Most of the so-called literature review experts, even among the academics and research consultants, are amateur lit review writers. When reviewing literature for a specific sociology topic, they usually follow a four-step process:

• Download 10 papers,
• Copy-paste relevant paragraphs,
• Paraphrase the copied paragraphs and
• Steal the “limitations of the study” sections of the papers they’re reviewing.

Well, here’s the cold, hard truth:

This is the wrong way to write a literature review. I call it the easy lit review model for lazy “scholars.” I call it so because the model doesn’t require any critical thinking and reading exercise.

When you follow that model, you’re not going to find any gap in the existing studies, because there’s no synergy between the literature that you’ve “reviewed” and your proposed research gap(s). If you borrow your sister’s smartphone after a thief has stolen yours, you can’t claim that you’ve gotten a new phone, would you?

Of course not: You’ve got to buy a new phone with your money—and that requires the hard work of making some money and then buying the phone. It’s the same with writing a literature review.

It’s not an easy task. It requires higher-order thinking—critical reading and thinking capabilities that will help you describe and analyze what other studies have said. It’s not a game of paraphrasing what other scholars have documented.

You need to do these difficult tasks:

• Download at least 30 quality research papers,
• Read these papers with critical eyes, and
• Critique the authors’ findings.

When you follow this difficult model, you’ll go beyond simply describing what others have said; you’ll also get the opportunity to add your voice to the ongoing debate in the literature.

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