Education Research Guide, College of Education & Human Ecology

A literature review should:

1. provide a critical evaluative overview of existing research that is significant regarding the chosen topic.
2. synthesize by showing the relationships between prior research- What are the connections?
3. inform the reader about what has been discovered in the research to avoid duplication.
4. identify gaps and inconsistencies in the literature (scholarly or peer-reviewed).

A literature review should not be:

1. an annotated bibliography.
2. original research.
3. an argument for research.

What is empirical research?

Empirical studies are those based on actual and objective observation or experimentation. Articles that describe empirical research studies are published in scholarly or academic journals. Most empirical studies are found in peer-reviewed  or refereed academic journals and contain the following sections:

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Literature review
• Methodolgy
• Results
• Conslusion or discussion
• References