Literature Reviews Made Easy: A Quick Guide to Success
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Succeeding with Your Literature Review: a Handbook for Students
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Practical Research: Planning and Design
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A complete search of all research and published materials about a specific topic including books, journals, bibliographies, and other sources.
Literature reviews provide a broad overview of scholarship in a particular subject area within an organizational structure that allows for summarizing and synthesizing of multiple sources. Literature reviews can also be used to provide background information as a distinct section in a research paper.
A bibliography (list of citations) that also includes a description or other notes for each source (in addition to the citation information)
Annotated bibliographies offer summaries and descriptions for each cited source, but generally do not synthesize the information to the same degree as a literature review.
A paper that develops an argument, often guided by a research question or statement; may include distinct sections such as introduction, literature review, methodology, results or findings, and a conclusion.
How does this all fit together?
These types of research projects may exist as stepping stones for each other.
For example, an annotated bibliography may provide a good first step for writing a literature review. A literature review may be added as a distinct section of a research paper (often towards the beginning, as part of or after the introduction).