Literature Review Summary

How to write a literature review
1
Literature Review
Process of conducting a literature

• Step 1: Search for relevant literature
clearly define the topic.
Research question example
What is the impact of social media on body image among active group?
• Make a list of keywords
• Keywords example
Social media- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
Body image- self-esteem, mental health
Active group- teenagers, adolescents, youth
2
Literature Review
• Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful

databases to search for journals and articles include:
• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• JSTOR
• EBSCO
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)
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Operators to help narrow down your search
• AND to find sources that contain more than one keyword

• OR to find sources that contain one of the keywords
• NOT to exclude results containing certain terms
• Note: Read the abstract to find out whether an article is
relevant to your question.
To identify the most important publications on your
topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same
authors, books or articles keep appearing in your
reading, make sure to seek them out
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Process of conducting a literature Cont..
• Step 2: Evaluate and select sources

You probably won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written
on the topic –
What question or problem is the author addressing?
What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
What are the key theories, models and methods??
What are the results and conclusions of the study?
How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it
confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What
are its key insights and arguments?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?
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• Step 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps

you need to understand the connections and
relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based
on your reading and notes, you can look for:
• Trends and patterns
• Themes
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions
• Gaps
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This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review
and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to
existing knowledge.
Example of trends and gaps
In reviewing the literature on social media and body image, you note
that:
• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of research on highly visual platforms like
Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that you could address in your
own research.
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• Step 5: Write your literature review
Body image issues have been widely associated with social media usage, particularly in young
women. Previous study by Grace,(2008) concluded that exposure to mass media is linked to body
image among women. However, in an era of rapidly changing digital technologies, the mass
media is no longer adequate for understanding how people engage with images, and the
findings of older studies like this one may not be generalizable to younger generations.
According to Bontle (2018), reveals that the interactive aspects of social media may influence its
impact on body image, and mentions that young women are among the most active social media
users. Several empirical studies have focused on Facebook usage in adolescent girls (Tiggerman,
2013;Gray, 2018) and in young adult women (Smith, 2020; John, 2017), while a systematic review
by Holland (2020) confirmed a relationship between social networking and body image for both
women and men. Across these studies, there is consistent evidence that body image issues are
influenced not by social media usage in general, but by engagement with the visual and
interactive aspects of these platforms. Nonetheless, there is a lack of research on more highly
visual social media (HVSM) such as Instagram and Snapchat that have gained more recent
popularity among younger generations.
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How to write a literature review

Process of conducting a literature

• Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful

• AND to find sources that contain more than one keyword

• Step 2: Evaluate and select sources

• Step 3: Identify themes, debates, and gaps

• Step 5: Write your literature review

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