Template
How to structure a literature review that argues something
You are writing a standalone review — for a course, a thesis chapter, or a review journal — and you have far more sources than shape.
- Typical length
- A coursework review often runs 3,000–5,000 words; a thesis chapter frequently reaches 8,000–12,000; a review-journal article varies widely. Confirm the expectation before you plan.
- Usual tense
- Present tense for what a source argues (“Smith argues”), past tense for what a study did and found (“the authors surveyed 240 nurses”).
- First person
- Sparingly. It reads naturally when describing your own search procedure and less so when discussing other people’s findings.
- Organization
- Thematic in most cases. Chronological order is defensible only when the point is how the field changed over time.
- Citation density
- High by design — a review is mostly other people’s work. Group citations behind a claim instead of writing one paragraph per source.
- Check with your department
- Whether a search-method paragraph is required, the minimum number of sources, and whether the review must end with your own research questions.
THE SKELETON
Section by section
Each block gives you the heading, what it has to accomplish, and the questions that fill it.
1 · about 10% of the total
Introduction and Scope
Say what question the review answers, not merely what topic it covers. Then draw the boundary: what is in, what is out, and why.
- What question does this review answer that a single study cannot?
- Which years, languages, disciplines, and publication types are inside your boundary?
- Why is a review needed now — what changed in the field recently?
- Who is the reader, and what do they already know?
2 · about 5–10% of the total
How the Sources Were Found
A short passage on where the literature came from turns “I read a lot” into something a reader can check. Even a narrative review benefits from it.
- Which databases did you search, and with which search terms?
- How did you decide a source was relevant enough to keep?
- Roughly how many items did you screen, and how many survived?
- Did you follow citation trails backward or forward from key papers?
3
Definitions and Conceptual Frame
Fix the meaning of the terms that the rest of the review will use. Where the literature uses one word for several things, say so here rather than letting the ambiguity spread.
- Which key term is used inconsistently across the literature?
- Whose definition are you adopting, and why that one?
- What framework will you use to group studies — theoretical, methodological, chronological?
4 · about 55–65% of the total, split across three to five themes
Thematic Sections
One section per theme, each opening with a claim about the literature and closing with what the theme leaves unresolved. Studies appear as evidence for the claim, never as a queue of paragraphs.
- What is the one-sentence claim at the top of this theme?
- Which studies converge here, and what do they share methodologically?
- Which study is the strongest piece of evidence, and which is the weakest?
- What does this theme leave open?
5
Contested Findings and Methodological Divides
Show where the field disagrees and, where you can, explain the disagreement in terms of how the studies were designed rather than who was right.
- Which two bodies of work reach incompatible conclusions?
- Do the differences track sample, measure, setting, or analytic choice?
- Is there a study that would settle the disagreement, and does it exist yet?
6 · about 10–15% of the total
Synthesis and the Gap
Pull the themes into one account of what the field knows, then name what it does not. The gap should follow from the review rather than being announced.
- In three sentences, what does the field currently know?
- Which gap is genuinely unaddressed rather than merely under-cited?
- Is the gap worth filling, or is it empty because nobody needs it filled?
7 · about 5–10% of the total
Conclusion and Implications
Close on what follows from the review — for future studies, for practice, or for the study you are about to propose.
- What should the next study in this area do differently?
- What should a practitioner take from this review today?
- Have you introduced any source here that was not discussed above?
SENTENCE STARTERS
Phrasing you can adapt
Lift these and change the specifics. Academic phrasing is a shared convention, not something each writer has to reinvent.
A consistent finding across this body of work is that …
Several studies converge on the view that … (Author, Year; Author, Year).
This position is developed most fully by …
Work in this tradition tends to treat X as …
The evidence here is mixed: while X reports …, Y finds the opposite.
This conclusion has been challenged on methodological grounds.
The discrepancy may reflect differences in how X was measured.
Later work has qualified this claim considerably.
Although the design is well suited to X, it cannot speak to Y.
The sample, drawn entirely from …, limits how far the finding travels.
The study is frequently cited for a claim it does not actually test.
The analysis is careful, but the effect rests on a single measure.
What remains unclear is whether …
No study reviewed here examines X and Y together.
This literature has largely bypassed the question of …
These strands have developed separately, and connecting them is overdue.
Questions about the literature review outline
How is this different from a systematic review?
A systematic review commits in advance to a protocol — a fixed search string, explicit inclusion criteria, and a documented screening process — so that someone else could reproduce the same set of studies. A narrative review is argued rather than reproduced, and it accepts more selection on the author’s judgment.
How many sources should a literature review include?
The number that supports your claims. Coursework briefs sometimes set a floor, but a review of 30 well-chosen studies organized into an argument beats 90 summarized in sequence.
Can I include sources I disagree with?
You should. A review that cites only agreeable work is easy to discredit — a reviewer only needs to name the paper you skipped. Engaging the opposing case is what makes the gap convincing.
Should each paragraph cover one study?
No, and that habit is the most common reason reviews read like annotated lists. Start each paragraph with a claim about the literature, then bring in the two or three studies that support or complicate it.
How recent do the sources have to be?
Recent enough that a reader trusts you know the current state of the field, plus the older work the field is built on. A review with nothing from the last three years invites the question of what you missed.
Related templates
Research Paper Outline
You are writing an empirical paper for a journal or a graduate course and you want the structure settled before you draft a paragraph.
Annotated Bibliography
You have been asked to show not only what you have read but what you made of it, usually before a longer piece of writing is due.
Systematic Review Protocol
You are planning a systematic review and need the method fixed and registered before the results can influence your decisions.
Thesis Outline
You have a supervisor, a topic, and a submission date, and you need to see the whole thesis as chapters before you start writing any of them.
An outline is a start
Plan mode is the rest
Copyeditor’s Plan mode turns a structure like this into sections you produce one at a time, with citations landing in the bibliography as you go.
