A thesis isn’t one big paper—it’s several smaller papers linked together in a common project. Trying to write a thesis like it’s just another course assignment, just longer, is a recipe for frustration. Instead, it’s best to appreciate each part of a thesis as playing a distinct role.
One of the least intuitive sections of a thesis is the part commonly called a “literature review”. In some ways, a literature review appears close to what students have done in previous assignments. Go to Google Scholar, find some articles that match relevant keywords, remember to use proper citation, summarize what you found, and boom—you’ve got yourself a literature review!
Right? Wrong.
The literature review is unintuitive because it’s poorly named, it requires its own suite of methods and skills, and—crucially—it’s not a standalone section but a core link between your question, your puzzle, your methods, and your answer. The goal of the literature review isn’t even to “review” the literature, per se: it’s to establish how your work connects to a broader conversation.
That points to why we think the literature review is badly named. There are standalone essays literally called “literature reviews” that really do thoroughly review the literature on a topic. They assess trends and methods, look for weaknesses and gaps, and call for future research into particularly promising areas—and warn against sinking more time, effort, and money into unproductive ventures. These can take a substantial amount of time to write and require a corresponding amount of expertise.
The “literature review” in a thesis, by contrast, has to establish what is relevant in prior arguments to situate your own work. Some of this should reflect your own reading and research, but a good deal of it should come from the suggested readings from your adviser. Your goal with the literature review is sufficiency, not novelty and certainly not mastery. All you have to do is demonstrate that your project is not adrift alone somewhere but, rather, that it is directly linked to earlier research.
That sounds easy, but trust us: it’s still challenging enough. In particular, you will want to make sure that you have covered work dealing with the theory, methods, and empirical approaches that earlier research has taken. Your goal is to demonstrate how your contribution fits with that conversation, and to do that you will also have to show shortcomings, conflicts, or unresolved issues in some aspect of that earlier conversation. Moreover, the problems you uncover need to relate to the work you will be doing—there’s no benefit in showing that the theory is flawed if you’re writing a methods paper, and there’s no benefit in showing that methods are flawed if you’re writing a theory paper.
Carrying this out requires its own suite of methods and tricks. You need to be able to burrow into databases, hunt through library shelves (sometimes in person), and efficiently and quickly synthesize others’ arguments into debatable claims and reliable findings that you can weave into the story you’re telling about your research topic. That’s “research” in its own right, even if it will look very different from the statistical analysis, archival work, or survey experiment you’ll be conducting as the main dish in your thesis.
The annoying thing about a literature review, however, is that it’s never done. Someone has always written something that’s relevant to what you’re writing about—and you’ll never have the complete list of what everyone has written. The good news, though, is that once your literature review section is good enough, that means it is just that: good enough. Perfection isn’t attainable, so don’t set perfection as your goal. Do what’s sufficient—that is, thorough to the best of your knowledge—and move on. (This is a key skill for life, by the way.)
In sum: don’t write a literature review. Write something that’s less ambitious but more useful: a discussion of what others have said that’s relevant to your topic, including particularly points that you would like to refute, refine, or defend. A literature connection may be a less familiar term than a “review”, but it’s a more accurate and less intimidating term that will help you focus on what you’re really doing.
The takeaway: Literature reviews are like flytraps: the unwary can get trapped in other people’s arguments instead of building their own. Remember that you’re not here to “promote” what others have said. Your job is to set the stage for what you will say. Synthesize and critique (always citing!) and move on to your own argument.
The practical: View your literature review as a subordinate (if important) part of your work. Instead of assuming it’s something that must be perfect before you can do the rest of your research, look at it as a living document that you will be iterating throughout the process.