CSC 493 Computer Science Capstone: Literature Review

Explains literature reviews and guides you through organizing and writing them. Created by the Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The literature review should address the following points:

Why is the focus area interesting?
What are the challenges and the key research questions?
What are the known approaches results, their strengths and their weaknesses?
What are important open research questions?


IMPORTANT #1: A key aspect of the literature review is that it should not be merely an enumeration of previous work. It should have, either interspersed throughout or as a last section, a discussion with your own thoughts. Such thoughts could be your own evaluation of the merits/drawbacks of proposed approach beyond those already identified in the literature. Also, a good literature review almost always includes a well-argued discussion of promising research directions for future work in the area.

Literature Review within a research article that describes developing a new app.

Another article describing development of a new app. This literature review section has subsection titles that clearly show its organization.

From Purdue OWL, a brief guide to organizing and writing a literature review.

From the University of Toronto - some tips on writing a literature review as part of a larger project or proposal, and plenty of questions to ask about the individual articles and the review as a whole.

Writing help from the University of Manchester. Gives common phrases used in academic writing to express comparisons, criticism, transitions from one topic to the next and similar writing functions.

The first paragraph gives examples of ACM in-text citations.