, L., Middleton, R., Alananzeh, I., & Ellwood, L. (2020). Implications for COVID-19: A systematic review of nurses’ experiences of working in acute care hospital settings during a respiratory pandemic. International Journal of Nursing Studies , 111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2020.103637

Kassin, S. M., & Gudjonsson, G. H. (2004). The psychology of confessions. Psychological Science in the Public Interest , 5 (2), 33–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00016.x

National Council of Teachers of English. (2018, June 16). Students’ right to their own language (with bibliography) . Conference on College Composition and Communication. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/srtolsummary

NEIU Libraries. (2020). “How should I search in a database?”  YouTube . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fgBF0EuH_o

Ratcliffe, E. (2021). Summary Flowchart [Image]. Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563/full#B3

Ratcliffe, E. (2021). Sound and soundscape in restorative natural environments: A narrative literature review. Frontiers in Psychology , 12 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563

Sasaki. K. (2022). Synthesis and Recipes [Image].

Von Esch, K., Motha, S., & Kubota, R. (2020). Race and language teaching. Language Teaching, 53 (4), 391-421. doi:10.1017/S0261444820000269

Writing for Inquiry and Research Copyright © 2023 by Charitianne Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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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
• Librarian Support
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools

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.

Librarian Assistance

For help, please contact the librarian for your subject area.  We have a guide to library specialists by subject .

• Last Updated: Aug 26, 2024 5:59 AM
• URL: https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/literaturereviews

Literature Reviews

What this handout is about.

This handout will explain what literature reviews are and offer insights into the form and construction of literature reviews in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Introduction

OK. You’ve got to write a literature review. You dust off a novel and a book of poetry, settle down in your chair, and get ready to issue a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” as you leaf through the pages. “Literature review” done. Right?

Wrong! The “literature” of a literature review refers to any collection of materials on a topic, not necessarily the great literary texts of the world. “Literature” could be anything from a set of government pamphlets on British colonial methods in Africa to scholarly articles on the treatment of a torn ACL. And a review does not necessarily mean that your reader wants you to give your personal opinion on whether or not you liked these sources.

What is a literature review, then?

A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a certain time period.

A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. 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. It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. And depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

But how is a literature review different from an academic research paper?

The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, and a research paper is likely to contain a literature review as one of its parts. In a research paper, you use the literature as a foundation and as support for a new insight that you contribute. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.

Why do we write literature reviews?

Literature reviews provide you with a handy guide to a particular topic. If you have limited time to conduct research, literature reviews can give you an overview or act as a stepping stone. For professionals, they are useful reports that keep them up to date with what is current in the field. For scholars, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the writer in his or her field. Literature reviews also provide a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers.

Who writes these things, anyway?

Literature reviews are written occasionally in the humanities, but mostly in the sciences and social sciences; in experiment and lab reports, they constitute a section of the paper. Sometimes a literature review is written as a paper in itself.

Let’s get to it! What should I do before writing the literature review?

If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your instructor:

• Roughly how many sources should you include?
• What types of sources (books, journal articles, websites)?
• Should you summarize, synthesize, or critique your sources by discussing a common theme or issue?
• Should you evaluate your sources?
• Should you provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history?

Find models

Look for other literature reviews in your area of interest or in the discipline and read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or ways to organize your final review. You can simply put the word “review” in your search engine along with your other topic terms to find articles of this type on the Internet or in an electronic database. The bibliography or reference section of sources you’ve already read are also excellent entry points into your own research.

Narrow your topic

There are hundreds or even thousands of articles and books on most areas of study. The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to get a good survey of the material. Your instructor will probably not expect you to read everything that’s out there on the topic, but you’ll make your job easier if you first limit your scope.

Keep in mind that UNC Libraries have research guides and to databases relevant to many fields of study. You can reach out to the subject librarian for a consultation: https://library.unc.edu/support/consultations/ .

And don’t forget to tap into your professor’s (or other professors’) knowledge in the field. Ask your professor questions such as: “If you had to read only one book from the 90’s on topic X, what would it be?” Questions such as this help you to find and determine quickly the most seminal pieces in the field.

Consider whether your sources are current

Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. In the sciences, for instance, treatments for medical problems are constantly changing according to the latest studies. Information even two years old could be obsolete. However, if you are writing a review in the humanities, history, or social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be what is needed, because what is important is how perspectives have changed through the years or within a certain time period. Try sorting through some 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 consider what is currently of interest to scholars in this field and what is not.

Strategies for writing the literature review

Find a focus.

A literature review, like a term paper, is usually organized around ideas, not the sources themselves as an annotated bibliography would be organized. This means that you will not just simply list your sources and go into detail about each one of them, one at a time. No. As you read widely but selectively in your topic area, consider instead what themes or issues connect your sources together. Do they present one or different solutions? Is there an aspect of the field that is missing? How well do they present the material and do they portray it according to an appropriate theory? Do they reveal a trend in the field? A raging debate? Pick one of these themes to focus the organization of your review.

Convey it to your reader

A literature review may not have a traditional thesis statement (one that makes an argument), but you do need to tell readers what to expect. Try writing a simple statement that lets the reader know what is your main organizing principle. Here are a couple of examples:

The current trend in treatment for congestive heart failure combines surgery and medicine. More and more cultural studies scholars are accepting popular media as a subject worthy of academic consideration.

Consider organization

You’ve got a focus, and you’ve stated it clearly and directly. Now what is the most effective way of presenting the information? What are the most important topics, subtopics, etc., that your review needs to include? And in what order should you present them? Develop an organization for your review at both a global and local level:

First, cover the basic categories

Just like most academic papers, literature reviews also must contain at least three basic elements: an introduction or background information section; the body of the review containing the discussion of sources; and, finally, a conclusion and/or recommendations section to end the paper. The following provides a brief description of the content of each:

• Introduction: Gives a quick idea of the topic of the literature review, such as the central theme or organizational pattern.
• Body: Contains your discussion of sources and is organized either chronologically, thematically, or methodologically (see below for more information on each).
• Conclusions/Recommendations: Discuss what you have drawn from reviewing literature so far. Where might the discussion proceed?

Organizing the body

Once you have the basic categories in place, then you must consider how you will present the sources themselves within the body of your paper. Create an organizational method to focus this section even further.

To help you come up with an overall organizational framework for your review, consider the following scenario:

You’ve decided to focus your literature review on materials dealing with sperm whales. This is because you’ve just finished reading Moby Dick, and you wonder if that whale’s portrayal is really real. You start with some articles about the physiology of sperm whales in biology journals written in the 1980’s. But these articles refer to some British biological studies performed on whales in the early 18th century. So you check those out. Then you look up a book written in 1968 with information on how sperm whales have been portrayed in other forms of art, such as in Alaskan poetry, in French painting, or on whale bone, as the whale hunters in the late 19th century used to do. This makes you wonder about American whaling methods during the time portrayed in Moby Dick, so you find some academic articles published in the last five years on how accurately Herman Melville portrayed the whaling scene in his novel.

Now consider some typical ways of organizing the sources into a review:

• Chronological: If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials above according to when they were published. For instance, first you would talk about the British biological studies of the 18th century, then about Moby Dick, published in 1851, then the book on sperm whales in other art (1968), and finally the biology articles (1980s) and the recent articles on American whaling of the 19th century. But there is relatively no continuity among subjects here. And notice that even though the sources on sperm whales in other art and on American whaling are written recently, they are about other subjects/objects that were created much earlier. Thus, the review loses its chronological focus.
• 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 biological studies of sperm whales if the progression revealed a change in dissection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies.
• By trend: A better way to organize the above sources chronologically is to examine the sources under another trend, such as the history of whaling. Then your review would have subsections according to eras within this period. For instance, the review might examine whaling from pre-1600-1699, 1700-1799, and 1800-1899. Under this method, you would combine the recent studies on American whaling in the 19th century with Moby Dick itself in the 1800-1899 category, even though the authors wrote a century apart.
• Thematic: Thematic reviews of literature are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time. However, progression of time may still be an important factor in a thematic review. For instance, the sperm whale review could focus on the development of the harpoon for whale hunting. While the study focuses on one topic, harpoon technology, it will still be organized chronologically. The only difference here between a “chronological” and a “thematic” approach is what is emphasized the most: the development of the harpoon or the harpoon technology.But more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. For instance, a thematic review of material on sperm whales might examine how they are portrayed as “evil” in cultural documents. The subsections might include how they are personified, how their proportions are exaggerated, and their behaviors misunderstood. A review organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point made.
• Methodological: A methodological approach differs from the two above in that the focusing factor usually does not have to do with the content of the material. Instead, it focuses on the “methods” of the researcher or writer. For the sperm whale project, one methodological approach would be to look at cultural differences between the portrayal of whales in American, British, and French art work. Or the review might focus on the economic impact of whaling on a community. A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed. Once you’ve decided on the organizational method for the body of the review, the sections you need to include in the paper should be easy to figure out. They should arise out of 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.

Sometimes, though, you might 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. Put in only what is necessary. Here are a few other sections you might want to consider:

• Current Situation: Information necessary to understand the topic or focus of the literature review.
• History: The chronological progression of the field, the literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
• Methods and/or Standards: The criteria you used to select the sources in your literature review or the way in which you present your information. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed articles and journals.

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?

Begin composing

Once you’ve settled on a general pattern of organization, you’re ready to write each section. There are a few guidelines you should follow during the writing stage as well. Here is a sample paragraph from a literature review about sexism and language to illuminate the following discussion:

However, other studies have shown that even gender-neutral antecedents are more likely to produce masculine images than feminine ones (Gastil, 1990). Hamilton (1988) asked students to complete sentences that required them to fill in pronouns that agreed with gender-neutral antecedents such as “writer,” “pedestrian,” and “persons.” The students were asked to describe any image they had when writing the sentence. Hamilton found that people imagined 3.3 men to each woman in the masculine “generic” condition and 1.5 men per woman in the unbiased condition. Thus, while ambient sexism accounted for some of the masculine bias, sexist language amplified the effect. (Source: Erika Falk and Jordan Mills, “Why Sexist Language Affects Persuasion: The Role of Homophily, Intended Audience, and Offense,” Women and Language19:2).

Use evidence

In the example above, the writers refer to several other sources when making their point. A literature review in this sense is just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence to show 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 review’s focus, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological.

Use quotes sparingly

Falk and Mills do not use any direct quotes. That is because the survey nature of the literature review does not allow for in-depth discussion or detailed quotes from the text. Some short quotes here and there are okay, though, if you want to emphasize a point, or if what the author said just cannot be rewritten in your own words. Notice that Falk and Mills do quote certain terms that were coined by the author, not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. But if you find yourself wanting to put in more quotes, check with your instructor.

Summarize and synthesize

Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each paragraph as well as throughout the review. The authors here recapitulate important features of Hamilton’s study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study’s significance and relating it to their own work.

Keep your own voice

While the literature review presents others’ ideas, your voice (the writer’s) should remain front and center. Notice that Falk and Mills weave references to other sources into their own text, but they still maintain their own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with their own ideas and their own words. The sources support what Falk and Mills are saying.

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. In the preceding example, Falk and Mills either directly refer in the text to the author of their source, such as Hamilton, or they provide ample notation in the text when the ideas they are mentioning are not their own, for example, Gastil’s. For more information, please see our handout on plagiarism .

Revise, revise, revise

Draft in hand? Now you’re ready to revise. Spending a lot of time revising is a wise idea, because your main objective is to present the material, not the argument. So check over your review again to make sure it follows the assignment and/or your outline. Then, just as you would for most other academic forms of writing, rewrite or rework the language of your review so that you’ve presented your information in the most concise manner possible. Be sure to use terminology familiar to your audience; get rid of unnecessary jargon or slang. Finally, double check that you’ve documented your sources and formatted the review appropriately for your discipline. For tips on the revising and editing process, see our handout on revising drafts .

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Jones, Robert, Patrick Bizzaro, and Cynthia Selfe. 1997. The Harcourt Brace Guide to Writing in the Disciplines . New York: Harcourt Brace.

Lamb, Sandra E. 1998. How to Write It: A Complete Guide to Everything You’ll Ever Write . Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

Rosen, Leonard J., and Laurence Behrens. 2003. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook , 5th ed. New York: Longman.

Troyka, Lynn Quittman, and Doug Hesse. 2016. Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers , 11th ed. London: Pearson.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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What is a literature review?

A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area. Often part of the introduction to an essay, research report or thesis, the literature review is literally a "re" view or "look again" at what has already been written about the topic, wherein the author analyzes a segment of a published body of knowledge through summary, classification, and comparison of prior research studies, reviews of literature, and theoretical articles. Literature reviews provide the reader with a bibliographic history of the scholarly research in any given field of study. As such,  as new information becomes available, literature reviews grow in length or become focused on one specific aspect of the topic.

A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but usually contains an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, whereas a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. The literature review might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. Depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

A literature review is NOT:

• An annotated bibliography – a list of citations to books, articles and documents that includes a brief description and evaluation for each citation. The annotations inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy and quality of the sources cited.
• A literary review – a critical discussion of the merits and weaknesses of a literary work.
• A book review – a critical discussion of the merits and weaknesses of a particular book.
• Teaching Information Literacy Reframed: 50+ Framework-Based Exercises for Creating Information-Literate Learners
• The UNC Writing Center – Literature Reviews
• The UW-Madison Writing Center: The Writer’s Handbook – Academic and Professional Writing – Learn How to Write a Literature Review

What is the difference between a literature review and a research paper?

The focus of a literature review is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions, whereas academic research papers present and develop new arguments that build upon the previously available body of literature.

How do I write a literature review?

There are many resources that offer step-by-step guidance for writing a literature review, and you can find some of them under Other Resources in the menu to the left. Writing the Literature Review: A Practical Guide suggests these steps:

• Chose a review topic and develop a research question
• Locate and organize research sources
• Select, analyze and annotate sources
• Evaluate research articles and other documents
• Structure and organize the literature review
• Develop arguments and supporting claims
• Synthesize and interpret the literature
• Put it all together

What is the purpose of writing a literature review?

Literature reviews serve as a guide to a particular topic: professionals can use literature reviews to keep current on their field; scholars can determine credibility of the writer in his or her field by analyzing the literature review.

As a writer, you will use the literature review to:

• See what has, and what has not, been investigated about your topic
• Identify data sources that other researches have used
• Learn how others in the field have defined and measured key concepts
• Establish context, or background, for the argument explored in the rest of a paper
• Explain what the strengths and weaknesses of that knowledge and ideas might be
• Contribute to the field by moving research forward
• To keep the writer/reader up to date with current developments in a particular field of study
• Develop alternative research projects
• Put your work in perspective
• Demonstrate your understanding and your ability to critically evaluate research in the field
• Provide evidence that may support your own findings
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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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• Published: 17 September 2024

Can carbon trading policy boost upgrading and optimization of industrial structure? An empirical study based on data from China

• Daoping Chen   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0005-8345-5434 1 ,
• Haifeng Liao 1 &
• Hong Tan 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  1234 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

• Environmental studies
• Social policy

Carbon trading policy is a major mechanism innovation based on the market to deal with climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the scale of China’s carbon trading market gradually expands, the impact of carbon trading policy on the upgrading and optimization of industrial structures has attracted much attention. This paper depicts the upgrading of industrial structure through the advancement of industrial structure, and the optimization of industrial structure through the rationalization of industrial structure. Using panel data from 201 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2004 to 2018, this study empirically investigates the impact and mechanism of carbon trading policy on the upgrading and optimization of industrial structure based on a double difference and mediation effect model. The research results show that carbon trading policy can generally promote the upgrading and optimization of industrial structures, but there are significant differences between promoting the upgrading and optimization of industrial structures. Mechanism analysis shows that carbon trading policy can promote the upgrading and optimization of industrial structure through technological innovation, and technological innovation has an intermediary effect. Heterogeneity analysis shows that there are significant differences between the eastern region and the central and western regions in carbon trading policy promoting the upgrading and optimization of industrial structure. Carbon trading policy is conducive to the upgrading of industrial structure in the eastern region, while they are conducive to the optimization of industrial structure in the central and western regions. In addition, it was found that there are significant differences in the promotion of the upgrading and optimization of industrial structure by carbon trading policy among cities with different levels of human capital, fiscal expenditure, foreign investment, and infrastructure. These conclusions can provide policy inspiration for high-quality green economic development, environmental policy formulation, industrial policy formulation, and urban resource allocation.

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Introduction.

Carbon trading policy (CTP) refers to carbon emissions trading policy, which is an environmental regulation tool to solve global warming. Specifically, CTP is a policy measure used by the government to regulate the allocation and trading of total carbon emissions and carbon emission quotas (Zhang et al., 2014 ). China’s CTP includes six aspects: defining the scope of emission control, setting the total amount, allocating quotas, trading systems, reporting and verification mechanisms, and compliance and punishment mechanisms. CTP aims to create a free trading environment, fully leverage the role of the market in factor allocation, and ultimately achieve optimal allocation of carbon resources. The economic activities of human society are bound by the environment and in turn, affect the environment. Before the industrial revolution, the scale and scope of economic activities were small, and the impact of the environment on economic development and economic activities on the environment was inadvertently ignored. After the industrial revolution, the world seems to have found a fast path to economic development, but the problem of environmental pollution has become increasingly prominent.

In recent decades, environmental pollution has become a key factor restricting economic development. In the 1980s, the international community officially raised the issue of climate change for the first time, believing that the production of large amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the main cause of global climate change (Anjos et al., 2022 ; Jang et al., 2024 ). Only by working together can countries around the world jointly address this challenge. The market mechanism based on carbon emission trading has become a consensus as a new path for cooperation in solving greenhouse gas emissions problems. In 2011, China approved the pilot work of carbon trading in some provinces and cities, aiming to control greenhouse gas emissions by establishing a carbon trading market and conducting market trading based on greenhouse gas emission quotas. At present, the scale of quota trading volume in China’s pilot areas is second only to the European carbon market, and CTP has become an important means for China to promote enterprise emission reduction (Lv and Bai, 2021 ).

Industrial structure refers to the allocation and interdependence of resources between industries in a country or region during the process of social reproduction (Kuznets, 1957 ). It is generally believed that changes in industrial structure include two aspects: upgrading of industrial structure (UIS) and optimization of industrial structure (OIS) (Guan et al., 2022 ; Song et al., 2024 ). UIS refers to the process of transforming industrial structural systems from lower-level forms to higher-level forms. OIS refers to the coordination between various industries to maintain strong industrial structure transformation ability and good adaptability. Both UIS and OIS reflect the characteristics of changes in industrial structure. The difference lies in that UIS reflects the process of industrial structure evolution from lower to higher levels, such as the sequential transformation of industrial structure from labor-intensive to capital-intensive, and then to knowledge and technology-intensive, or the transformation from low value-added industries to high value-added industries, or the transformation from primary product industries to manufacturing intermediate and final product industries, which also means the continuous upgrading and innovation of traditional industrial production technology or the improvement of product technology content. OIS reflects the proportion balance and coordination degree between industries and reflects the efficiency of resource allocation, coordination, and utilization among industries. Under the constraints of productivity level and resource endowment, it is necessary to allocate production factors reasonably according to specific demand structures, achieve mutual coordination between industries, and maintain strong industrial structure transformation ability and good adaptability.

When the economy reaches a certain stage of development, UIS and OIS are crucial. Since the reform and opening up, relying on the development strategy of heavy industry first, China’s economy has made remarkable achievements in the world (Du et al., 2024 ). However, this mode of development has obvious characteristics of high pollution and extensive (Yu et al., 2020 ). High pollution not only aggravates the burden on the environment, but also makes the coupling degree between the input structure and output structure of factors low, resources are not effectively utilized, the transformation ability and adaptability of industrial structure are at a low level, and the economic growth is insufficient. Extensive development has resulted in a smaller share of industries with higher labor productivity, a lower level of industrial structure upgrading, and a lower quality of economic development. UIS and OIS are necessary processes for sustained economic growth and high-quality development in China (Xi and Zhai, 2022 ).

Can CTP, as an environmental regulatory tool, promote China’s UIS and OIS while reducing carbon emissions? UIS and OIS are obviously related to the environment. The reason why the current industrial structure is not optimized enough and needs to be upgraded is mainly because the industrial structure is highly polluted and extensive in economic development. An earlier study showed that the economic losses caused by environmental pollution accounted for at least 8 to 15% of the average annual GDP (World Bank report, 2007 ), which shows that there is still much room for improvement in UIS and OIS. CTP is directly aimed at the environment but may ultimately promote UIS and OIS, and UIS and OIS can better ensure the green nature of GDP. Under the incentive of CTP, enterprises can obtain new competitive advantages through the reallocation of resources, while enterprises at a competitive disadvantage may withdraw from the industry. The result of survival of the fittest makes the industry more coordinated to maintain strong industrial structure transformation ability and good adaptability. Some pollution-intensive enterprises may transfer to areas with low environmental standards in order to reduce environmental costs. This transfer not only increases the coordination between industries but also increases the adaptability between industries. CTP can also promote enterprises to develop advanced environmental protection technology through technological innovation to reduce costs, optimize internal production structure through advanced technology, and realize the upgrading of industrial structure. However, there are other possibilities. CTP has increased the product cost on the whole, and the enterprises in the industry are not adapted to the market at all, let alone the enhancement of conversion ability. Enterprises may also not have enough resources to mobilize for technological innovation, and the crowdsourcing transfer of many pollution-intensive enterprises may produce a synthetic fallacy. These circumstances may make CTP unable to promote UIS and OIS.

As the carbon trading market gradually expands, it is urgent to empirically understand the impact of CTP on China’s UIS and OIS. In relevant research fields, existing literature has mostly focused on the mechanism design of carbon trading, the emission reduction effects of CTP, and the impact of CTP on the economy. A small amount of literature has theoretically analyzed the impact of carbon trading environmental regulations on industrial structure, but there is almost no literature that studies the impact of China’s CTP on industrial structure from an empirical perspective and further explores the mechanism of this impact. Therefore, the research in this paper has important theoretical and practical significance.

Compared with the existing research, the contributions of this paper include the following three aspects. First, it is the first time to use the panel data of prefecture-level and above cities to study the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS. The sample size of panel data of cities at prefecture-level and above is larger, the data contains more information, and the practical characteristics of the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS can be more carefully captured. Secondly, it reveals the mechanism of the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS. In theory, both the “compliance cost hypothesis” and the “Porter hypothesis” indicate that CTP may promote UIS and OIS by promoting technological innovation, but this mechanism has not been verified empirically (Zhang and Duan, 2020 ; Porter and Linde, 1995 ). This study empirically found that CTP can promote UIS and OIS by promoting technological innovation. Thirdly, it expands the scope of research on the heterogeneity of the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS. The usual research on heterogeneity only discusses regional heterogeneity. This study not only studies regional heterogeneity but also studies the heterogeneity of urban characteristics in more detail. Characterized by human capital, financial expenditure, foreign investment, and infrastructure level, this study found that the role of CTP in promoting UIS and OIS is also different if the city characteristics are different.

Literature review

Economic development is faced with environmental constraints. The global climate warming caused by environmental pollution has external diseconomies. In order to achieve the goal of coordinating environmental protection and economic development, it is necessary to regulate economic activities based on environmental regulations. In economic activities, the irrational industrial structure or the low level of industrial operation may cause environmental problems. The government usually uses environmental regulation to regulate economic activities, hoping to promote UIS and OIS through environmental regulation, thus promoting economic growth and alleviating environmental pollution. As far as CTP is concerned, how to design the carbon trading mechanism, whether this mechanism design can reduce the level of carbon emissions, and what impact CTP will have on the economy are all issues worthy of attention. This paper will sort out these relevant documents. This paper aims to study the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS, and the mechanism of this impact. The literature in this area is the focus of this paper. The following is a literature review on these aspects.

The first is the literature on carbon trading mechanisms. The carbon trading mechanism is an environmental regulation based on market means to solve the problem of global climate change, and CTP is the core content (Shobande et al., 2024 ). The scope of the carbon trading mechanism is broader than that of CTP. Carbon assets were not commodities and had no significant development value. However, in order to address the issue of global climate change, countries jointly signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. According to the Kyoto Protocol, by 2010, the amount of six greenhouse gases emitted by all developed countries, including carbon dioxide, methane, etc., will be reduced by 5.2% compared to 1990. However, due to significant differences in energy utilization efficiency, energy structure, and adoption of new energy technologies between developing countries and developed countries, there are significant differences in emission reduction costs, which has led to the emergence of a carbon trading market (Oke et al., 2024 ). The carbon trading mechanism is a system that regulates the international carbon trading market, which includes mechanisms such as the clean development mechanism (CDM), joint implementation (JI), and emissions trading (ET).

The carbon trading mechanism regards carbon emission rights as a special commodity, and internalizes external costs through market-based means to guide enterprises to achieve emission reduction and promote low-carbon economic development (Chen and Mu, 2023 ). The key to the carbon trading mechanism is the allocation scheme of carbon emission rights among regions. One is to allocate carbon emission rights based on the current greenhouse gas emissions, the other is to allocate carbon emission rights based on the historical cumulative carbon emissions, and the other is to allocate carbon emission rights based on the carbon capital stock (Peng et al., 2023 ). However, no matter which allocation scheme is adopted, there may be mismatches. The mismatch of carbon emission rights may lead to adverse selection of enterprises. In order to eliminate the adverse selection of enterprises’ emission reduction from the mechanism design, it is possible to achieve better allocation efficiency by introducing the auction-paid allocation criteria into the carbon trading market (Chen et al., 2023 ). Zhou et al. ( 2021 ) believed that carbon emission quotas should be determined according to the impact of the carbon trading mechanisms on the competitiveness of different industries. Wang et al. ( 2024 ) believe that China’s carbon trading market has played a significant role in achieving emission reduction and environmental goals. In the future, we should speed up the improvement of carbon trading-related legislation, develop a multi-level carbon trading market, and pay attention to preventing the risk of quota overrun. In the context of the development of economic integration, the design of a cross-regional carbon emission coordinated governance mechanism has also received attention (Xie et al., 2019 ). At the micro level, the household carbon emission reduction incentive mechanism (Jia, 2023 ) and the establishment of an individual carbon trading market (Uusitalo et al., 2022 ) were included in the research horizon.

The second is the literature on the emission reduction effect of CTP. Generally speaking, the implementation of economic policies is usually affected by various external factors, and the policy effect is often uncertain. How about the emission reduction effect of CTP? At the initial stage of China’s carbon trading market pilot, scholars mostly focused on qualitative research, mainly involving the construction of a CTP performance evaluation index system and the practical problems in the implementation of CTP (Wu et al., 2016 ). With the continuous development of China’s carbon market, the research on CTP has begun to be quantitative, and this kind of research mainly focuses on the evaluation of the emission reduction effect of CTP. From different macro and micro levels, some scholars have empirically found that CTP has significant emission reduction effects and regional heterogeneity (Tan et al., 2022 ; Song et al., 2023 ). Liu et al. ( 2023 ) found that CTP can significantly improve the level of industrial carbon productivity, and can produce significant energy structure optimization effects. Fu ( 2024 ) believed that although CTP has significantly reduced carbon emissions and carbon intensity and has a significant emission reduction effect, its role in promoting carbon emission reduction is limited, and the market mechanism measured by the carbon price and market liquidity has no significant emission reduction effect. The development of some carbon markets in China is not perfect, the operation and pricing mechanism of the carbon market is not completely reasonable (Lin and Huang, 2022 ), the instability of carbon prices in the carbon market and the lack of liquidity of carbon trading products (Lyu et al., 2020 ; Lin and Jia, 2019 ), and a series of problems may weaken the positive impact of CTP in achieving the minimum social cost reduction. But on the whole, the emission reduction effect of CTP exists.

The third is the literature on the impact of CTP on the economy. CTP is an environmental regulation tool based on the property rights theory of the new institutional economics and taking carbon emissions trading as the core by means of marketization. Therefore, in addition to directly studying the impact of CTP on the economy, scholars have also studied the impact of the carbon emissions trading mechanism and environmental regulation on the economy. Wang et al. ( 2022 ) believe that CTP has significantly promoted the high-quality development of the economy, and there are significant regional differences in this promotion. Liu and Liu ( 2023 ) found that CTP has significantly promoted the innovative activities of enterprises to explore new knowledge, and the carbon quota allocation method has an important impact on the innovative activities of enterprises. The adoption of the intensity of the carbon quota allocation method is more conducive to the breakthrough innovation of enterprises, while the total carbon quota allocation method is more conducive to the progressive innovation of enterprises. Zhu et al. ( 2019 ) believe that CTP can have a positive impact on China’s economy by stimulating investment in low-carbon technology innovation, but this impact is heterogeneous at the micro level. Wang et al. ( 2024 ) constructed game models among manufacturers under different carbon trading models and found that when carbon quotas are within a certain range, various CTPs are beneficial to both original manufacturers and remanufacturers. This indicates that CTP has a positive incentive effect on micro-enterprises. Shi et al. ( 2023 ) studied the main exogenous shocks that caused China’s economic fluctuations under different carbon quota allocation modes and the mechanisms that affected China’s economic fluctuations and found that the factors that affected China’s economic fluctuations under different carbon quota allocation modes were different. Based on the research from the perspective of environmental regulation, the impact of environmental regulation on economic growth has a threshold effect on technological innovation (Wang, 2023 ; Chishti et al., 2023 ) . Only when human capital is at a high level can environmental regulation exert its positive economic growth effect (Liu and Pan, 2024 ). The coordination of environmental regulation policies, on the whole, has significantly promoted high-quality economic development, but there is significant heterogeneity (Kou and Shi, 2024 ). However, some scholars believe that the economic effect of CTP is weak, and the “strong Poter hypothesis” of CTP on total factor productivity has not been shown (Zhang et al., 2023 ), and it has not significantly promoted the low-carbon technological innovation of enterprises and the long-term value of enterprises (Wang et al., 2024 ).

The last is the literature on the impact of CTP on industrial structure. In essence, the impact of CTP on industrial structure also belongs to the category of economic impact, but considering the purpose of this paper, the literature on the impact of CTP on industrial structure is specially reviewed. An earlier study showed that under the constraints of a low-carbon economy, the extensive economic development model of high pollution is not enough to absorb the impact of emission reduction, and technological progress and structural transformation are crucial to the sustained and stable growth of China’s economy (Zhao et al., 2022 ). Harris and Sunley ( 2023 ) also believe that promoting industrial restructuring is the only way to achieve low-carbon development. The theoretical analysis believes that environmental regulation contributes to the adjustment of industrial structure, and the research on the mechanism of environmental regulation affecting industrial structure has formed three theoretical views. The first is the “compliance cost hypothesis “, which holds that environmental regulation makes enterprises pay extra costs to occupy the production and R & D funds of enterprises, resulting in the reduction of the production efficiency and operating performance of enterprises, and then affects the entry and exit of enterprises through the survival of the fittest, making the industry structure compulsory “cleaning” (Yang et al., 2012 ; Zhang and Duan, 2020 ). The second is the “pollution refuge hypothesis”, which holds that pollution-intensive enterprises often transfer to regions with low environmental standards or low intensity of environmental regulations in order to avoid environmental regulations or reduce environmental costs. This transfer will eventually make the industrial structure of a country or region adjust in the direction of rationalization (Millimeter and Roy, 2016 ; Dou and Han, 2019 ). The third is the “Porter Hypothesis”, which believes that appropriate environmental regulations can encourage technological innovation of enterprises. Enterprises can optimize their internal production structure by developing advanced technologies that can meet environmental requirements and reduce production costs, resulting in an innovation compensation effect (Porter and Linde, 1995 ). Du et al. ( 2021 ) found empirically that China’s environmental regulation policy can promote the upgrading of industrial structure through the reverse force mechanism, which seems to confirm the “compliance cost hypothesis”. However, some scholars believe that environmental regulation measures have not yet achieved the Potter effect in China, that is, environmental regulation has not achieved UIS and OIS through technological innovation (Nie et al., 2021 ).

As an environmental regulation tool, CTP has achieved positive results in promoting industrial structure adjustment (Chen et al., 2024 ). Jia et al. ( 2024 ) believe that changes in energy structure have driven the development of China’s industrial system towards the low-carbon direction. Therefore, the establishment of the carbon trading market is conducive to the regional transfer of high energy consumption and high-emission industries, thus increasing the coordination between industries and improving the transformation ability of industrial structure (Tang et al., 2016 ). Song and Kong ( 2018 ) found that carbon emissions trading volume has a significant positive impact on industrial structure changes, indicating that the development of the carbon emissions trading market can promote the optimization of regional economic structure. Liu and Cheng ( 2022 ) believe that carbon emissions trading can effectively promote the upgrading of regional industrial structure, but it is not conducive to the rationalization of regional industrial structure. The industrial structure optimization and upgrading effect of carbon emissions trading has obvious regional heterogeneity.

Through the aforementioned literature review, it was found that existing literature has conducted in-depth research on CTP from multiple perspectives, which can provide a reference for this article. However, the existing literature on the impact of CTP on industrial structure is not systematic and in-depth, especially the empirical research needs to be further deepened. For example, Du et al. ( 2021 ), Nie et al. ( 2021 ) and other studies involved industrial structure, but based on broader environmental regulations, there was no specific CTP, and the research conclusions were quite different. Two more relevant documents are the research of Song and Kong ( 2018 ), Liu and Cheng ( 2022 ). The former involves industrial structure but mainly focuses on economic structure, while the latter only uses provincial panel data to limit the scope and depth of the research. Based on the panel data of cities at the prefecture level and above, this study has more advantages in feature capture, mechanism recognition, and heterogeneity research.

Model and data

Benchmark model.

Based on the literature analysis mentioned above, it can be seen that CTP has a significant impact on industrial structure, but it is not entirely clear whether they have promoted UIS and OIS. The traditional view is that CTP, due to increasing corporate costs, has a negative impact on improving productivity and competitiveness, which may inhibit UIS and OIS (Dai et al., 2018 ; Zhang and Duan, 2020 ). The opposite of the Porter hypothesis suggests that CTP can encourage companies to engage in more innovative activities, which will increase productivity and offset the increase in costs caused by environmental protection, thereby enhancing the profitability of companies in the market and promoting UIS and OIS. There may also be another situation where companies pay additional costs to comply with CTP, which squeezes out production and research and development funds, leading to a decrease in production efficiency and operational performance. Such a portion of enterprises have been eliminated, and the industrial structure has been optimized. In addition, from the perspective of industrial transfer, CTP may also encourage pollution-intensive enterprises to transfer to areas with lower environmental standards in order to reduce environmental costs, which may lead to a rationalization of industrial structure.

Carbon trading entities include key emitting enterprises in industries such as electricity, steel, cement, construction, papermaking, and petrochemicals. CTP may achieve UIS and OIS through mechanisms such as cost constraints, innovation incentives, factor substitution, and consumption upgrading. CTP significantly increases the carbon emission cost of high-carbon industries, and low-carbon industries will gradually replace some of their shares due to their cost advantages. This will force high-carbon industries to carry out energy-saving and emission-reduction transformation, thereby promoting overall UIS and OIS. CTP can encourage enterprises to rationally allocate resources in research and development and operation, strengthen the cultivation of technological research and innovation capabilities, increase profits and enhance core competitiveness by selling remaining carbon quotas, and ultimately achieve UIS and OIS (Zhou and Wang, 2022 ). CTP can also optimize industrial structure through factor substitution. On the one hand, when a company reduces the use of traditional carbon-containing resources, it will inevitably reduce the market’s consumption and demand for such mineral resources, thereby easing the pressure on their mining upstream of the industrial chain; On the other hand, market-oriented carbon prices and quota trading mechanisms change the energy consumption structure of emission control enterprises by influencing their factor inputs, thereby promoting the green transformation of high-emission enterprises. Consumption upgrading may also be a mechanism by which CTP promotes UIS and OIS. Consumption upgrading promotes the flow of funds into energy-saving industries, and under the multiplier effect of funds, the industrial structure develops towards rationalization (Zhao et al., 2022 ).

In order to examine the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS, and to answer whether CTP can promote UIS and OIS, this paper uses the dual-difference (DID) model for empirical research. The DID model can obtain the net effect of policy implementation through the difference in time trend before and after policy implementation and the difference of policy implementation between the experimental group (pilot area) and the control group (non-pilot area) after effectively removing the unobservable heterogeneity factors. This method is a “quasi-natural experiment” method (Angrist and Pischke, 2018 ). Specifically, the cities under the jurisdiction of the pilot provinces are taken as the experimental group, and the other cities are taken as the control group. The fixed effects are estimated by setting the interactive dummy variables of whether the policy occurs or not. This design can not only alleviate the bias caused by missing variables to a certain extent but also effectively avoid endogenous problems caused by reverse causality, so as to more accurately estimate the net effect of policy implementation (Lv and Bai, 2021 ). The benchmark empirical model of this paper is set as follows:

Where i and t represent cities and years, respectively. The variable Upgrade i,t represents the level of UIS and OIS. treat i is a virtual variable of the city, with a value of 1 or 0. The variable post t is a dummy variable of time. If t is the implementation of the policy in 2011 and later, the value post t is 1, and the value of other years is 0. X i,t are control variables, which refer to other important factors affecting UIS and OIS besides CTP. η t is the time-fixed effect, μ i is the urban fixed effect that does not change with time, and ε i,t is the random error term. The coefficient β of the interaction term treat × post is the focus of the paper. It reflects the net effect of CTP on the optimization and upgrading of the regional industrial structure after the double difference.

Variable selection

Explained variable.

Upgrade is the dependent variable, representing the levels of UIS and OIS. UIS is measured by the advancement of industrial structure, and OIS is measured by the rationalization of industrial structure (Lin and Liao, 2023 ).

The variable SA represents the level of the advancement of industrial structure, defined as the product of the proportion of output in each industrial sector and labor productivity (Liu et al., 2008 ). The specific formula is as follows:

Where m represents the three major industries, with values ranging from 1 to 3. Y represents total output, LP labor productivity. The larger SA , the higher the UIS level, while the smaller SA , the lower the UIS level. Considering that the labor productivity LP in formula (2) has dimensions and the proportion of output value is a dimensionless index, it needs to be standardized. The formula is as follows:

Where \(L{P}_{i,m,t}^{N}\) represents the standardized labor productivity of the m industry after the completion of industrialization. The meaning of LP i,m,t is the same as before. LP mb is the labor productivity of m industry at the beginning of industrialization, and LP mf is the labor productivity of m industry at the completion of industrialization.

The variable SR represents the level of the rationalization of industrial structure. Under the constraints of productivity level and resource endowment, it is necessary to allocate production factors reasonably according to the specific demand structure to achieve mutual coordination among industries to maintain strong industrial structure transformation ability and good adaptability. Therefore, the coupling degree between the input structure and the output structure is crucial, which reflects the rationalization level of the industrial structure. This coupling degree is usually measured by the structural deviation degree. However, one disadvantage of the structural deviation degree is to treat the importance of each industry in the economy equally, and it may be more common to not consider the unbalanced phenomenon in the economy. For this reason, some researchers introduced the Theil index into the structural deviation degree to measure SR (Gan et al., 2011 ). This not only considers the coupling relationship between the input structure and the output structure, but also considers the unbalanced phenomenon in the economy. This study follows this approach, and the specific formula is as follows:

Where y i,m,t represents the proportion of the total output of i city m industry in year t to the gross regional product and L i,t represents the proportion of the employees in the total employment of i city in t year. If SR is 0, it indicates that the industrial structure has achieved an equilibrium state. If it is not 0, it indicates that the industrial structure deviates from the equilibrium state. The smaller SR value, the smaller the deviation between the industrial structure and the equilibrium state, and the higher the OIS. SR is an inverse indicator for OIS.

Explanatory variable

The explanatory variable is CTP, represented by treat ×  post . It is a dummy variable with 2011 as the point of policy impact. If a city is affected by CTP in 2011 or later, then treat × post =1, otherwise it is 0.

Control variable

In the empirical model (1), X represents a series of control variables, and λ is the coefficient of each control variable. The selection and measurement of control variables refer to relevant literature and consider the supply and demand factors that drive UIS and OIS (Lyu et al., 2023 ; Pan et al., 2023 ). Six control variables are selected in this study, which are: human (human capital), expressed by the proportion of the number of students in higher education in the total urban population; gov (government expenditure), expressed by the proportion of government public expenditure in urban GDP; pgdp (level of economic development) is expressed by the proportion of urban GDP to the total urban population; urban (urbanization level), expressed as the logarithm of the total urban population divided by the urban area; fdi (foreign investment) is expressed by the proportion of the total amount of FDI actually utilized to the urban GDP; instr (infrastructure) is expressed by dividing the urban road area by the total urban population. Among them, human , gov , fdi , and instr are also used to analyze the heterogeneity of urban characteristics. The details of each variable definition are presented in Table 1 .

Intermediary variable

Referring to other relevant studies (Hayes., 2009 ; Ma et al., 2024 ), this study uses a mediation effect model to identify the mechanism by which CTP affects UIS and OIS. Patent (technological innovation) is used as a mediator variable, measured by the number of urban patent applications (Liu et al., 2023 ). The measurements for all variables are presented in Table 1 .

Data source and description statistics

The panel data of 201 prefecture-level and above cities in China (including 33 pilot cities) from 2004 to 2018 were selected as the research samples, with a sample size of 3015. The data were sourced from the China Urban Statistical Yearbook and some prefecture-level city statistical annual reports, and all value variables were processed with 2004 as the base period (Brandt et al., 2012 ). The descriptive statistics of each variable are shown in Table 1 .

Benchmark model estimation results and robustness test

Estimation results of the benchmark model.

Table 2 shows the estimated results of model (1). Columns (1)–(3) in Table 2 reflect the estimated results of the impact of CTP on UIS. When no control variables are added, the coefficient of the CTP variable treat × post is 0.178, which is significant at the 1% statistical level; After adding the control variable, the coefficients of treat  ×  post are 0.202 and 0.185, respectively, under the two different conditions of fixed individuals or fixed time, which are significant at the statistical level of 1%, and the coefficient value increases. This shows that CTP has a significant positive impact on UIS, and the overall explanatory power of the model is enhanced after adding control variables. Therefore, CTP can promote UIS.

Columns (4)–(6) in Table 2 reflect the estimated results of the impact of CTP on OIS. It can be seen that the coefficients of treat × post are all negative and consistent with expectations, but the coefficients are not completely statistically significant. When no control variable is added, the coefficient of treat × post is negative 0.003, but it is not significant at the given statistical level; After adding the control variable, the coefficient of treat × post is negative 0.006, which is significant at the statistical level of 5%, and the absolute value of the coefficient increases when the individual and time are fixed at the same time. Although the estimated results are not perfect, the model still has some explanatory power. CTP can promote OIS to a certain extent, and the explanatory power of the model has increased after adding control variables.

From the perspective of the benchmark model estimation results, the coefficients of treat × post are all consistent with expectations. When individuals and time are fixed at the same time, the coefficients of treat × post are at least significant at the statistical level of 5% after adding control variables. Therefore, in general, CTP can promote UIS and OIS, but there is a significant difference between promoting UIS and OIS. CTP is more conducive to promoting UIS, which may also be the practical characteristics of the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS.

What needs further explanation is why the impact of CTP on OIS is weaker than that on UIS. OIS involves the rational allocation of resources and the coordination among industries. China’s carbon trading market has not yet fully developed and matured. The incomplete market mechanism and imperfect legal system make the resource allocation in the pilot area unreasonable (Wang et al., 2024 ). In addition, there is a lack of awareness of cooperation among enterprises and a low degree of inter-industry correlation (Lin and Jia, 2019 ). In the process of industrial structure adjustment, the adverse effects of these factors have weakened the role of CTP in promoting OIS, and the offset of adverse effects has led to the weaker role of CTP in promoting OIS than in promoting UIS.

The estimated results of the control variables show that in terms of UIS, the coefficients of human , pgdp , urban and instr are significantly positive, while the coefficients of gov and fdi are significantly negative. In terms of OIS, the coefficients of human and fdi are significantly positive, while the coefficients of gov and pgdp are significantly negative. This also further reflects that there are differences between UIS and OIS.

Dynamic effect test

One prerequisite for using the DID model is that there is no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group before the implementation of the policy, that is, there is a parallel trend between the experimental group and the control group before the occurrence of the policy. Therefore, it is necessary to test the parallel trend of CTP affecting UIS and OIS. In addition, the above-estimated results reflect the average impact of CTP on UIS and OIS in the pilot area. Over time, the impact of the CTP pilot on UIS and OIS may change accordingly. Therefore, it is necessary to further investigate the dynamic effects of CTP to reflect the differences in the effect of the pilot policy in different time periods. Using the methods of Xu and Cui ( 2020 ) for reference, the following model (5) is constructed to test the dynamic effects of CTP:

Where, post 04 represents a time dummy variable. If it is in 2004, it takes a value of 1, otherwise it takes a value of 0. The remaining 13 times dummy variables, such as post 05, are all assigned this value and the values of other variables are the same as those of Eq. ( 1 ). The base year is 2010, the year before the implementation of CTP.

The value and test results of coefficient β can be obtained by estimating the model (5). Figure 1 shows the dynamic effect diagram of coefficient β change at 95% confidence. From Fig. 1 , it can be seen that the interaction coefficient β is not significant before and after the implementation of CTP, indicating that there is no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group. The parallel trend assumption of double difference is satisfied, and the above estimation of the model (1) is effective. Further, from Fig. 1a of the dynamic effect of CTP to promote UIS, it can be seen that the value of β coefficient began to be significant and gradually increased since 2013, which indicates that the impact of the CPT pilot on the industrial structure in 2011 lagged for two years, and the role of CTP in promoting UIS gradually increased. It can be seen from Fig. 1b of the dynamic effect of OIS that the value of β coefficient gradually becomes negative after 2014, which indicates that the inhibition effect of CTP on the deviation of industrial structure from the equilibrium state begins to appear, and the time lag period of CTP on OIS is longer. In general, the implementation of CTP has a more obvious role in promoting UIS than in OIS.

Note: the vertical line in the figure represents the base year 2010. The x -axis represents the year, and the y -axis represents the value of the coefficient β . a and b , respectively, reflect the dynamic changes in β values when SA and SR are used as dependent variables.

Robustness test

Placebo test.

Sampling 1000 times from 201 cities, 33 cities were randomly selected as virtual pilot cities each time, and the remaining 168 cities were used as control cities. By re-estimating model (1), the kernel density distribution Figure of the two explained variables SA and SR can be obtained as shown in Fig. 2 . It can be seen from Fig. 2 that t -test values of most of the sampling estimates are between ±2, and most of the P- values are above 0.1, which indicates that CTP has no significant effect in the 1000 random samples, indicating that other unknown factors have a little causal relationship with the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS of the pilot cities.

Note: this figure reflects the distribution of t -values in sampling estimation, where panel a represents the distribution of t -values when SA is the dependent variable, and panel b represents the distribution of t -values when SR is the dependent variable.

Propensity score matching-double difference test (PSM-DID)

According to the PSM-DID method, the common support hypothesis is first tested, and the results show that the hypothesis is satisfied, and then the kernel matching method is used for estimation. Figure 3 shows the density function of propensity scores before and after matching. It can be seen from Fig. 3 that after matching, the probability density of the tendency scores of the experimental group and the control group has been relatively close, and the matching effectiveness is good.

Note: this figure reflects the distribution of propensity scores, where panel a represents the distribution of propensity scores before matching, and panel b represents the distribution of propensity scores after matching.

Further, columns (1) and (2) of Table 3 present the PSM-DID estimation results. It can be seen from Table 3 that the estimated results of PSM-DID are basically consistent with those of Table 2 , indicating that the model’s estimation is robust, which further supports the above empirical conclusion that CTP has promoted UIS and OIS.

Delete the sample value test for the pilot year

Delete the observations from all provinces in 2011 and re-estimate the model. The results are shown in columns (3) and (4) of Table 3 . It can be seen from this that the coefficient of interaction terms is still significant at the level of at least 5%, which again shows that the conclusion that CTP promotes UIS and OIS is robust.

Further analysis

Mechanism analysis.

This paper empirically finds that CTP can promote UIS and OIS. In order to lead the research to depth, it is necessary to further study the transmission mechanism behind this. This paper will further explore the transmission mechanism of CTP promoting UIS and OIS from the perspective of technological innovation. In theory, the “compliance cost hypothesis” and the “Porter hypothesis” both predict that CTP may promote UIS and OIS by promoting technological innovation. On the one hand, CTP makes enterprises pay extra compliance costs to squeeze out the production and R&D expenditure of enterprises. The lack of expenditure will affect the speed of technological innovation of enterprises. The conversion of competitive advantages and disadvantages may lead to the withdrawal of the enterprise or the entry of other enterprises, and the industrial structure will have to be adjusted compulsorily. On the other hand, CTP can change the industrial structure by encouraging technological innovation of enterprises and generating an innovation compensation effect. In reality, the mechanism design of the carbon trading market allows enterprises to have a certain amount of free emission quota, while allowing free transfer of emission rights on the premise of complying with the provisions of the law. For high-polluting enterprises, after consuming their own emission quotas, they also need to purchase the excess part in the carbon trading market, otherwise they will face economic penalties, which will lead to an increase in the production costs of enterprises. For enterprises with advantages in production technology and technology research and development, after the implementation of the policy, the surplus quota can be sold on the market to obtain profits. High-polluting enterprises under the pressure of cost are forced to make technological innovations to alleviate the pressure of emissions. Enterprises with technological and R & D advantages are encouraged by profits to further carry out production technology R & D to improve the level of technological innovation and obtain more surplus quotas (Cai and Ye, 2022 ).

In the empirical aspect, the existing research has focused on the impact of CTP on technological innovation and the impact of technological innovation on industrial structure but failed to combine CTP, technological innovation, and industrial structure to examine the mechanism of CTP promoting UIS and OIS. In terms of the impact of CTP on technological innovation, the existing research believes that the establishment of a carbon emission trading pilot has promoted the level of low-carbon technological innovation (Liu et al., 2015 ), CTP has promoted breakthrough innovation activities of enterprises (Liu and Liu, 2023 ), CTP has promoted low-carbon technological innovation investment (Zhu et al., 2019 ), and similar research also includes Jia et al. ( 2024 ). In terms of the impact of technological innovation on industrial structure, the existing research believes that UIS and OIS based on technological innovation is an important way of economic growth (You and Zhang, 2022 ), and technological innovation affects UIS and OIS through three driving forces of technological diffusion, product demand and factor allocation (Zou, 2024 ). Zhang and Liu ( 2022 ) believe that technological innovation has a significant role in promoting UIS and has a positive spatial spillover effect. Today, with the development of digital technology, digital technology integration and innovation will help o UIS and OIS for a long time (Wang et al., 2024 ).

On the basis of existing research, combining CTP, technological innovation, and industrial structure, empirical research on whether CTP promotes UIS and OIS through technological innovation is not only a test of theory but also a concern for reality. Using the method of Hayes ( 2009 ) for reference, build a mediation effect model including three models, and identify the aforementioned transmission mechanism through the overall judgment of the coefficient of the model interaction terms. The specific settings are as follows:

The meaning of each variable in the model is the same as before. The test steps and judgment rules of intermediary effect are as follows: The first step is to test the coefficient α 1 which represents the total effect of CTP. If α 1 is significant, continue; otherwise, stop testing. The second step is to test the coefficients θ 1 and ξ . If both are significant, then the indirect effect is significant, proceed to the fourth step; If at least one coefficient is not significant, proceed to the third step. The third step is to use the Bootstrap method for testing. If significant, the indirect effect is significant. This can proceed to the fourth step, otherwise the test will be stopped. Step four, test the coefficient γ 1 . If it is not significant, i.e., the direct effect is not significant, then there is only a mediating effect; If significant, that is, the direct effect is significant, proceed to the fifth step. Step five, see the symbols of θ 1 * ξ and γ 1 . If the symbols are the same, there is a partial mediating effect; If there is a different symbol, it belongs to the masking effect.

Table 4 reports the estimation and test results of the intermediary effect models (6), (7) and (8). Through these results, we can determine whether the variable Patent has an intermediary effect in CTP to promote UIS and OIS. If there is an intermediary effect, it can be considered that the mechanism of CTP promoting UIS and OIS through technological innovation is established.

First of all, we will examine whether there is an intermediary effect of technological innovation in promoting UIS through CTP. It can be seen from column (1) of Table 4 that the coefficient of the interaction item treat × post is 0.185 and is significant at the statistical level of 1%, indicating that CTP has a significant impact on UIS. It can be seen from column (3) that the coefficient of treat × post is 7.582 and is significant at the statistical level of 1%, indicating that CTP has a significant impact on technological innovation. It can be seen from column (4) that the coefficients of treat × post and the technological innovation variable Patent are 0.088 and 0.013, respectively, and both are significant at the statistical level of 1%, indicating that CTP and technological innovation variables have a significant impact on UIS. According to the judging rules for testing the intermediary effect, technological innovation has an intermediary effect in CTP to promote UIS. CTP can promote UIS by promoting technological innovation.

Then we will examine whether technological innovation has an intermediary effect in promoting OIS through CTP. It can be seen from column (2) of Table 4 that the coefficient of treat × post is negative 0.006 and is significant at the statistical level of 5%, indicating that CTP has a significant impact on OIS. The test results of column (3) show that CTP has a significant impact on technological innovation. It can be seen from column (5) that the coefficient of treat × post is negative 0.006 and significant at the statistical level of 5%, but the coefficient of technological innovation variable Patent is not statistically significant. According to the judging rules of intermediary effect, it can not be determined that there is an intermediary effect in technological innovation, but it can also not be determined that there is no intermediary effect in technological innovation. Therefore, further tests are needed. The bootstrap sampling method is used to test whether there is an intermediary effect. Through 500 bootstrap sampling, the 95% confidence interval is (0.007,0.013), which does not contain 0, and the probability value P of the two-tailed test is 0.000. It can be seen that technological innovation has an intermediary effect in the process of CTP promoting OIS, and CTP can promote OIS by promoting technological innovation.

To sum up, CTP can promote UIS and OIS. In terms of the promotion mechanism, CTP can promote the development of UIS and OIS by promoting technological innovation. Technological innovation has an intermediary effect.

Heterogeneity analysis

Heterogeneity means that some things are different in some characteristics. When studying the impact of one variable on another variable, further investigation of the heterogeneity of the impact after clarifying the impact relationship will help to understand the impact more deeply and carefully. This study found that CTP can generally promote UIS and OIS. However, due to significant differences in economic development level, resource endowment, industrial structure, and other aspects among different regions, these differences may lead to heterogeneity in CTP when promoting UIS and OIS. Capturing this heterogeneity through relevant data is not only the need of empirical research but also helpful to put forward targeted differentiation policy recommendations. The heterogeneity analysis based on regional and urban characteristics in this paper is a further deepening of the research on the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS.

Analysis of regional heterogeneity

Based on Jin and Xu ( 2024 ), this paper divides China into the Eastern region and the Central and Western regions. Therefore, the regional heterogeneity analysis model of the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS is constructed as follows:

Where Did is the interaction term treat in model (1). location k is a location level variable with a value of 1 or 0. k represents the city type, with a value of 1 or 2, where 1 represents the eastern city and 2 represents the central and western cities. The interaction coefficient β reflects the regional heterogeneity of the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS. The estimated results are reported in Table 5 .

From the coefficient of interaction item Did × location in Table 5 , it can be seen that CTP has significantly promoted UIS of the eastern developed cities (as shown in columns (1) and (2)), both with and without control variables. However, in central and western cities, the impact of CTP on UIS is not significant (as shown in columns (3) and (4)). The eastern developed cities have a high level of industrialization. After the implementation of CTP, the location advantages of technology and capital promote enterprises to further innovate technology, improve labor productivity, and then promote the industrial structure of the eastern developed cities to develop in an advanced direction. The proportion of industries with high energy consumption and high pollution in the central and western regions is still large. The implementation of CTP has put forward higher requirements for the level of pollution control technology in the central and western regions. The high cost of pollution control may have a restraining effect on the advanced development of the industrial structure.

It can also be seen from Table 5 that CTP has not significantly promoted OIS of the eastern developed cities (as shown in columns (5) and (6)). However, for central and western cities, the implementation of CTP can promote OIS (as shown in (7) and (8)). The reason for this situation may be that the industrial structure of developed cities in the eastern region is already relatively reasonable, and the effect of CTP on further rationalizing their industrial structure is relatively weak. However, for the central and western regions, due to the large space for further improvement in OIS, when there are new situations where dominant industries or new technology industries strengthen the degree of correlation between industries, CTP more clearly promotes OIS in the region.

Heterogeneity analysis on urban characteristics

After discussing regional heterogeneity, this paper further explores the urban characteristic heterogeneity of CTP to promote UIS and OIS. The analysis of urban characteristics heterogeneity is the refinement of regional heterogeneity analysis and is more detailed in perspective. Referring to Shi et al. ( 2018 ), the four variables of human , gov , fdi , and instr are used to describe the urban characteristics. Cities are divided into low-level and high-level categories according to the value of each variable. The classification rules are as follows: first, they are sorted according to the value of each variable from small to large, then they are divided into first-class groups, second-class groups, and third-class groups according to the value of each variable from small to large, and finally, the first-class groups are classified as low-level categories, and the second-class and third-class groups are classified as high-level categories. For example, according to the classification of human capital, cities will be divided into low human capital cities and high human capital cities; If classified by fiscal expenditure, cities will be divided into two categories: low fiscal expenditure cities and high fiscal expenditure cities, and the rest are the same. Group regression based on model (1) is conducted, and the results are shown in Tables 6 and 7 .

First, by comparing the coefficient of interaction item treat × post in the two columns of human variable in Tables 6 and 7 , it can be seen that in cities with high human capital, CTP has a more significant role in promoting UIS and OIS (the interaction coefficient is 0.225 and −0.012, respectively), which shows that human capital plays an important role in promoting UIS and OIS by CTP. UIS and OIS depend on advanced technology, and the development and acquisition of advanced technology have a certain threshold. Workers with higher education levels find it relatively easy to learn these technologies, while workers with lower education levels find it relatively difficult to master and use technologies in a short time.

Secondly, by comparing the coefficient of interaction item treat × post in the two columns of gov variable in Table 6 and Table 7 , it can be found that in cities with high fiscal expenditure, CTP has promoted UIS (interaction coefficient is 0.326), and in cities with low fiscal expenditure, CTP has promoted OIS (interaction coefficient is −0.008), This reflects that there are significant differences between fiscal expenditure policies and CTP in promoting UIS and OIS.

Third, by comparing the coefficient of interaction item treat × post in the two columns of fdi variable in Table 6 and Table 7 , it can be seen that compared with the cities with low foreign investment, CTP in the cities with high foreign investment has a smaller effect on promoting UIS and OIS (interaction coefficient: 0.146 is less than 0.225, and the absolute value of −0.008 is less than the absolute value of −0.011). The reason for this phenomenon may be the balance between the long-term and short-term benefits of foreign capital. Foreign capital is unwilling to invest in emissions reduction which will take a long time. Therefore, in cities with high levels of foreign investment, the effect of CTP to promote UIS and OIS has not been fully played. It may also be the quality problem of introducing foreign capital. Only by introducing high-quality and cost-effective foreign capital can it drive UIS and OIS under the guidance of CTP.

Fourth, by comparing the coefficient of treat × post in the two columns of instr variable in Table 6 and Table 7 , it can be found that compared with low-infrastructure cities, CTP in high-infrastructure cities has a greater effect on promoting UIS and OIS (interaction coefficient: 0.214 is greater than 0.176, and the absolute value of −0.006 is greater than the absolute value of −0.001). A city with better infrastructure is more conducive to the flow of capital, labor, and other factors of production, and the city’s scientific and technological strength may also be stronger. So, UIS and OIS are more likely to be realized under the guidance of CTP.

To sum up, in the process of CTP promoting UIS and OIS, there are significant differences in the size of the boosting effect due to differences in urban characteristics, which shows obvious heterogeneity based on urban characteristics.

Conclusions and policy implications

Conclusions.

Under the realistic background that China’s economy has entered a high-quality, green, and low-carbon development, this paper uses the panel data of 201 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2004 to 2018 and empirically studies the impact of CTP on UIS and OIS based on the DID model and the intermediary effect model. The purpose is to empirically test the boosting effect and mechanism of CTP on industrial structure and to examine the heterogeneity of the boosting effect.

On the whole, CTP can promote UIS and OIS. But compared with promoting OIS, CTP is more helpful to promote UIS. After a variety of robustness tests, the conclusion is still valid. The mechanism analysis found that CTP can promote UIS and OIS by promoting technological innovation, and technological innovation has an intermediary effect in CTP promoting UIS and OIS. In the new context, technological innovation has become the key path of CTP promoting UIS and OIS.

Further, the heterogeneity analysis found that there are regional heterogeneity and urban characteristics heterogeneity in CTP to promote UIS and OIS. In terms of regional heterogeneity, it is found that CTP has promoted UIS in the eastern region, but the impact on UIS in the central and western regions is not significant. CTP has no significant impact on OIS in the eastern region but has boosted OIS in the central and western regions. In terms of the heterogeneity of urban characteristics, it is found that in cities with high human capital, CTP plays a more significant role in promoting UIS and OIS. CTP in cities with high fiscal expenditure can promote UIS, and CTP in cities with low fiscal expenditure can promote OIS. In cities with high foreign investment, CTP has less effect on promoting UIS and OIS. In high-infrastructure cities, CTP has a greater effect on promoting UIS and OIS.

Policy implications

First, in the high-quality and green development of the economy, China must fully leverage the decisive role of market mechanisms. the high-quality development of the economy requires the industrial structure to develop from low to high, and the industrial structure is more optimized and reasonable. How to optimize and upgrade without increasing the environmental burden is the key to the green development of the economy. In the past, the carbon emissions of various regions and industries were generally controlled and constrained by administrative means. The implementation of CTP introduced the market mechanism into the field of environmental protection and optimized the allocation of carbon emissions of enterprises by market means. The research results of this paper provide empirical evidence for the feasibility of high-quality green development of China’s economy and also provide empirical interpretation for the rationality of the direction of carbon trading marketization reform.

Second, in formulating environmental regulatory policies, the government should pay special attention to their guiding role in enterprise technological innovation. The inducement factors of enterprise technological innovation are diverse, and CTP is one of many factors. This study found that CTP promotes UIS and OIS by guiding the technological innovation of enterprises, and technological innovation plays an intermediary role. With the establishment of the carbon trading market, the green and low-carbon energy consumption of high-emission industries has an endogenous power, and the carbon market has given enterprises continuous innovation incentives. Therefore, when formulating environmental regulation policies, the government should firmly grasp the key of technological innovation and take whether the environmental regulation policies can guide enterprises to actively carry out technological innovation as an important consideration.

Third, when formulating industrial policies, the government should fully consider the regional heterogeneity of the impact of CTP on industrial structure. The regional heterogeneity of the impact of CTP on industrial structure requires the government to take full account of the different impacts of CTP on enterprises in different industries in the eastern central and western regions when formulating industrial policies. The government must formulate customized strategies for UIS and OIS and corresponding policies and measures according to the actual industrial development status and comparative advantages of different regions, and respect the differences of different regions in UIS and OIS.

Fourth, In the allocation of urban resources, the government must fully consider the heterogeneity of urban characteristics in the impact of CTP on industrial structure. In order to maximize the boosting effect of CTP on UIS and OIS, it is necessary to reasonably allocate various resources from the perspective of carbon. For example, the government can increase the financial expenditure to ensure low-carbon technology breakthroughs in cities with low and medium economic development, and then improve the energy conservation and emission reduction technology of cities; The government can encourage and attract high-quality green and low-carbon foreign investment, and then drive the development of green technology in cities.

Research prospect

Terms such as climate change, low-carbon living, low-carbon economy, and green development have only gradually appeared in people’s lives in recent decades, but when people feel it, climate problems have become very serious. CTP, as an environmental regulatory tool to address climate change, promote green development, and promote harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, will inevitably have an impact on industries in economic development. This article empirically studies the impact and mechanism of carbon trading policies on industrial structure. However, due to various circumstances, this study inevitably has limitations. Future research can be conducted from the following three aspects.

Firstly, measure the industrial structure using other methods and examine the impact of CTP on the industrial structure. At present, the measurement of UIS and OIS are based on the traditional division of three industries, and this study is no exception. The theoretical basis of this division fundamentally stems from the evolution law of industrial structure described by the early Petty-Clark law. However, with the rapid development of high-tech such as information technology, the scale and methods of human industrial activities have undergone tremendous changes. The use of industrial structure measurement methods that take into account these changes in future research will be an extension of this study.

Secondly, in mechanism analysis, more factors can be considered than just technological innovation, although technological innovation may be a key factor. This article mainly examines the mechanism of the impact of carbon trading policies on industrial structure from the perspective of technological innovation and does not involve other possible mechanism factors. Therefore, further research is needed to examine whether other factors have a mediating effect in promoting UIS and OIS through CTP.

Finally, this paper is only based on data from China, and in the future, a comparative study of the impact of CTP between countries on industrial structure can be conducted based on data from more countries. Climate issues are a global issue, and carbon trading involves global markets. Research based on a global perspective will make the research more comprehensive and also be a natural extension of this study.

Data availability

All data used in the study have been provided in the supplementary materials.

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The authors confirm their contribution to the paper as follows: study conception and design: Daoping Chen, Haifeng Liao, Hong Tan; methodology and model building: Daoping Chen, Haifeng Liao; analysis and interpretation of results: Daoping Chen, Haifeng Liao; software and writing-original draft: Haifeng Liao; validation and supervision: Daoping Chen; resources: Hong Tan. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Chen, D., Liao, H. & Tan, H. Can carbon trading policy boost upgrading and optimization of industrial structure? An empirical study based on data from China. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 1234 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03739-2

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Cemented versus cementless Oxford unicompartmental knee arthroplasty for the treatment of medial knee osteoarthritis: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis

• Knee Arthroplasty
• Published: 19 September 2024

Cite this article

• Lun Liu   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0008-5987-4913 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Juebei Li 3   na1 ,
• Yunlu Wang 1 , 2 ,
• Xiyong Li 2 , 4 ,
• Pengfei Han 4   na2 &
• Xiaodong Li 1   na2  

This meta-analysis sought to compare the efficacy of cemented versus cementless Oxford unicompartmental knee arthroplasty(UKA) for the treatment of medial knee osteoarthritis.

A comprehensive search of the following databases was conducted: Pubmed, The Cochrane Library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Embase, the Web of Science, and MEDLINE. The objective was to identify literature comparing cemented versus cementless Oxford unicompartmental knee arthroplasty for the treatment of medial knee osteoarthritis. Duplicate literature, low-quality literature, literature with incompatible observations, and literature for which the full text was not available were excluded. Two independent researchers employed the Cochrane Risk Assessment Tool and the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) to evaluate the quality of the included literature. The data then were extracted and subsequently meta-analyzed using RevMan 5.4.

A total of 12 papers were included in the analysis, encompassing a cumulative of 2558 cumulative cases. Of these, 1258 were cemented and 1300 were cementless. A meta-analysis was conducted to compare the outcomes of cemented versus cementless Oxford UKA. The Oxford UKA group exhibited a significantly longer surgery time than the cementless Oxford UKA group [mean difference (MD) = 9.91, 95% confidence interval (CI) (7.64,12.17)]. Additionally, the cemented Oxford UKA group demonstrated a significantly lower knee OKS score compared to the cementless Oxford UKA group. The mean difference (MD) was − 1.58 (95% CI: -2.30, -0.86), indicating a significantly lower score for the cemented Oxford UKA group. Similarly, the mean difference (MD) was − 1.8 for the knee KSS clinical score, indicating a significantly lower score for the cemented Oxford UKA group. The results demonstrated that the knee KSS functional score was significantly lower in the cemented Oxford UKA group than in the cementless Oxford UKA group [MD=-1.72, 95% CI (-3.26, -0.37)]. 95% CI (-3.27,-0.17)], the cemented Oxford UKA group exhibited a significantly higher incidence of radiolucent lines around the prosthesis than the cementless Oxford UKA group [ratio of ratios (OR) = 3.62, 95% CI (1.08,12.13)]. The revision rate was significantly higher in the cemented Oxford UKA group than in the cementless Oxford UKA group [OR = 2.22, 95% CI (1.40,3.53)]. However, no significant difference was observed between the two groups in terms of reoperation rate, five-year prosthesis survival rate, and complication rate.

Conclusions

The findings indicated that, in comparison to cemented Oxford UKA, cementless Oxford UKA resulted in a reduction in surgical time, an improvement in knee OKS score, KSS clinical score, and KSS functional score, and a decrease in the incidence of periprosthetic radiolucent lines and the rate of revisions.

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Data availability

We state that the data will not be shared since all the raw data are present in the figures included in the article.

Abbreviations

Total knee arthroplasty

• Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty

Unicompartmental knee replacement

American knee society knee score

Mean difference

Confidence interval

Fixed effect model

Randomized effect model

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Department of Orthopaedics, The Second People’s Hospital of Changzhi City, No. 83, Heping West Street, Changzhi, Shanxi, 046000, China

Lun Liu, Yunlu Wang & Xiaodong Li

Graduate School, The First Clinical College of Changzhi Medical College, No. 161, Jiefang East Street, Changzhi, Shanxi, 046000, China

Lun Liu, Yunlu Wang & Xiyong Li

Graduate School, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No.13, Hangkong Road, Wuhan, Hubei, 430000, China

Department of Orthopaedics, Heping Hospital Affiliated To Changzhi Medical College, No. 110, Yan’an South Road, Changzhi, Shanxi, 046000, China

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Liu, L., Li, J., Wang, Y. et al. Cemented versus cementless Oxford unicompartmental knee arthroplasty for the treatment of medial knee osteoarthritis: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis. Arch Orthop Trauma Surg (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00402-024-05539-4

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Effects of perceived sleep quality on creative behavior via work engagement: the moderating role of gender

• Wenxian Wang 1 ,
• Wonho Jeung 2 ,
• Seung-Wan Kang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6170-1009 2 &
• Hee Jin Kim 2  

BMC Psychology volume  12 , Article number:  491 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Sleep quality significantly impacts employees’ attitudes and behaviors. Using ego depletion theory, we examined the influence of sleep quality on work engagement and creative behavior, also investigating gender differences in these effects.

A multi-wave survey approach was employed with a six-week interval between waves for data collection. Participants were recruited online across two waves, totaling 322 employees from the United Kingdom and the United States.

Regression analyses revealed a statistically significant positive relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior, mediated by work engagement. Additionally, gender moderated both the direct and indirect effects of sleep quality.

The study found a positive relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior, mediated by work engagement, with notable gender differences. Sleep quality had a stronger impact on work engagement for men than women, and a stronger indirect effect on creative behavior through work engagement. These findings add to the existing literature on the influence of sleep quality on creative behavior.

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Introduction

In the contemporary knowledge-based economy, creative behavior has emerged as a critical determinant of a firm’s competitive advantage, driving innovation and organizational success [ 1 ]. Recognizing its significance, scholars have extensively investigated the antecedents of creative behavior, focusing on various external factors. These include leadership styles [ 2 ], work environment [ 3 ], organizational culture [ 4 ], and team dynamics [ 5 ]. Additionally, researchers have explored individual-level factors such as personality traits [ 6 ], intrinsic motivation [ 7 ], and cognitive styles [ 8 ] as potential predictors of creative behavior. However, the inherent nature of creative behavior, which constantly challenges the status quo and introduces novel ideas, introduces an element of unpredictability into employees’ perceptions of the future [ 9 ]. This uncertainty, coupled with the cognitive demands of creative tasks, can pose significant challenges to employees and deplete their resources.

The resource-intensive nature of creative behavior has been well-documented in the literature [ 10 , 11 ]. For instance, engaging in creative activities requires substantial cognitive resources for divergent thinking, problem-solving, and idea generation [ 12 ]. Moreover, the emotional resources needed to persist in the face of setbacks and ambiguity are also crucial for sustaining creative efforts [ 13 ]. Consequently, the availability and management of personal resources emerge as critical factors in facilitating and sustaining creative behavior in the workplace [ 14 ].

Among various personal resources, sleep quality is a vital factor that significantly influences an individual’s cognitive and emotional capacities [ 15 ]. As sleep is essential for the body’s recovery and energy maintenance [ 16 ], Baumeister et al. [ 17 ] proposed that sleep is crucial for replenishing depleted self-regulatory resources. Sleep quality also impacts brain recovery as sleep itself is a process of daily resource recovery [ 18 ]. Research suggests that good sleep quality is related to positive outcomes, whereas sleep deprivation is associated with decreased attention among employees [ 19 ].

While previous studies have explored the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ], the existing literature remains insufficient in fully elucidating this connection. Notably, there is a lack of research providing a comprehensive theoretical foundation for the link between sleep quality and creative behavior, and the underlying mechanisms of this relationship have not been adequately addressed [ 24 ]. Furthermore, the interplay between sleep quality, work engagement, and creative behavior remains largely unexplored, presenting a significant gap in our understanding of the complex dynamics underlying employee creativity.

To address these research gaps, the present study aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior by employing ego depletion theory as a theoretical framework [ 25 ]. This theory posits that self-regulatory resources are finite and can be depleted, thereby affecting subsequent cognitive and behavioral outcomes [ 26 ]. By applying this theoretical lens, we can better explain how sleep quality, as a restorative process, may influence an individual’s capacity for creative behavior. Furthermore, this study proposes to investigate the mediating role of work engagement in the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior. Work engagement, characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption [ 27 ], may serve as a crucial mechanism through which sleep quality impacts creative performance.

Additionally, we aim to examine the moderating effect of gender on these relationships. Previous research has suggested potential gender differences in sleep patterns, work engagement, and creative processes [ 28 ]. Ołpińska-Lischka et al. [ 29 ] found that men were more sensitive to sleep deprivation than women, and women were less affected by sleep quality. Therefore, we speculate that gender plays a moderating role in the relationship between sleep quality and work engagement, such that poor sleep quality among men results in greater resource depletion at work than among women. By incorporating gender as a moderator, our study aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how the relationships between sleep quality, work engagement, and creative behavior may vary across genders.

To summarize, this study aims to apply ego depletion theory to examine the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior, considering the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating role of gender. By addressing these research objectives, our study contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, it provides a robust theoretical foundation for understanding the link between sleep quality and creative behavior, addressing a significant gap in current research. Second, by exploring the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating effect of gender, we offer insights into the complex mechanisms underlying this relationship. Lastly, our findings have the potential to inform organizational practices aimed at fostering employee creativity and well-being through improved sleep quality and enhanced work engagement, while considering potential gender differences.

Theoretical background and hypotheses

Sleep quality and creative behavior.

Sleep quality is defined as individuals’ satisfaction with their overall sleep experience, encompassing factors such as ease of falling asleep, sleep initiation, maintenance, duration, and mental state upon waking up [ 30 ]. Prior research has shown that high sleep quality facilitates the replenishment of personal resources, enabling individuals to more effectively meet the cognitive, emotional, and physical demands of their work [ 31 ]. For instance, well-rested employees with restored attentional resources are better equipped to concentrate on complex tasks, generate novel ideas, and exhibit cognitive flexibility, all of which are crucial for creative thinking and problem-solving [ 24 ].

Creative behavior is defined as the process of generating original and innovative ideas that could be useful [ 32 , 33 ]. Previous studies have found that creative behavior is influenced by individual characteristics and environmental factors [ 34 ]. Notably, prior research has emphasized the critical importance of personal resources, such as knowledge, skills, and experiences [ 30 ], in enabling and facilitating creative behavior.

Ego depletion theory provides a theoretical rationale for the relationship between an individual’s sleep quality and creative behavior. According to ego depletion theory [ 25 ], individuals must expend limited self-regulatory resources to engage in volitional activities. The greater the availability of resources, the higher the likelihood of successfully carrying out willful actions. Volitional activity involves temporarily depleting resources, which can be replenished after adequate rest. Lack of sleep leads to a failure in the timely recovery of individual resources and increases individual ego depletion, and high-quality sleep is regarded as a key way to restore individual resources [ 25 ]. When individuals get adequate and high-quality sleep, their resources are replenished, thus reducing ego depletion [ 35 ]. This allows for better concentration, novel idea generation, and cognitive flexibility when performing creative thinking activities. In contrast, individuals with poor sleep quality are more prone to problems such as inattention due to inadequate resources [ 19 ], which inhibits their creative behavior.

Previous research has found that sleep quality influences an individual’s creative behavior. For example, researchers have found that good sleep quality improves memory consolidation and cognitive functioning, thereby enhancing performance at work [ 36 ]. In contrast, poor sleep quality is associated with heightened anxiety and stress levels [ 37 ], which can deplete cognitive resources and hinder individuals’ creative behavior [ 28 ]. Prior studies further suggest that good sleep quality provides important self-regulatory resources for employees to effectively engage in creative processes, such as defocused attention, cognitive flexibility, and divergent thinking [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ]. Considering the empirical evidence highlighting the significant role of sleep quality in shaping creative behavior, we propose the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1

Perceived sleep quality is positively related to creative behavior.

The mediating role of work engagement

Schaufeli and Bakker [ 38 ] defined work engagement as a positive, fulfilling state of mind associated with work characterized by energy, dedication, and absorption. In a similar vein, Biggs et al. [ 39 ] defined work engagement as a positive state referring to an individual’s massive energy input and psychological attachment to the performance of work-related tasks. Previous research has identified job resources (e.g., autonomy, feedback) and personal resources (e.g., self-efficacy, optimism) as key antecedents of work engagement [ 14 ]. Furthermore, work engagement has been linked to positive outcomes such as high job performance, low turnover intentions, and enhanced well-being [ 40 ].

The relationship between sleep quality, work engagement, and creative behavior can be elucidated through the lens of ego depletion theory. This theory posits that the depletion of self-regulatory resources compromises the attention and energy required for subsequent activities [ 41 ]. Specifically, it suggests that self-regulation relies on finite resources that can be exhausted through use, leading to consequential effects on self-control and cognitive function [ 42 ]. Notably, work engagement demands substantial cognitive and emotional resources [ 43 ].

High sleep quality is essential for restoring resources expended on daytime activities and improving attention, energy, and cognitive function—factors that are crucial for maintaining or enhancing work engagement. Conversely, poor sleep quality can impede the full recovery of these resources, subsequently affecting self-control and cognitive abilities, reducing attention and energy levels, and thus diminishing work engagement.

Empirical evidence supports this theoretical framework. Studies have demonstrated that poor sleep impairs post-work recovery [ 44 ], and insufficient sleep has been identified as a key factor contributing to the decline of work engagement [ 45 ]. Conversely, good sleep quality and short breaks have been shown to enhance employees’ work engagement [ 45 ]. Moreover, sleep quality has been recognized as vital to employees’ mental health and work engagement [ 46 ].

Drawing on ego depletion theory, we also posit that work engagement plays a crucial role in fostering creative behavior. Employees with high work engagement demonstrate strong work attachment [ 47 ], which is conducive to creativity. Work engagement, characterized by high levels of energy, dedication, and absorption, represents a state of optimal resource utilization that can facilitate creative endeavors. This relationship can be explained by the availability of cognitive and emotional resources that engaged employees can invest in creative problem-solving and idea generation. Indeed, previous studies have consistently found a positive relationship between work engagement and employees’ creativity [ 48 , 49 ].

These findings align with Bakker and Demerouti’s [ 14 ] conceptualization of work engagement as a motivational process that links work-related resources to positive work outcomes. In this context, work engagement can be viewed as the mechanism through which available resources are channeled into creative behavior. The mediating role of work engagement between personal resources and organizational outcomes has been both theoretically proposed and empirically tested [ 50 , 51 ].

Extending this line of research, we propose that work engagement mediates the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior. Specifically, good sleep quality increases work engagement by replenishing depleted resources, and this increased work engagement, in turn, enhances creative behavior by providing the necessary resources for creative processes. Therefore, we propose the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2

Work engagement mediates the relationship between perceived sleep quality and creative behavior.

The moderating role of gender

Stevens-Smith [ 52 ] defined gender as the state of being biologically or environmentally male or female, and Doughty and Leddick [ 53 ] defined the construct as the psychological and social characteristics associated with being male or female. Gender is usually determined by actual biological differences rather than environmental factors. This study proposes that gender moderates the relationship between sleep quality and work engagement, drawing on ego depletion theory as a theoretical framework. Specifically, we hypothesize that the effect of sleep quality on work engagement will be stronger for men than for women.

Hagger et al. [ 26 ] defined ego depletion as the exhaustion of an individual’s self-control ability following actions that require self-control resources. Research has consistently shown that men typically exhibit lower self-control than women [ 54 , 55 ]. Importantly, when sleep-deprived, men expend more resources on self-control compared to women, leading to more severe ego depletion [ 56 ]. Furthermore, Rothbart and Rueda [ 57 ] found that women are more effective in resource management than men and are adept at replenishing exhausted resources. Tyler and Burns [ 58 ] noted that women are better at utilizing social support, which can help mitigate resource depletion and maintain job engagement. From the perspective of ego depletion theory, these findings suggest that women have a stronger ability to protect and recover resources.

Consequently, we posit that sleep quality may have a differential impact on work engagement for men and women. Specifically, due to men’s greater susceptibility to ego depletion and their less effective resource management, we hypothesize that the relationship between sleep quality and work engagement will be stronger for men than for women. Poor sleep quality is likely to deplete self-control resources more severely in men, potentially leading to a more pronounced decrease in work engagement. Conversely, women’s superior resource management and recovery abilities may buffer the negative effects of poor sleep quality on their work engagement. This gender-based difference in resource depletion and recovery mechanisms provides a theoretical basis for expecting gender to moderate the relationship between sleep quality and work engagement.

Empirical evidence further supports this expectation. Previous studies have consistently demonstrated that men and women exhibit differential sensitivities to sleep quality. Ołpińska-Lischka et al. [ 29 ] found that men were more susceptible to the effects of sleep deprivation than women. Similarly, Romdhani et al. [ 59 ] observed that sleep deprivation had a more pronounced impact on men compared to women, and that recovery sleep was less restorative for men. This gender difference extends to younger populations as well, with extant research confirming that girls are better able to cope with sleep deprivation than boys [ 60 ].

Due to this heightened sensitivity, men may require higher sleep quality to compensate for resource loss and subsequently improve work engagement. In contrast, women appear to be more resilient to the negative effects of poor sleep quality. This differential impact of sleep quality on resource depletion and recovery between genders may translate into varying effects on work engagement. Based on the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence presented, we propose the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3

Gender moderates the relationship between perceived sleep quality and work engagement such that the relationship is stronger for men than for women.

The moderated mediation role of gender

As previously discussed, men demonstrate greater sensitivity to sleep quality compared to women. Consequently, poor sleep quality appears to have a less significant impact on women’s resource availability. During the resource consumption process involved in creative activities, resource depletion is likely to have a diminished effect on women’s work engagement and creative behavior. This gender difference in sensitivity to sleep quality [ 17 ] suggests that the indirect effect of sleep quality on creative behavior through work engagement may vary between men and women.

Specifically, we hypothesize that for men, poor sleep quality will negatively influence their work engagement, which will subsequently impair their creative behavior. In contrast, for women, we anticipate that poor sleep quality will have a weaker or non-significant effect on both work engagement and creative behavior. This differential impact implies a moderated mediation effect, where gender moderates the indirect relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior via work engagement. Based on these theoretical arguments and empirical precedents, we propose the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 4

Gender moderates the indirect relationship between perceived sleep quality and creative behavior via work engagement such that the indirect relationship is stronger for men than for women.

Figure  1 presents the hypothesized research model.

The theoretical research model

Sample and procedure

We used online panel platforms to recruit full-time employees from the UK and US. These platforms are considered as reliable as conventional field samples [ 61 ] and are designed for academic use [ 62 ], making them suitable for research using academic panels [ 63 ]. To protect participants’ rights, safety, and well-being, we informed them of the study purpose and data collection procedure before the study began and obtained informed consent from each participant.

We employed a multi-wave approach with embedded attention checks in each wave [ 64 , 65 ] for data collection to reduce common method bias (CMB) [ 66 ]. While there is no clear consensus on the optimal time interval for time-lagged studies [ 66 ], previous research has employed interval periods ranging from a couple of weeks [ 50 , 67 ] to several months. Although no prior study has utilized a time-lagged design with the same research model as ours, we considered similar approaches in previous time-lagged studies [ 68 ] and collected data in waves separated by six weeks.

In the first wave, participants assessed their sleep quality, while in the second wave, they reported their work engagement and creative behavior. The first wave generated 422 responses, with 376 remaining after excluding incomplete responses. In the second wave, questionnaires were sent to the 376 qualified respondents from the first wave, yielding 326 responses. After excluding incomplete surveys from the second wave, 322 completed questionnaires remained.

We employed G*Power version 3.1.9.7 [ 69 ] to ascertain the optimal sample size for our research. Considering a medium effect size of 0.15 in regression analysis with a power of 0.95 and a significance level of 0.05 [ 70 ], our sample size satisfies the calculated minimum requirement determined by the software. Additionally, accounting for potential non-response rates, our survey sample surpasses the specified minimum sample size.

The sample comprised 44.4% male, and 78.26% of the respondents were from the UK. Regarding education, 15.83% had a high school diploma, 19.25% had a college diploma, 43.18% had a bachelor’s degree, 17.39% had a master’s degree, and 4.35% had a doctorate. The average age was 38.92 years (SD = 9.93), and the mean organizational tenure was 7.86 years (SD = 6.99).

Respondents rated the survey items on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), except for the demographic information.

Perceived sleep quality. We measured perceived sleep quality with a two-item scale [ 71 ]; an example item is “I evaluate my sleep quality very well generally.” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.92.

Work engagement. We used a three-item scale developed by [ 72 ] to measure employees’ work engagement; an example item is “I am enthusiastic about my job.” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.89.

Creative behavior. For creative behavior, we adopted [ 73 ] three-item self-report scale; an example item is “I generate creative ideas at work.” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.94.

Gender. Gender was a dichotomous variable coded as 0 for female and 1 for male.

Control variables. We included age, education, organizational tenure, and nationality as control variables since these variables might influence employees’ work engagement and creative behavior [ 34 ]. Organization tenure and age were measured in years, and nationality was a dichotomous variable coded as 0 for the United Kingdom and 1 for the United States. There were six levels of education: elementary school, high school, college diploma, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and doctoral degree.

Common method bias check

To mitigate common method bias, we employed a multi-wave approach for data collection. However, because all variables were based on responses from the same participants, there was the possibility of false internal consistency, which could have led to misleading results [ 74 ]. To assess the effects of common method variance, we used Harman’s single factor test [ 66 ]. After loading all items of the measured construct into the exploratory factor analysis, we found that no single factor could explain more than 50% of the variance [ 75 ]. We determined that there was minimal risk of CMB in our results.

Analytical method

In this study, we analyzed all variables at the individual level using STATA 15.1. To test the distinctiveness of the variables, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and a chi-squared model comparison test. We then conducted a hierarchical multiple regression analysis to test our hypotheses. We used process model 7 to examine the indirect effect and conditional indirect effect of sleep quality on work engagement and creative behavior, applying bootstrapping [ 76 ].

Descriptive statistics

The descriptive statistics, including means, standard deviations, and correlations of the variables, are presented in Table  1 . Sleep quality was positively correlated with work engagement ( r  = 0.26, p  < 0.01) and creative behavior ( r  = 0.14, p  < 0.05). Work engagement was positively correlated with creative behavior ( r  = 0.49, p  < 0.01).

Validity and reliability

We conducted a series of CFAs to examine the validity of the three-factor models. The baseline model fit the data well (X² = 27.59; df = 17; CFI = 0.99; TLI = 0.99; RMSEA = 0.04; SRMR = 0.03) and better than the alternative models (i.e., the one- and two-factor models). Cronbach’s alpha ranged from 0.89 to 0.92, showing good reliability.

Hypotheses tests

H1 predicted that sleep quality would be positively related to creative behavior. Table  2 shows that after controlling for age, education, tenure, and nationality, there was a significant positive relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior (b = 0.11; p  < 0.05; Model 3). The analytical results supported H1.

H2 predicted that work engagement would mediate the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior. After bootstrapping with 10,000 samples, the coefficient was 0.11, and the 95% bias-corrected bootstrap confidence interval was (0.06, 0.17), which does not contain zero. Thus, the results supported H2.

H3 proposed that gender moderates the relationship between sleep quality and work engagement such that the relationship is stronger for men than for women. As shown in Table  2 , the interaction term of sleep quality and gender was positively related to work engagement (b = 0.25; p  < 0.01; Model 2). As shown in Fig.  2 , the effect of sleep quality on work engagement was more pronounced for men than for women. Simple slope analysis revealed that the effect of sleep quality on work engagement was statistically significant for men (b = 0.37, SE = 0.07, p  < 0.001) but not for women (b = 0.12, SE = 0.06, p  = 0.07). Therefore, H3 was supported.

The moderating effect of gender on the relationship between sleep quality and work engagement

H4 proposed that gender moderates the indirect effect of sleep quality on creative behavior through work engagement. As shown in Table  3 , the bootstrapped resample results using process model 7 showed that gender moderated the indirect effect of sleep quality on creative behavior such that it was significant for men (estimate = 0.20, BootSE = 0.04; 95% CI = [0.12, 0.30]) but not for women (estimate = 0.05; BootSE = 0.03; 95% CI = [− 0.01, 0.13]). Moreover, the index of moderated mediation was also statistically significant (index = 0.12, BootSE = 0.05, 95% CI = [0.03, 0.22]). Thus, the results of the analysis supported H4.

Summary of results

This study examines the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior, particularly focusing on the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating effect of gender. Our findings reveal a positive correlation between sleep quality and creative behavior, with work engagement acting as a mediator. Furthermore, we observed that the influence of sleep quality on work engagement and its indirect effect on creative behavior were more pronounced in men than in women.

Theoretical contributions

First, this study contributes to the literature on sleep quality by elucidating its impact on creative behavior through the framework of ego depletion theory. Our findings corroborate previous research demonstrating a positive relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 30 , 77 ]. However, we extend this literature by explicitly applying ego depletion theory to elucidate the underlying mechanisms. Specifically, we show that sleep quality is linked to the replenishment of employee resources, which subsequently influences creative behavior. This theoretical framing provides a more comprehensive understanding of the sleep quality-creativity relationship, addressing a gap in prior research that often lacked a robust theoretical foundation.

Second, we advance the work engagement literature by exploring its mediating role between sleep quality and creative behavior. In accordance with ego depletion theory, which posits that work engagement mediates the relationship between relevant resources and various outcomes [ 78 ], our study validates the mediating role of work engagement in the context of sleep quality and creativity. This finding not only supports previous research on work engagement as a mediator between job resources and positive work outcomes [ 50 , 51 ], but also extends it by applying ego depletion theory to explain this mediational process. By doing so, we provide theoretical validation for the role of work engagement as a crucial mechanism through which sleep quality influences creative behavior.

Third, our study makes a significant contribution by examining the moderating effects of gender on the relationship between sleep quality and work engagement, as well as on the indirect effect of sleep quality on creative behavior through work engagement. Grounded in ego depletion theory, we discovered that gender moderates the effects of sleep quality on work engagement, consistent with previous findings [ 59 , 79 ]. Specifically, our results indicate that the impact of sleep quality on resource recovery, and subsequently on work engagement, is stronger for men than for women. This finding not only supports extant studies suggesting that men are more sensitive to sleep quality than women, but also provides a theoretical explanation for this gender difference using ego depletion theory. This nuanced understanding of gender differences in the sleep quality-work engagement relationship offers valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners.

Finally, we broaden the applicability of ego depletion theory [ 17 , 25 , 41 , 42 , 80 ] by demonstrating its utility in explaining the complex relationships between sleep quality, work engagement, and creative behavior. Our study offers empirical support for the theory’s predictions, illustrating how sleep quality affects resource recovery, which in turn impacts work engagement and ultimately influences creative behavior. This application of ego depletion theory to the sleep-creativity domain represents a novel contribution to the literature and opens new avenues for future research.

In summary, by integrating ego depletion theory into the study of sleep quality, work engagement, and creative behavior, our research provides a more comprehensive and theoretically grounded understanding of these relationships. Additionally, our examination of gender as a moderator provides nuanced insights into how individual differences can affect these processes. These contributions not only advance our theoretical knowledge but also hold important practical implications for managing employee creativity and well-being.

Managerial implications

Given the significant impact of sleep quality on employees’ creative behavior, managers should prioritize addressing their employees’ sleep quality, including reducing overtime hours that may interfere with sleep. The recent proliferation of information and communication technologies has led to an increase in work-related communications outside of traditional working hours. This practice often results in employees receiving work-related messages from superiors via social media during non-work hours, creating expectations of availability that can disrupt sleep patterns. Therefore, managers should implement policies to limit work-related communication after working hours, thereby ensuring employees can attain adequate and restful sleep.

While our study demonstrates the mediating effect of work engagement in the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior, it is crucial to recognize that work engagement can be influenced by factors beyond sleep quality. Organizations and managers should, therefore, develop comprehensive strategies to enhance work engagement among their members, complementing efforts to improve sleep quality. Previous research has highlighted the significant impact of organizational climate and leadership on work engagement [ 81 ]. Consequently, organizational managers should focus on fostering a fair and supportive organizational climate and exhibiting effective leadership to promote enhanced work engagement among their members. This holistic approach can simultaneously address both sleep quality and work engagement.

Considering the positive effects of good sleep, organizations may benefit from implementing sleep awareness training programs for employees. Such programs have been shown to effectively improve employee sleep quality [ 82 ]. Additionally, short-term psychotherapy interventions can positively affect sleep patterns [ 83 ]. Managers should also explore ways to streamline workflow processes to increase efficiency, thereby helping employees improve their work-life balance and career development [ 84 ]. Where feasible, implementing flexible work schedules tailored to individual needs [ 85 ] and providing nap rooms or designated nap times can help employees rejuvenate and better manage work demands. These measures can be particularly beneficial for male employees, who our study found to be more sensitive to sleep quality variations, helping them maintain energy and physical strength for work tasks.

Furthermore, organizations should consider integrating sleep quality metrics into their wellness programs and performance management systems. This integration can help create a culture that values and promotes good sleep habits, potentially leading to increased creativity and productivity. By acknowledging the role of sleep in employee performance, organizations can develop more comprehensive and effective strategies for talent management and organizational development.

Limitations and future studies

First, we utilized self-reported measures for our study variables. Although Chan [ 86 ] demonstrated that self-reporting does not significantly affect data correlation, and we implemented a six-week time lag between data collection waves to mitigate CMB, potential CMB may still exist due to the simultaneous measurement of work engagement and creative behavior. This limitation may constrain our ability to establish causality. Future studies could employ a multi-source and longitudinal approach to address this issue.

Second, our sample was limited to participants from the UK and US to ensure representation of native English speakers, which restricts the generalizability of our findings to other countries. Cultural and social contexts can influence gender differences. For instance, societies emphasizing gender equality and women’s empowerment may exhibit more pronounced gender differences in the impact of sleep quality on work engagement. Conversely, societies with prevalent traditional gender roles might exacerbate the impact of resource depletion on women, potentially diminishing observed gender differences. Future research could conduct cross-cultural comparisons to investigate country-specific variations in gender differences.

Third, this study explored the between-person effects of sleep quality on work engagement and creative behavior. However, sleep quality and its corresponding creative behavior may fluctuate on a daily basis. Notably, work engagement is highly susceptible to daily variations [ 87 ]. Therefore, future research employing longitudinal study designs could examine both between-person and within-person effects, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the relationships among these variables.

Fourth, our study focused solely on individual-level variables, neglecting team-level or multilevel factors. Investigating the effects of sleep quality on work engagement and creative behavior at multiple levels could provide valuable insights. Future researchers could explore team-level and multilevel effects to gain a more holistic understanding of these relationships.

Fifth, this study exclusively focused on sleep quality, omitting consideration of sleep quantity. While numerous previous studies have investigated both sleep quantity and quality, our research concentrated solely on the qualitative aspect. Although sleep quality implicitly encompasses some aspects of sleep quantity, future research would benefit from incorporating both dimensions to provide a more comprehensive understanding of sleep’s effects on work-related outcomes.

Lastly, previous research has identified other factors, such as psychological safety, that can influence work engagement and employee creativity [ 74 ]. Future studies should expand beyond conventional demographic control variables to include factors that may affect variations in work engagement and creative behavior. This approach would provide a more nuanced understanding of the complex interplay among these variables. Addressing these limitations in future research will contribute to a more comprehensive and robust understanding of the relationships among sleep quality, work engagement, and creative behavior, while also accounting for potential moderating factors such as gender and cultural context.

This study explored the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior, investigating the mediating effect of work engagement and the moderating effect of gender. The theoretical foundation incorporated the ego depletion theory, which helped elucidate how high sleep quality can replenish personal resources and enhance creative behavior through the mediating effect of work engagement. Moreover, we examined the moderating role of gender in the relationship between sleep quality and work engagement, as well as in the indirect effect of sleep quality on creative behavior via work engagement. The findings of this study contribute to the existing literature on sleep quality, creative behavior, and work engagement by elucidating the mechanism through which sleep quality influences creative behavior. Furthermore, this study provides a clearer theoretical foundation by explaining the relationship between sleep quality and creative behavior through the lens of ego depletion theory.

Data availability

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

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This work was supported by the Gachon University research fund of 2023 (GCU-202304580001).

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W.W. wrote the article’s initial draft. W.J. edited the original draft after making suggestions for improvements. The study was overseen by S.-W.K., who also turned the rough text into a publishable piece. H.J.K. contributed theoretical insights based on her proficiency in the area.

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Wang, W., Jeung, W., Kang, SW. et al. Effects of perceived sleep quality on creative behavior via work engagement: the moderating role of gender. BMC Psychol 12 , 491 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01971-8

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01971-8

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