A literature review is an evaluative report of information found in the literature related to your selected area of study.  The review should describe, summarise, evaluate and clarify this literature.  It should give a theoretical base for the research and help you (the author) determine the nature of your research. Works which are irrelevant should be discarded and those which are peripheral should be looked at critically.

An overview of former researches, analysis and their results which are in relevant to your confronted research. Apart from the purpose of obtaining a broader perspective, it also helps to eliminate the need to rediscover knowledge which has been proposed before .Literature review provide researchers with a solid foundation to move on in their fields of study. It also makes sure that nothing is neither neglected nor examined carelessly.

A literature review is a summary or an informative report of a selected area of study.
It can be a precursor in the introduction of a paper or it can be an entire paper in itself, often the first stage of large research projects, allowing the supervisor to ascertain that the student is on the correct path.
However, a literature review is not merely achronological catalog of all of the sources.It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries It expands upon the reasons behind selecting a particular research question. It will describe, summarise, evaluate and clarify the information metioned in research paper.

A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. A literature review discussed published information in a particular subject area and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a certain time period. A literature can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis.

A literature review is an evaluative report of information found in the literature related to your selected area of study. The review should describe, summarise, evaluate and clarify this literature. It should give a theoretical base for the research and help you (the author) determine the nature of your research

A literature review is an evaluative report of information found in the literature related to your selected area of study. The review should describe, summarise, evaluate and clarify this literature. It should give a theoretical base for the research and help you (the author) determine the nature of your research.

Definition:

A literature review is an assessment of a body of research that addresses a research question.

Purpose:

• Identify what is already known about an area of study
• Identify questions a body of research does not answer     
• Make a case for why further study of research questions is important to a field

A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a certain time period.

A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. And depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

But how is a literature review different from an academic research paper?

The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, and a research paper will contain a literature review as one of its parts. In a research paper, you use the literature as a foundation and as support for a new insight that you contribute. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.

Why do we write literature reviews?

Literature reviews provide you with a handy guide to a particular topic. If you have limited time to conduct research, literature reviews can give you an overview or act as a stepping stone. For professionals, they are useful reports that keep them up to date with what is current in the field. For scholars, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the writer in his or her field. Literature reviews also provide a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers.

Who writes these things, anyway?

Literature reviews are written occasionally in the humanities, but mostly in the sciences and social sciences; in experiment and lab reports, they constitute a section of the paper. Sometimes a literature review is written as a paper in itself.