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Purposes of the Literature Review

• Define the research problem
• Avoid fruitless approaches
• Identify avenues of future research
• Seek new lines of inquiry
• Gain methodological insight

Reasons for Conducting a Literature Review

• Distinguishing what has been done from what needs to be done
• Discovering important variables relevant to the topic
• Synthesizing and gaining new perspective
• Identifying relationships between ideas and practices
• Establishing the context of the topic
• Rationalizing the significance of the problem
• Enhancing and acquiring subject vocabulary
• Understanding the structure of the subject
• Relating ideas and theory to applications
• Identifying main methodologies and research techniques that have been used
• Placing research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-art development

A literature review is a systematic survey of the scholarly literature published on a given topic. 

Rather than providing a new research insight, a literature review lays the groundwork for an in-depth research project analyzing previous research. Type of documents surveyed will vary depending on the field, but can include:

• books
• journal articles,
• theses
• dissertations.

A thorough literature review will also require surveying what librarians call "gray literature," which includes difficult-to-locate documents such as:

• technical reports
• government publications
• working papers
• preprints.