1 Literature Reviews Dr. Shelley Kinash skinash@bond.edu.au Acting Director Quality, Teaching, and Learning Bond University There are lots of reasons why students and academics construct literature reviews. With respect to students, sometimes your instructors will ask you specifically to write a literature review. Even if your university instructor does not specifically call your assignment a literature review, an ability to review the literature and present it in a concise, comprehensive manner is an important skill in almost every paper you will write at university. Academics have three main purposes for reviewing literature: 1. when academics are designing a new course, or updating their current course, they need to know what is being written about in the field, what issues are emerging, and whether new research has contributed to the state of knowledge; 2. a solid literature review is a publishable journal article, and; 3. literature reviews help researchers make decisions about the questions to be asked, in that reviewing the literature helps the academic to identify gaps in knowledge that require pursuing. So what is a literature review? Let us turn the order of the two words around. It is simpler to understand a review of the literature. A review of the literature presents the key themes written about a topic, and cites the sources. A literature review presents a perspective, and often a critical view, of the state of information on a given topic. Let us examine an example. I was invited to conduct a research study on Prader-Willi syndrome. A mother of a daughter with Prader-Willi