Q. What is a literature review?

A literature review is a paper that brings together and highlights the most important theories and research in a particular field. It generally makes mention of books, scholarly journals, and other important academic sources on a topic.

In a literature review you will be expected to describe, summarize, and evaluate these sources.

For an introduction to what literature reviews are and why they are written, see Seneca Libraries' Literature Review Tutorial. For how the fit into an applied research paper, see our Applied Research guide. 

For step by step instructions for working on a literature review, use Seneca's assignment planner. Choose your start and end dates for the assignment, and select the Literature Review assignment type from the drop down list.

The library also has a number of books on writing literature reviews, as well as many examples of reviews in our databases.