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How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

  • Search for relevant literature
  • Evaluate sources
  • Identify themes, debates, and gaps
  • Outline the structure
  • Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

  • Quick Run-through
  • Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

  • Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
  • Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
  • Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
  • Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
  • Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Literature review guide

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See an example

3 structure of literature review

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

  • Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
  • Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
  • Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
  • Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

  • Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
  • Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
  • Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

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
  • Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
  • Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
  • EconLit (economics)
  • Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

  • 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?
  • Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
  • 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?
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

  • Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
  • Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
  • Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
  • Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
  • Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

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.

  • 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 robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

  • Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
  • Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
  • Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

  • Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
  • Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
  • Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
  • Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

  • Sampling methods
  • Simple random sampling
  • Stratified sampling
  • Cluster sampling
  • Likert scales
  • Reproducibility

 Statistics

  • Null hypothesis
  • Statistical power
  • Probability distribution
  • Effect size
  • Poisson distribution

Research bias

  • Optimism bias
  • Cognitive bias
  • Implicit bias
  • Hawthorne effect
  • Anchoring bias
  • Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

  • To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
  • To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
  • To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
  • To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
  • To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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Writing a Literature Review

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A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

  • An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
  • A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
  • Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
  • Summarize and synthesize: Give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
  • Analyze and interpret: Don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
  • Critically Evaluate: Mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
  • Write in well-structured paragraphs: Use transition words and topic sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

  • Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
  • Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

  • Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
  • Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
  • Qualitative versus quantitative research
  • Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
  • Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
  • Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

  • It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
  • Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
  • Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
  • Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

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The structure of a literature review

A literature review should be structured like any other essay: it should have an introduction, a middle or main body, and a conclusion.

Introduction

The introduction should:

  • define your topic and provide an appropriate context for reviewing the literature;
  • establish your reasons – i.e. point of view – for
  • reviewing the literature;
  • explain the organisation – i.e. sequence – of the review;
  • state the scope of the review – i.e. what is included and what isn’t included. For example, if you were reviewing the literature on obesity in children you might say something like: There are a large number of studies of obesity trends in the general population. However, since the focus of this research is on obesity in children, these will not be reviewed in detail and will only be referred to as appropriate.

The middle or main body should:

  • organise the literature according to common themes;
  • provide insight into the relation between your chosen topic and the wider subject area e.g. between obesity in children and obesity in general;
  • move from a general, wider view of the literature being reviewed to the specific focus of your research.

The conclusion should:

  • summarise the important aspects of the existing body of literature;
  • evaluate the current state of the literature reviewed;
  • identify significant flaws or gaps in existing knowledge;
  • outline areas for future study;
  • link your research to existing knowledge.

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Literature Reviews

What this handout is about.

This handout will explain what literature reviews are and offer insights into the form and construction of literature reviews in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Introduction

OK. You’ve got to write a literature review. You dust off a novel and a book of poetry, settle down in your chair, and get ready to issue a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” as you leaf through the pages. “Literature review” done. Right?

Wrong! The “literature” of a literature review refers to any collection of materials on a topic, not necessarily the great literary texts of the world. “Literature” could be anything from a set of government pamphlets on British colonial methods in Africa to scholarly articles on the treatment of a torn ACL. And a review does not necessarily mean that your reader wants you to give your personal opinion on whether or not you liked these sources.

What is a literature review, then?

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 is likely to 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.

Let’s get to it! What should I do before writing the literature review?

If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your instructor:

  • Roughly how many sources should you include?
  • What types of sources (books, journal articles, websites)?
  • Should you summarize, synthesize, or critique your sources by discussing a common theme or issue?
  • Should you evaluate your sources?
  • Should you provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history?

Find models

Look for other literature reviews in your area of interest or in the discipline and read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or ways to organize your final review. You can simply put the word “review” in your search engine along with your other topic terms to find articles of this type on the Internet or in an electronic database. The bibliography or reference section of sources you’ve already read are also excellent entry points into your own research.

Narrow your topic

There are hundreds or even thousands of articles and books on most areas of study. The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to get a good survey of the material. Your instructor will probably not expect you to read everything that’s out there on the topic, but you’ll make your job easier if you first limit your scope.

Keep in mind that UNC Libraries have research guides and to databases relevant to many fields of study. You can reach out to the subject librarian for a consultation: https://library.unc.edu/support/consultations/ .

And don’t forget to tap into your professor’s (or other professors’) knowledge in the field. Ask your professor questions such as: “If you had to read only one book from the 90’s on topic X, what would it be?” Questions such as this help you to find and determine quickly the most seminal pieces in the field.

Consider whether your sources are current

Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. In the sciences, for instance, treatments for medical problems are constantly changing according to the latest studies. Information even two years old could be obsolete. However, if you are writing a review in the humanities, history, or social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be what is needed, because what is important is how perspectives have changed through the years or within a certain time period. Try sorting through some other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to consider what is currently of interest to scholars in this field and what is not.

Strategies for writing the literature review

Find a focus.

A literature review, like a term paper, is usually organized around ideas, not the sources themselves as an annotated bibliography would be organized. This means that you will not just simply list your sources and go into detail about each one of them, one at a time. No. As you read widely but selectively in your topic area, consider instead what themes or issues connect your sources together. Do they present one or different solutions? Is there an aspect of the field that is missing? How well do they present the material and do they portray it according to an appropriate theory? Do they reveal a trend in the field? A raging debate? Pick one of these themes to focus the organization of your review.

Convey it to your reader

A literature review may not have a traditional thesis statement (one that makes an argument), but you do need to tell readers what to expect. Try writing a simple statement that lets the reader know what is your main organizing principle. Here are a couple of examples:

The current trend in treatment for congestive heart failure combines surgery and medicine. More and more cultural studies scholars are accepting popular media as a subject worthy of academic consideration.

Consider organization

You’ve got a focus, and you’ve stated it clearly and directly. Now what is the most effective way of presenting the information? What are the most important topics, subtopics, etc., that your review needs to include? And in what order should you present them? Develop an organization for your review at both a global and local level:

First, cover the basic categories

Just like most academic papers, literature reviews also must contain at least three basic elements: an introduction or background information section; the body of the review containing the discussion of sources; and, finally, a conclusion and/or recommendations section to end the paper. The following provides a brief description of the content of each:

  • Introduction: Gives a quick idea of the topic of the literature review, such as the central theme or organizational pattern.
  • Body: Contains your discussion of sources and is organized either chronologically, thematically, or methodologically (see below for more information on each).
  • Conclusions/Recommendations: Discuss what you have drawn from reviewing literature so far. Where might the discussion proceed?

Organizing the body

Once you have the basic categories in place, then you must consider how you will present the sources themselves within the body of your paper. Create an organizational method to focus this section even further.

To help you come up with an overall organizational framework for your review, consider the following scenario:

You’ve decided to focus your literature review on materials dealing with sperm whales. This is because you’ve just finished reading Moby Dick, and you wonder if that whale’s portrayal is really real. You start with some articles about the physiology of sperm whales in biology journals written in the 1980’s. But these articles refer to some British biological studies performed on whales in the early 18th century. So you check those out. Then you look up a book written in 1968 with information on how sperm whales have been portrayed in other forms of art, such as in Alaskan poetry, in French painting, or on whale bone, as the whale hunters in the late 19th century used to do. This makes you wonder about American whaling methods during the time portrayed in Moby Dick, so you find some academic articles published in the last five years on how accurately Herman Melville portrayed the whaling scene in his novel.

Now consider some typical ways of organizing the sources into a review:

  • Chronological: If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials above according to when they were published. For instance, first you would talk about the British biological studies of the 18th century, then about Moby Dick, published in 1851, then the book on sperm whales in other art (1968), and finally the biology articles (1980s) and the recent articles on American whaling of the 19th century. But there is relatively no continuity among subjects here. And notice that even though the sources on sperm whales in other art and on American whaling are written recently, they are about other subjects/objects that were created much earlier. Thus, the review loses its chronological focus.
  • By publication: Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend. For instance, you could order a review of literature on biological studies of sperm whales if the progression revealed a change in dissection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies.
  • By trend: A better way to organize the above sources chronologically is to examine the sources under another trend, such as the history of whaling. Then your review would have subsections according to eras within this period. For instance, the review might examine whaling from pre-1600-1699, 1700-1799, and 1800-1899. Under this method, you would combine the recent studies on American whaling in the 19th century with Moby Dick itself in the 1800-1899 category, even though the authors wrote a century apart.
  • Thematic: Thematic reviews of literature are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time. However, progression of time may still be an important factor in a thematic review. For instance, the sperm whale review could focus on the development of the harpoon for whale hunting. While the study focuses on one topic, harpoon technology, it will still be organized chronologically. The only difference here between a “chronological” and a “thematic” approach is what is emphasized the most: the development of the harpoon or the harpoon technology.But more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. For instance, a thematic review of material on sperm whales might examine how they are portrayed as “evil” in cultural documents. The subsections might include how they are personified, how their proportions are exaggerated, and their behaviors misunderstood. A review organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point made.
  • Methodological: A methodological approach differs from the two above in that the focusing factor usually does not have to do with the content of the material. Instead, it focuses on the “methods” of the researcher or writer. For the sperm whale project, one methodological approach would be to look at cultural differences between the portrayal of whales in American, British, and French art work. Or the review might focus on the economic impact of whaling on a community. A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed. Once you’ve decided on the organizational method for the body of the review, the sections you need to include in the paper should be easy to figure out. They should arise out of your organizational strategy. In other words, a chronological review would have subsections for each vital time period. A thematic review would have subtopics based upon factors that relate to the theme or issue.

Sometimes, though, you might need to add additional sections that are necessary for your study, but do not fit in the organizational strategy of the body. What other sections you include in the body is up to you. Put in only what is necessary. Here are a few other sections you might want to consider:

  • Current Situation: Information necessary to understand the topic or focus of the literature review.
  • History: The chronological progression of the field, the literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
  • Methods and/or Standards: The criteria you used to select the sources in your literature review or the way in which you present your information. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed articles and journals.

Questions for Further Research: What questions about the field has the review sparked? How will you further your research as a result of the review?

Begin composing

Once you’ve settled on a general pattern of organization, you’re ready to write each section. There are a few guidelines you should follow during the writing stage as well. Here is a sample paragraph from a literature review about sexism and language to illuminate the following discussion:

However, other studies have shown that even gender-neutral antecedents are more likely to produce masculine images than feminine ones (Gastil, 1990). Hamilton (1988) asked students to complete sentences that required them to fill in pronouns that agreed with gender-neutral antecedents such as “writer,” “pedestrian,” and “persons.” The students were asked to describe any image they had when writing the sentence. Hamilton found that people imagined 3.3 men to each woman in the masculine “generic” condition and 1.5 men per woman in the unbiased condition. Thus, while ambient sexism accounted for some of the masculine bias, sexist language amplified the effect. (Source: Erika Falk and Jordan Mills, “Why Sexist Language Affects Persuasion: The Role of Homophily, Intended Audience, and Offense,” Women and Language19:2).

Use evidence

In the example above, the writers refer to several other sources when making their point. A literature review in this sense is just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence to show that what you are saying is valid.

Be selective

Select only the most important points in each source to highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to mention should relate directly to the review’s focus, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological.

Use quotes sparingly

Falk and Mills do not use any direct quotes. That is because the survey nature of the literature review does not allow for in-depth discussion or detailed quotes from the text. Some short quotes here and there are okay, though, if you want to emphasize a point, or if what the author said just cannot be rewritten in your own words. Notice that Falk and Mills do quote certain terms that were coined by the author, not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. But if you find yourself wanting to put in more quotes, check with your instructor.

Summarize and synthesize

Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each paragraph as well as throughout the review. The authors here recapitulate important features of Hamilton’s study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study’s significance and relating it to their own work.

Keep your own voice

While the literature review presents others’ ideas, your voice (the writer’s) should remain front and center. Notice that Falk and Mills weave references to other sources into their own text, but they still maintain their own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with their own ideas and their own words. The sources support what Falk and Mills are saying.

Use caution when paraphrasing

When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be sure to represent the author’s information or opinions accurately and in your own words. In the preceding example, Falk and Mills either directly refer in the text to the author of their source, such as Hamilton, or they provide ample notation in the text when the ideas they are mentioning are not their own, for example, Gastil’s. For more information, please see our handout on plagiarism .

Revise, revise, revise

Draft in hand? Now you’re ready to revise. Spending a lot of time revising is a wise idea, because your main objective is to present the material, not the argument. So check over your review again to make sure it follows the assignment and/or your outline. Then, just as you would for most other academic forms of writing, rewrite or rework the language of your review so that you’ve presented your information in the most concise manner possible. Be sure to use terminology familiar to your audience; get rid of unnecessary jargon or slang. Finally, double check that you’ve documented your sources and formatted the review appropriately for your discipline. For tips on the revising and editing process, see our handout on revising drafts .

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Jones, Robert, Patrick Bizzaro, and Cynthia Selfe. 1997. The Harcourt Brace Guide to Writing in the Disciplines . New York: Harcourt Brace.

Lamb, Sandra E. 1998. How to Write It: A Complete Guide to Everything You’ll Ever Write . Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

Rosen, Leonard J., and Laurence Behrens. 2003. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook , 5th ed. New York: Longman.

Troyka, Lynn Quittman, and Doug Hesse. 2016. Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers , 11th ed. London: Pearson.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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  • What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

Published on 22 February 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 7 June 2022.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

  • Search for relevant literature
  • Evaluate sources
  • Identify themes, debates and gaps
  • Outline the structure
  • Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

Why write a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1: search for relevant literature, step 2: evaluate and select sources, step 3: identify themes, debates and gaps, step 4: outline your literature review’s structure, step 5: write your literature review, frequently asked questions about literature reviews, introduction.

  • Quick Run-through
  • Step 1 & 2

When you write a dissertation or thesis, you will have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

  • Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and scholarly context
  • Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
  • Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
  • Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.

The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Literature review guide

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

  • Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
  • Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
  • Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
  • Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research objectives and questions .

If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list if you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

  • Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
  • Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
  • Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some databases to search for journals and articles include:

  • Your university’s library catalogue
  • Google Scholar
  • Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
  • Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
  • EconLit (economics)
  • Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:

Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

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.

You probably won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic – you’ll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.

For each publication, ask yourself:

  • 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? Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
  • 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?

Make sure the sources you use are credible, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.

The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).

Remember that you can use our template to summarise and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using!

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It’s important to keep track of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full reference information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

You can use our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations.

To begin organising your literature review’s argument and structure, 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 (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
  • Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
  • Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
  • Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
  • Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

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.

  • 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 robust research on highly-visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat – this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organising the body of a literature review. You should have a rough idea of your strategy before you start writing.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarising sources in order.

Try to analyse patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organise your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

  • Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
  • Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
  • Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic (“many recent studies have focused on the problem of x”) or highlight a gap in the literature (“while there has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration”).

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, make sure to follow these tips:

  • Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
  • Analyse and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole.
  • Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources.
  • Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.

In the conclusion, you should summarise the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.

If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This can lead directly into your methodology section.

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a dissertation , thesis, research paper , or proposal .

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

  • To familiarise yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
  • To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
  • To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
  • To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
  • To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your  dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

McCombes, S. (2022, June 07). What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 22 February 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/thesis-dissertation/literature-review/

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Literature Review

  • Getting Started
  • Framing the Literature Review

Literature Review Process

  • Mistakes to Avoid & Additional Help

The structure of a literature review should include the following :

  • An overview of the subject, issue or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review,
  • Division of works under review into themes or categories (e.g. works that support of a particular position, those against, and those offering alternative approaches entirely),
  • An explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others,
  • Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research

The critical evaluation of each work should consider :

  • Provenance  -- what are the author's credentials? Are the author's arguments supported by evidence (e.g. primary historical material, case studies, narratives, statistics, recent scientific findings)?
  • Objectivity  -- is the author's perspective even-handed or prejudicial? Is contrary data considered or is certain pertinent information ignored to prove the author's point?
  • Persuasiveness  -- which of the author's theses are most/least convincing?
  • Value  -- are the author's arguments and conclusions convincing? Does the work ultimately contribute in any significant way to an understanding of the subject?

Development of the Literature Review

Four stages:.

  • Introduce the reader to the importance of the topic being studied . The reader is oriented to the significance of the study and the research questions or hypotheses to follow.
  • Places the problem into a particular context  that defines the parameters of what is to be investigated.
  • Provides the framework for reporting the results  and indicates what is probably necessary to conduct the study and explain how the findings will present this information.
  • Literature search -- finding materials relevant to the subject being explored.
  • Evaluation of resources  -- determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic.
  • Analysis and interpretation -- discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature.

Consider the following issues before writing the literature review:

Sources and expectations.  if your assignment is not very specific about what form your literature review should take, seek clarification from your professor by asking these questions:.

  • Roughly how many sources should I include?
  • What types of sources should I review (books, journal articles, websites)?
  • Should I summarize, synthesize, or critique your sources by discussing a common theme or issue?
  • Should I evaluate the sources?
  • Should I provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history?

Find Models.   When reviewing the current literature, examine how authors in your discipline or area of interest have organized their literature reviews. Read not only for information, but also to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research review.

Narrow the topic.  the narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to obtain a good survey of relevant resources., consider whether your sources are current and applicable.  s ome disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. this is very common in the sciences where research conducted only two years ago could be obsolete. however, when writing a review in the social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be what is needed because what is important is how perspectives have changed over the years or within a certain time period. try sorting through some other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. you can also use this method to consider what is consider by scholars to be a "hot topic" and what is not., follow the bread crumb trail.  the bibliography or reference section of sources you read are excellent entry points for further exploration. you might find resourced listed in a bibliography that points you in the direction you wish to take your own research., ways to organize your literature review, chronologically:  .

If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials according to when they were published or the time period they cover.

By Publication:  

Order your sources chronologically by publication date, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend. For instance, you could order a review of literature on environmental studies of brown fields if the progression revealed, for example, a change in the soil collection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies.

Conceptual Categories:

The literature review is organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time. However, progression of time may still be an important factor in a thematic review. For example, a review of the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics could focus on the development of online political satire. While the study focuses on one topic, the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics, it will still be organized chronologically reflecting technological developments in media. The only difference here between a "chronological" and a "thematic" approach is what is emphasized the most.

Methodological:  

A methodological approach focuses on the methods utilized by the researcher.  A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed.

Sections of Your Literature Review:  

Once you've decided on the organizational method for your literature review, the sections you need to include should be easy to figure out because they arise from your organizational strategy.

Here are examples of other sections you may need to include depending on the type of review you write:

  • Current Situation : information necessary to understand the topic or focus of the literature review.
  • History : the chronological progression of the field, the literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
  • Selection Methods : the criteria you used to select (and perhaps exclude) sources in your literature review. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed articles and journals.
  • Standards : the way in which you present your information.
  • Questions for Further Research : What questions about the field has the review sparked? How will you further your research as a result of the review?

Writing Your Literature Review

Once you've settled on how to organize your literature review, you're ready to write each section. When writing your review, keep in mind these issues.

Use Evidence:

A literature review in this sense is just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence to show that what you are saying is valid.

Be Selective:  

Select only the most important points in each source to highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to mention should relate directly to the research problem, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological.

Use Quotes Sparingly:  

Some short quotes are okay if you want to emphasize a point, or if what the author said just cannot be rewritten in your own words. Sometimes you may need to quote certain terms that were coined by the author, not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. Do not use extensive quotes as a substitute your own summary and interpretation of the literature.

Summarize and Synthesize:  

Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each paragraph as well as throughout the review. Recapitulate important features of a research study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study's significance and relating it to their own work.

Keep Your Own Voice:  

While the literature review presents others' ideas, your voice (the writer's) should remain front and center. For example, weave references to other sources into what you are writing but maintain your own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with your own ideas and wording.

Use Caution When Paraphrasing:  

When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be sure to represent the author's information or opinions accurately and in your own words. Even when paraphrasing an author’s work, you still must provide a citation to that work.

  • << Previous: Getting Started
  • Next: Mistakes to Avoid & Additional Help >>
  • Last Updated: Oct 3, 2023 2:44 PM
  • URL: https://guides.franklin.edu/LITREVIEW

Academic Writing

  • Strategies for Writing
  • Punctuation
  • Plagiarism & Self-Plagiarism

How to Build a Literature Review

  • PRISMA - Systematic reviews & meta-analyses
  • Other Resources
  • Using Zotero for Bibliographies
  • Abstract Writing Tips
  • Writing Assistance
  • Locating a Journal
  • Assessing Potential Journals
  • Finding a Publisher
  • Types of Peer Review
  • Author Rights & Responsibilities
  • Copyright Considerations
  • What is a Lit Review?
  • Why Write a Lit Review?

Structure of a Literature Review

Preliminary steps for literature review.

  • Basic Example
  • More Examples

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a comprehensive summary and analysis of previously published research on a particular topic. Literature reviews should give the reader an overview of the important theories and themes that have previously been discussed on the topic, as well as any important researchers who have contributed to the discourse. This review should connect the established conclusions to the hypothesis being presented in the rest of the paper.

What a Literature Review Is Not:

  • Annotated Bibliography: An annotated bibliography summarizes and assesses each resource individually and separately. A literature review explores the connections between different articles to illustrate important themes/theories/research trends within a larger research area. 
  • Timeline: While a literature review can be organized chronologically, they are not simple timelines of previous events. They should not be a list of any kind. Individual examples or events should be combined to illustrate larger ideas or concepts.
  • Argumentative Paper: Literature reviews are not meant to be making an argument. They are explorations of a concept to give the audience an understanding of what has already been written and researched about an idea. As many perspectives as possible should be included in a literature review in order to give the reader as comprehensive understanding of a topic as possible.

Why Write a Literature Review?

After reading the literature review, the reader should have a basic understanding of the topic. A reader should be able to come into your paper without really knowing anything about an idea, and after reading the literature, feel more confident about the important points.

A literature review should also help the reader understand the focus the rest of the paper will take within the larger topic. If the reader knows what has already been studied, they will be better prepared for the novel argument that is about to be made.

A literature review should help the reader understand the important history, themes, events, and ideas about a particular topic. Connections between ideas/themes should also explored. Part of the importance of a literature review is to prove to experts who do read your paper that you are knowledgeable enough to contribute to the academic discussion. You have to have done your homework.

A literature review should also identify the gaps in research to show the reader what hasn't yet been explored. Your thesis should ideally address one of the gaps identified in the research. Scholarly articles are meant to push academic conversations forward with new ideas and arguments. Before knowing where the gaps are in a topic, you need to have read what others have written.

As mentioned in other tabs, literature reviews should discuss the big ideas that make up a topic. Each literature review should be broken up into different subtopics. Each subtopic should use groups of articles as evidence to support the ideas. There are several different ways of organizing a literature review. It will depend on the patterns one sees in the groups of articles as to which strategy should be used. Here are a few examples of how to organize your review:

Chronological

If there are clear trends that change over time, a chronological approach could be used to organize a literature review. For example, one might argue that in the 1970s, the predominant theories and themes argued something. However, in the 1980s, the theories evolved to something else. Then, in the 1990s, theories evolved further. Each decade is a subtopic, and articles should be used as examples. 

Themes/Theories

There may also be clear distinctions between schools of thought within a topic, a theoretical breakdown may be most appropriate. Each theory could be a subtopic, and articles supporting the theme should be included as evidence for each one. 

If researchers mainly differ in the way they went about conducting research, literature reviews can be organized by methodology. Each type of method could be a subtopic,  and articles using the method should be included as evidence for each one.

  • Define your research question
  • Compile a list of initial keywords to use for searching based on question
  • Search for literature that discusses the topics surrounding your research question
  • Assess and organize your literature into logical groups
  • Identify gaps in research and conduct secondary searches (if necessary)
  • Reassess and reorganize literature again (if necessary)
  • Write review

Here is an example of a literature review, taken from the beginning of a research article. You can find other examples within most scholarly research articles. The majority of published scholarship includes a literature review section, and you can use those to become more familiar with these reviews.

Source:  Perceptions of the Police by LGBT Communities

section of a literature review, highlighting broad themes

There are many books and internet resources about literature reviews though most are long on how to search and gather the literature. How to literally organize the information is another matter.

Some pro tips:

  • Be thoughtful in naming the folders, sub-folders, and sub, sub-folders.  Doing so really helps your thinking and concepts within your research topic.
  • Be disciplined to add keywords under the tabs as this will help you search for ALL the items on your concepts/topics.
  • Use the notes tab to add reminders, write bibliography/annotated bibliography
  • Your literature review easily flows from your statement of purpose (SoP).  Therefore, does your SoP say clearly and exactly the intent of your research?  Your research assumption and argument is obvious?
  • Begin with a topic outline that traces your argument. pg99: "First establish the line of argumentation you will follow (the thesis), whether it is an assertion, a contention, or a proposition.
  • This means that you should have formed judgments about the topic based on the analysis and synthesis of the literature you are reviewing."
  • Keep filling it in; flushing it out more deeply with your references

Other Resources/Examples

  • ISU Writing Assistance The Julia N. Visor Academic Center provides one-on-one writing assistance for any course or need. By focusing on the writing process instead of merely on grammar and editing, we are committed to making you a better writer.
  • University of Toronto: The Literature Review Written by Dena Taylor, Health Sciences Writing Centre
  • Purdue OWL - Writing a Lit Review Goes over the basic steps
  • UW Madison Writing Center - Review of Literature A description of what each piece of a literature review should entail.
  • USC Libraries - Literature Reviews Offers detailed guidance on how to develop, organize, and write a college-level research paper in the social and behavioral sciences.
  • Creating the literature review: integrating research questions and arguments Blog post with very helpful overview for how to organize and build/integrate arguments in a literature review
  • Understanding, Selecting, and Integrating a Theoretical Framework in Dissertation Research: Creating the Blueprint for Your “House” Article focusing on constructing a literature review for a dissertation. Still very relevant for literature reviews in other types of content.

A note that many of these examples will be far longer and in-depth than what's required for your assignment. However, they will give you an idea of the general structure and components of a literature review. Additionally, most scholarly articles will include a literature review section. Looking over the articles you have been assigned in classes will also help you.

  • Understanding, Selecting, and Integrating a Theoretical Framework in Dissertation Research: Creating the Blueprint for Your “House” Excellent article detailing how to construct your literature review.
  • Sample Literature Review (Univ. of Florida) This guide will provide research and writing tips to help students complete a literature review assignment.
  • Sociology Literature Review (Univ. of Hawaii) Written in ASA citation style - don't follow this format.
  • Sample Lit Review - Univ. of Vermont Includes an example with tips in the footnotes.

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Understanding the Crucial Components of Literature Review Structure!

Sumalatha G

Table of Contents

A literature review is a process of reviewing the existing scholarly literature based on a specific topic. It is one of the critical components of your own research paper. By conducting a thorough literature review, you will get a synopsis of the relevant methods, theories, and research gaps of the existing research on the related topic.

However, writing a good literature review is not as easy as it sounds. It requires rigorous research and extensive exploration of hundreds of journal articles to land on the pertinent information. So, it’s essential to learn the components of a literature review structure before you start writing one.

That’s why this article exists — to help you understand how to structure a literature review in a research paper. Read through the article to get the gist of the components used and how to structure them.

Role of literature review structure in research

Why do you think structuring your literature review is crucial in your research? It plays a significant role in organizing and presenting the research evidence and information effectively to the readers.

A well-structured literature review ensures clarity and coherence in the research which enables readers to follow the logical flow of ideas. It helps researchers to logically present their arguments and findings, making it easier for readers to comprehend the research's context and contribution.

Furthermore, it aids in identifying relationships between diverse studies, identifying key themes, and highlighting any research gaps. In fact, one of the prominent reasons why the proper format of a literature review is important is that it provides a framework for the researchers to present their ideas in a systematic and organized sequence.

Overall, a well structured literature review provides a roadmap for readers to navigate through the existing research or existing knowledge. By clearly indicating the main sections and sub-sections of the research, readers can easily locate the information they are interested in.

It is essential for researchers who are conducting a literature review to gain an overview of a specific topic or to find relevant studies and build a concrete framework for their research.

The Right Time to Structure Your Literature Review?

Writing and structuring a literature review imparts the required knowledge to the readers only when you do it at the right time. So, be sure to map out the structure after you conduct a thorough literature review of the existing sources.

You should structure the review once you’re done with reading and digesting the research papers and before you start writing your thesis, dissertation, or research paper. It bridges the gap between reviewing literature and writing a research paper.

In simpler words, once you’ve comprehended the existing literature and gained enough knowledge of the theories, key concepts, and research gaps of your study or topic, you will be in a position to map out a literature review structure. It gives you a boost to set the stage for your research paper writing. Once the structure is ready, you can reiterate or restructure it based on the flow of your research work.

Tip: Use SciSpace Literature Review to compare and contrast multiple research papers on a single screen, saving a significant amount of time. And to comprehend the research papers easily, utilize Copilot which explains even the most complicated nomenclature and context in the simplest way possible. Above all, these tools support 75+ languages making your literature review and research paper reading a breeze.

How to structure a literature review

A literature review is also one of the chapters or sections in your research paper. The structure varies from one study to another depending on diverse factors. However, a typical structure of a literature review has 3 main parts — an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Let's get into them in detail.

a) Introduction of the literature review

The literature review introduction should give the readers an overview of what will you cover in the study and how the study is correlated. Ideally, it should provide the outline of your research and also explain the scope of your literature review. The introduction section is the most suitable segment to share your stance or perspective about the research topic and gently convey your contributions to the field through this study.

Since it happens to be the first paragraph, you must include and define its purpose, organization, and critical aspects of your research project.

Your introduction should give the following relevant background information to the readers:

  • The “why” of the review? — should provide a reason for why you’re writing the review
  • The “takeaway” of the review? — should portray the importance of the research
  • Articulate the topics covered in the research in a sequential manner
  • “What” of the review? — scope of the review
  • How or where your topic is aligned with the niche or subject area

b) Body of the literature reviews

The format and structure of the central body part are of utmost importance in writing a good literature review.. This is the section where you summarize, synthesize, analyze, and critically evaluate your research work. Therefore, you must use sections and subsections to divide the body for each methodological approach or theme aspect of further research.

In this part, you will have to organize and present your discussion in a clear and coherent manner. There are different types of structural approaches to adhere to while organizing the main body part of the literature review. Let’s explore the types based on the length and format of your review.

i) Chronological literature reviews

The chronological approach to building literature review format has been described as one of the most straightforward approaches. It helps you articulate the growth and development of the research topic over time in chronological order.

However, do not restrict yourself to just making a list or summarizing the reference resources. Instead, write a brief discussion and analysis of the critical arguments, research, and trends that have shaped the current status of your research topic.

Additionally, you must provide an interpretation of these events in your curated version. This approach gives you a space to discuss the latest developments, key debates, trends, and gaps focused on your research topic.

Example: Locoregional Management of Breast Cancer: A Chronological Review This chronological review discusses the evolution of locoregional management through some key clinical trials and aims to highlight important points in the time period in which the evidence was generated and emphasize the 10-year outcomes for the comparability of results. Source: SciSpace

ii) Thematic literature review

The thematic literature review is the best way to structure your literature review based on the theme or category of your research. The format of a literature review is structured in sections and sub-sections based on the observed themes or patterns in your review.

Every part stays dedicated to presenting a different aspect of your chosen topic. For example, if you’re working on a topic of climatic conditions in Nigeria, you might find themes such as monsoon climate, tropical savannah climate, and so on. Unlike the chronological approach, the primary focus here is on different aspects of a particular topic, or issue instead of the progression of certain events. Example: A Thematic Review of Current Literature Examining Evidence-Based Practices and Inclusion

This paper provides a thematic summary of current literature combining the topics of evidence-based practices (EBPs) and inclusive settings and summarizes key findings from 27 peer-reviewed articles written in English and published between 2012-2022.

Source: SciSpace

iii) Methodological literature review

The methodological approach helps you formulate the structure of a literature review based on the research methodologies used. These methodologies could be qualitative, quantitative, or mixed. You can present your literature review structure in a form by showing a comparison between crucial findings, gatherings, and outcomes from different research methods.

If you’re working on research derived from different disciplines and methodologies, this approach would be more suitable to structure your literature review. This method majorly focuses on the type of analysis method used in the research (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed).

Example: Methodological review to develop a list of bias items used to assess reviews incorporating network meta-analysis: protocol and rationale

The methodological review aims to develop a list of items relating to biases in reviews with NMA, which will inform a new tool to assess the risk of bias in NMAs, and potentially other reporting or quality checklists for NMAs that are being updated.

iv) Theoretical literature review

Theoretical literature reviews are often used to discuss and analyze vital concepts and theories. Adopting this approach such a way that, you can significantly put forth the relevance and critical findings of a particular field or theoretical method. Proceeding in the same way, you can also outline an entirely new research framework.

Example: Theoretical Review Study: Peran Dan Fungsi Mutu Pelayanan Kesehatan Di Rumah Sakit

This paper analyzes various theories on the role and function of quality management in hospitals, where the authors investigate how the role and functions of the quality of health services in hospitals.

c) Conclusion of the literature review

The conclusion of your literature review must be focused on your key findings, and their results, and an elaborate emphasis on the significance of all aspects. Describing the research gaps and your contributions can be helpful in case you are writing a dissertation or thesis.

Moreover, you must specify the procedure and research methodology for developing the framework of your research topic. Additionally, if the relevant literature review is a standalone assignment for you, present the conclusion centered on the implications and suggestions for future references.

Lastly, you must ensure that your research paper does not lack any critical aspects and must not contain any grammatical or spelling mistakes. For this, you must proofread and edit it to perfection.

Overall, your conclusion should provide the reader with the following information:

  • Provide an overview of the literature review.
  • Highlight key areas for future research on the topic.
  • Establish a connection between the review and your research.

Tip: Keep this checklist handy before writing your literature review!

  • Outline the purpose and scope of the study
  • Identify relevant and credible scholarly sources (research papers/literature)
  • Use AI tools to streamline the literature review process
  • Capture the bibliographical details of the sources
  • Analyze and interpret the findings
  • Identify research gaps in the literature
  • Investigate methodologies/theories/hypotheses
  • Brainstorm and research multiple standpoints
  • Craft an introduction, a body, and a conclusion
  • Final proofreading and all set!!

Wrapping up!

If you are working on your thesis, ensure to emphasize structuring your literature reviews and be keen in presenting it in a clear, coherent, and organized manner. The structure of a literature review is critical as it assists researchers in building upon existing knowledge, creating a theoretical framework, identifying relationships between studies, highlighting key concepts, and guiding readers through the research.

Scientific research can be made more accessible, informative, and impactful by structuring the literature review according to the different types of approaches discussed in this blog.

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  • 04 December 2020
  • Correction 09 December 2020

How to write a superb literature review

Andy Tay is a freelance writer based in Singapore.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Literature reviews are important resources for scientists. They provide historical context for a field while offering opinions on its future trajectory. Creating them can provide inspiration for one’s own research, as well as some practice in writing. But few scientists are trained in how to write a review — or in what constitutes an excellent one. Even picking the appropriate software to use can be an involved decision (see ‘Tools and techniques’). So Nature asked editors and working scientists with well-cited reviews for their tips.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03422-x

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Updates & Corrections

Correction 09 December 2020 : An earlier version of the tables in this article included some incorrect details about the programs Zotero, Endnote and Manubot. These have now been corrected.

Hsing, I.-M., Xu, Y. & Zhao, W. Electroanalysis 19 , 755–768 (2007).

Article   Google Scholar  

Ledesma, H. A. et al. Nature Nanotechnol. 14 , 645–657 (2019).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Brahlek, M., Koirala, N., Bansal, N. & Oh, S. Solid State Commun. 215–216 , 54–62 (2015).

Choi, Y. & Lee, S. Y. Nature Rev. Chem . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-020-00221-w (2020).

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Literature Review: 3 Essential Ingredients

The theoretical framework, empirical research and research gap

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Reviewer: Eunice Rautenbach (DTech) | July 2023

Writing a comprehensive but concise literature review is no simple task. There’s a lot of ground to cover and it can be challenging to figure out what’s important and what’s not. In this post, we’ll unpack three essential ingredients that need to be woven into your literature review to lay a rock-solid foundation for your study.

This post is based on our popular online course, Literature Review Bootcamp . In the course, we walk you through the full process of developing a literature review, step by step. If it’s your first time writing a literature review, you definitely want to use this link to get 50% off the course (limited-time offer).

Overview: Essential Ingredients

  • Ingredients vs structure
  • The theoretical framework (foundation of theory)
  • The empirical research
  • The research gap
  • Summary & key takeaways

Ingredients vs Structure

As a starting point, it’s important to clarify that the three ingredients we’ll cover in this video are things that need to feature within your literature review, as opposed to a set structure for your chapter . In other words, there are different ways you can weave these three ingredients into your literature review. Regardless of which structure you opt for, each of the three components will make an appearance in some shape or form. If you’re keen to learn more about structural options, we’ve got a dedicated post about that here .

Free Webinar: Literature Review 101

1. The Theoretical Framework

Let’s kick off with the first essential ingredient – that is the theoretical framework , also called the foundation of theory . 

The foundation of theory, as the name suggests, is where you’ll lay down the foundational building blocks for your literature review so that your reader can get a clear idea of the core concepts, theories and assumptions (in relation to your research aims and questions) that will guide your study. Note that this is not the same as a conceptual framework .

Typically you’ll cover a few things within the theoretical framework:

Firstly, you’ll need to clearly define the key constructs and variables that will feature within your study. In many cases, any given term can have multiple different definitions or interpretations – for example, different people will define the concept of “integrity” in different ways. This variation in interpretation can, of course, wreak havoc on how your study is understood. So, this section is where you’ll pin down what exactly you mean when you refer to X, Y or Z in your study, as well as why you chose that specific definition. It’s also a good idea to state any assumptions that are inherent in these definitions and why these are acceptable, given the purpose of your study.

Related to this, the second thing you’ll need to cover in your theoretical framework is the relationships between these variables and/or constructs . For example, how does one variable potentially affect another variable – does A have an impact on B, B on A, and so on? In other words, you want to connect the dots between the different “things” of interest that you’ll be exploring in your study. Note that you only need to focus on the key items of interest here (i.e. those most central to your research aims and questions) – not every possible construct or variable.

Lastly, and very importantly, you need to discuss the existing theories that are relevant to your research aims and research questions . For example, if you’re investigating the uptake/adoption of a certain application or software, you might discuss Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model and unpack what it has to say about the factors that influence technology adoption. More importantly, though, you need to explain how this impacts your expectations about what you will find in your own study . In other words, your theoretical framework should reveal some insights about what answers you might expect to find to your research questions .

If this sounds a bit fluffy, don’t worry. We deep dive into the theoretical framework (as well as the conceptual framework) and look at practical examples in Literature Review Bootcamp . If you’d like to learn more, take advantage of the limited-time offer (60% off the standard price).

Need a helping hand?

3 structure of literature review

2. The Empirical Research

Onto the second essential ingredient, which is  empirical research . This section is where you’ll present a critical discussion of the existing empirical research that is relevant to your research aims and questions.

But what exactly is empirical research?

Simply put, empirical research includes any study that involves actual data collection and analysis , whether that’s qualitative data, quantitative data, or a mix of both . This contrasts against purely theoretical literature (the previous ingredient), which draws its conclusions based exclusively on logic and reason , as opposed to an analysis of real-world data.

In other words, theoretical literature provides a prediction or expectation of what one might find based on reason and logic, whereas empirical research tests the accuracy of those predictions using actual real-world data . This reflects the broader process of knowledge creation – in other words, first developing a theory and then testing it out in the field.

Long story short, the second essential ingredient of a high-quality literature review is a critical discussion of the existing empirical research . Here, it’s important to go beyond description . You’ll need to present a critical analysis that addresses some (if not all) of the following questions:

  • What have different studies found in relation to your research questions ?
  • What contexts have (and haven’t been covered)? For example, certain countries, cities, cultures, etc.
  • Are the findings across the studies similar or is there a lot of variation ? If so, why might this be the case?
  • What sorts of research methodologies have been used and how could these help me develop my own methodology?
  • What were the noteworthy limitations of these studies?

Simply put, your task here is to present a synthesis of what’s been done (and found) within the empirical research, so that you can clearly assess the current state of knowledge and identify potential research gaps , which leads us to our third essential ingredient.

Theoretical literature provides predictions, whereas empirical research tests the accuracy of those predictions using real-world data.

The Research Gap

The third essential ingredient of a high-quality literature review is a discussion of the research gap (or gaps).

But what exactly is a research gap?

Simply put, a research gap is any unaddressed or inadequately explored area within the existing body of academic knowledge. In other words, a research gap emerges whenever there’s still some uncertainty regarding a certain topic or question.

For example, it might be the case that there are mixed findings regarding the relationship between two variables (e.g., job performance and work-from-home policies). Similarly, there might be a lack of research regarding the impact of a specific new technology on people’s mental health. On the other end of the spectrum, there might be a wealth of research regarding a certain topic within one country (say the US), but very little research on that same topic in a different social context (say, China).

These are just random examples, but as you can see, research gaps can emerge from many different places. What’s important to understand is that the research gap (or gaps) needs to emerge from your previous discussion of the theoretical and empirical literature . In other words, your discussion in those sections needs to start laying the foundation for the research gap.

For example, when discussing empirical research, you might mention that most studies have focused on a certain context , yet very few (or none) have focused on another context, and there’s reason to believe that findings may differ. Or you might highlight how there’s a fair deal of mixed findings and disagreement regarding a certain matter. In other words, you want to start laying a little breadcrumb trail in those sections so that your discussion of the research gap is firmly rooted in the rest of the literature review.

But why does all of this matter?

Well, the research gap should serve as the core justification for your study . Through your literature review, you’ll show what gaps exist in the current body of knowledge, and then your study will then attempt to fill (or contribute towards filling) one of those gaps. In other words, you’re first explaining what the problem is (some sort of gap) and then proposing how you’ll solve it.

 A research gap exists whenever there’s still a  reasonable level of uncertainty or disagreement regarding a certain topic or question.

Key Takeaways

To recap, the three ingredients that need to be mixed into your literature review are:

  • The foundation of theory or theoretical framework
  • The empirical or evidence-based research

As we mentioned earlier, these are components of a literature review and not (necessarily) a structure for your literature review chapter. Of course, you can structure your chapter in a way that reflects these three components (in fact, in some cases that works very well), but it’s certainly not the only option. The right structure will vary from study to study , depending on various factors.

If you’d like to get hands-on help developing your literature review, be sure to check out our private coaching service , where we hold your hand through the entire research journey, step by step. 

Literature Review Course

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling Udemy Course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

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What is a literature review?

A literature review is an integrated analysis -- not just a summary-- of scholarly writings and other relevant evidence related directly to your research question.  That is, it represents a synthesis of the evidence that provides background information on your topic and shows a association between the evidence and your research question.

A literature review may be a stand alone work or the introduction to a larger research paper, depending on the assignment.  Rely heavily on the guidelines your instructor has given you.

Why is it important?

A literature review is important because it:

  • Explains the background of research on a topic.
  • Demonstrates why a topic is significant to a subject area.
  • Discovers relationships between research studies/ideas.
  • Identifies major themes, concepts, and researchers on a topic.
  • Identifies critical gaps and points of disagreement.
  • Discusses further research questions that logically come out of the previous studies.

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1. Choose a topic. Define your research question.

Your literature review should be guided by your central research question.  The literature represents background and research developments related to a specific research question, interpreted and analyzed by you in a synthesized way.

  • Make sure your research question is not too broad or too narrow.  Is it manageable?
  • Begin writing down terms that are related to your question. These will be useful for searches later.
  • If you have the opportunity, discuss your topic with your professor and your class mates.

2. Decide on the scope of your review

How many studies do you need to look at? How comprehensive should it be? How many years should it cover? 

  • This may depend on your assignment.  How many sources does the assignment require?

3. Select the databases you will use to conduct your searches.

Make a list of the databases you will search. 

Where to find databases:

  • use the tabs on this guide
  • Find other databases in the Nursing Information Resources web page
  • More on the Medical Library web page
  • ... and more on the Yale University Library web page

4. Conduct your searches to find the evidence. Keep track of your searches.

  • Use the key words in your question, as well as synonyms for those words, as terms in your search. Use the database tutorials for help.
  • Save the searches in the databases. This saves time when you want to redo, or modify, the searches. It is also helpful to use as a guide is the searches are not finding any useful results.
  • Review the abstracts of research studies carefully. This will save you time.
  • Use the bibliographies and references of research studies you find to locate others.
  • Check with your professor, or a subject expert in the field, if you are missing any key works in the field.
  • Ask your librarian for help at any time.
  • Use a citation manager, such as EndNote as the repository for your citations. See the EndNote tutorials for help.

Review the literature

Some questions to help you analyze the research:

  • What was the research question of the study you are reviewing? What were the authors trying to discover?
  • Was the research funded by a source that could influence the findings?
  • What were the research methodologies? Analyze its literature review, the samples and variables used, the results, and the conclusions.
  • Does the research seem to be complete? Could it have been conducted more soundly? What further questions does it raise?
  • If there are conflicting studies, why do you think that is?
  • How are the authors viewed in the field? Has this study been cited? If so, how has it been analyzed?

Tips: 

  • Review the abstracts carefully.  
  • Keep careful notes so that you may track your thought processes during the research process.
  • Create a matrix of the studies for easy analysis, and synthesis, across all of the studies.
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Literature review

A general guide on how to conduct and write a literature review.

Please check course or programme information and materials provided by teaching staff , including your project supervisor, for subject-specific guidance.

What is a literature review?

A literature review is a piece of academic writing demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the academic literature on a specific topic placed in context.  A literature review also includes a critical evaluation of the material; this is why it is called a literature review rather than a literature report. It is a process of reviewing the literature, as well as a form of writing.

To illustrate the difference between reporting and reviewing, think about television or film review articles.  These articles include content such as a brief synopsis or the key points of the film or programme plus the critic’s own evaluation.  Similarly the two main objectives of a literature review are firstly the content covering existing research, theories and evidence, and secondly your own critical evaluation and discussion of this content. 

Usually a literature review forms a section or part of a dissertation, research project or long essay.  However, it can also be set and assessed as a standalone piece of work.

What is the purpose of a literature review?

…your task is to build an argument, not a library. Rudestam, K.E. and Newton, R.R. (1992) Surviving your dissertation: A comprehensive guide to content and process. California: Sage, p49.

In a larger piece of written work, such as a dissertation or project, a literature review is usually one of the first tasks carried out after deciding on a topic.  Reading combined with critical analysis can help to refine a topic and frame research questions.  Conducting a literature review establishes your familiarity with and understanding of current research in a particular field before carrying out a new investigation.  After doing a literature review, you should know what research has already been done and be able to identify what is unknown within your topic.

When doing and writing a literature review, it is good practice to:

  • summarise and analyse previous research and theories;
  • identify areas of controversy and contested claims;
  • highlight any gaps that may exist in research to date.

Conducting a literature review

Focusing on different aspects of your literature review can be useful to help plan, develop, refine and write it.  You can use and adapt the prompt questions in our worksheet below at different points in the process of researching and writing your review.  These are suggestions to get you thinking and writing.

Developing and refining your literature review (pdf)

Developing and refining your literature review (Word)

Developing and refining your literature review (Word rtf)

Writing a literature review has a lot in common with other assignment tasks.  There is advice on our other pages about thinking critically, reading strategies and academic writing.  Our literature review top tips suggest some specific things you can do to help you submit a successful review.

Literature review top tips (pdf)

Literature review top tips (Word rtf)

Our reading page includes strategies and advice on using books and articles and a notes record sheet grid you can use.

Reading at university

The Academic writing page suggests ways to organise and structure information from a range of sources and how you can develop your argument as you read and write.

Academic writing

The Critical thinking page has advice on how to be a more critical researcher and a form you can use to help you think and break down the stages of developing your argument.

Critical thinking

As with other forms of academic writing, your literature review needs to demonstrate good academic practice by following the Code of Student Conduct and acknowledging the work of others through citing and referencing your sources.  

Good academic practice

As with any writing task, you will need to review, edit and rewrite sections of your literature review.  The Editing and proofreading page includes tips on how to do this and strategies for standing back and thinking about your structure and checking the flow of your argument.

Editing and proofreading

Guidance on literature searching from the University Library

The Academic Support Librarians have developed LibSmart I and II, Learn courses to help you develop and enhance your digital research skills and capabilities; from getting started with the Library to managing data for your dissertation.

Searching using the library’s DiscoverEd tool: DiscoverEd

Finding resources in your subject: Subject guides

The Academic Support Librarians also provide one-to-one appointments to help you develop your research strategies.

1 to 1 support for literature searching and systematic reviews

Advice to help you optimise use of Google Scholar, Google Books and Google for your research and study: Using Google

Managing and curating your references

A referencing management tool can help you to collect and organise and your source material to produce a bibliography or reference list. 

Referencing and reference management

Information Services provide access to Cite them right online which is a guide to the main referencing systems and tells you how to reference just about any source (EASE log-in may be required).

Cite them right

Published study guides

There are a number of scholarship skills books and guides available which can help with writing a literature review.  Our Resource List of study skills guides includes sections on Referencing, Dissertation and project writing and Literature reviews.

Study skills guides

3 structure of literature review

3 Literature Review

Charitianne Williams

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

  • Understand the purpose and function of a literature review.
  • Structure a literature review according to basic genre expectations.
  • Synthesize ideas from multiple sources using a synthesis matrix.
  • Choose between narrative or parenthetical citation and direct quoting, or paraphrase with intent and purpose.

I. Introduction

The purpose of a literature review is just that—it reviews. This means that literature reviews examine a text after it was produced, with all the benefits that hindsight allows a reader. In popular culture, we commonly review movies, restaurants, vacation spots, products, etc. In those reviews, you look back at the single thing you are reviewing and your experience with it. You focus on the strengths and weaknesses of your experience and judge the experience as positive or negative while recommending or not recommending the place or product and explaining why.

An academic literature review does something different, although some of the skills and strategies you use remain the same. The job of a literature review is to examine a collection of research or scholarship (not a single thing or text) on a given topic and show how that scholarship fits together. Literature reviews summarize, describe, evaluate, and synthesize the work of other authors and researchers while looking for common trends/patterns, themes, inconsistencies, and gaps in this previous research. The main strategy writers of a literature review use is synthesis.

SYNTHESIS: the combination of ideas and elements to form a complete system or theory.

A good metaphor for synthesis is cooking! Imagine the ingredients for a loaf of bread laid out on a kitchen cabinet. Each ingredient—eggs, milk, flour, sugar, salt, yeast—have their own purpose and can be combined in different ways to form food other than bread. Knowing all of those individual attributes that make an egg an egg, or the difference between yeast and flour, is what makes you a chef. When you combine all these ingredients according to the recipe, you get something different than all the ingredients on their own: and most of us would rather eat a slice of bread than a spoonful of flour. The product of synthesis is like bread. Synthesis takes a list of ingredients and makes them into something more than the ingredients alone.

The images show ingredients, followed by a recipe, and then all put together for bread. These images are meant to compare the baking process to synthesis in writing.

Usually, the writers of a literature review will start with a question that they want to answer through informed and research-based evidence gathered while reading others’ work on related topics. The “thesis” or controlling idea of a literature review may be that same question ( “This review seeks to answer…” ) or it may be a statement describing the reviewed research. The thesis reflects the purpose of the literature review as a genre and is different from the thesis you will write for the research paper that argues a claim or asserts a new idea.

Example 3.1: Look at this thesis statement taken from the introduction of a literature review in environmental psychology on the relationship between “nature sounds” and restorative environments:

From this example, we can learn many things about literature reviews:

  • They are explicit and focused on their topic. The opening states an observable truth about the current research ( emphasizes nature ), is followed by a general condition ( positive psychological experiences) within that research, and then finally focuses on describing how a particular outcome is achieved (listening to nature sounds is restorative).
  • They seek to pre vent or eliminate misunderstanding. Note the use of specialized key terms, exacting transitional phrases, and meaningful verbs in the thesis such as “ restorative environments,” “in particular,” and “ generate .”
  • They seek to forward understanding. In other words, literature reviews examine and link together evidence described and validated in the research of others so a reader can learn how a field is developing. ( Research seems to agree that nature sounds can relieve stress and fatigue–this review will examine that conclusion so readers can understand/ build on how and why.)

Moving from the beginning to the very end of the literature review, we can also learn many things about literature reviews from the sources used. Think of each text listed in the References section of a literature review as contributing pieces to a gigantic puzzle.

Example 3.2: Look at the first three articles listed in the References for the article excerpted above:

Abbott, L. C., Taff, D., Newman, P., Benfield, J. A., and Mowen, A. J. (2016). The influence of natural sounds on attention restoration. J. Park Recreation Adm. 34, 5–15. doi: 10.18666/JPRA-2016-V34-I3-6893

Aletta, F., and Kang, J. (2019). Promoting healthy and supportive acoustic environments: going beyond the quietness. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 16:4988. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16244988

Aletta, F., Oberman, T., and Kang, J. (2018). Associations between positive health-related effects and soundscapes perceptual constructs: a systematic review. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 15:2392. doi: 10.3390/ijerph15112392

None of these sources are exactly the same. One focuses on sound and attention, the next two on sound and health, and none of them are quite the same as sound and restoration —but they are all pieces of the puzzle that give a full understanding of how sound and restorative environments relate.

As the author of the literature review, it is your job to join the pieces together, giving your reader a complete picture of what researchers know about your topic.

Literature reviews are an indispensable tool for researchers. Instead of having to read dozens of articles on a topic, a researcher could instead read a literature review that synthesizes what is known and puts each piece of scholarship into conversation with the others. This could be not only quicker, but also more valuable.

Have you heard the saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts? The knowledge constructed by a well-written literature review often outweighs the knowledge constructed by simply reading each article in the References section on its own because the author of a literature review processes and analyzes the information for the reader.

Literature reviews occur in two general forms—as a background section in a scholarly work or as a stand-alone genre in and of itself. In both situations, the basic purpose and structure of the literature review is similar: it is the length and the scope that varies. For example, consider the previous chapter, the Proposal. In most proposals, you will want to convince your audience that you are informed on the background of your topic—a literature review is how you would do that. Since a proposal is commonly a short text, you do not have the space to summarize every piece of research. You must select an important set and synthesize that information into a small section signaling your expertise.

On the other hand, consider a professional journal intended to keep its readers up to date on new technologies and findings in a specific field or career. New ideas and discoveries are emerging every day, and it can be difficult to stay on top of all of these new findings, understand how they fit together, and also keep track of your own career responsibilities! A magazine might hire an author to read all the new research on a specific topic and synthesize it into a single article, a state-of-the-art review, so that practitioners in a field can read a single 25-page article instead of 100 25-page articles.

More Resources 3.1: Literature Reviews

II. Rhetorical Considerations: Voice

Using the scholarship of other writers and researchers is one of the things that differentiates academic writing from other types of writing. Using others’ scholarship in a meaningful way that creates new knowledge without mischaracterizing the original findings takes effort, attention, and usually several rounds of revision and rewriting. One of the issues is voice , which refers to the attitude and tone of a text—think of it as what the text “sounds like” in your head as you read it. Voice is an important element of cohesion , or what some people think of as “flow.” Creating a consistent voice in the mind of your reader helps them fit all the information in a text together in the way the author intends. Check out this advice from APAstyle.org about academic style and voice.

Think back to your annotated bibliography and how you created your summaries. You probably used key terms from the original authors’ texts, but because you had to take whole articles and restate the meaning in a short paragraph, there wasn’t room to just repeat the words of the original author. So you had to write the summaries in your voice . If you used those key terms correctly and in ways similar to original authors, those key terms probably did not interfere with cohesiveness and voice. However, in the literature review, you have many more voices to synthesize than you did to summarize in the annotated bibliography. Maintaining a consistent and cohesive voice will be challenging. An important way to maintain voice is through paraphrasing, discussed later in this chapter.

More Resources 3.2: Transitions

Another important way to maintain cohesion is through the use of metadiscourse (see Chapter 2) and transitional phrases. See this link for the use and meaning of transitional phrases, sometimes called signposts .

III. The Literature Review Across the Disciplines

Example 3.3: Academic and Professional Examples

Structure of Literature Reviews

While the details vary across disciplines, all literature reviews tend to have similar basic structure. The introduction of a literature review informs the reader on the topic by defining key terms, citing key researchers or research periods in the field, and introducing the main focus of the review in a descriptive thesis statement. The introduction also explains the organization of the review. In a literature review, you organize your discussion of the research by topic or theme— not article or author. This is in direct contrast to the annotated bibliography, which is often the first step in the writing process for a literature review.

In the annotated bibliography, you organize your entries in alphabetical order by authors’ last names. Each annotation is directly connected to a single text. A literature review is connected to a collection of texts, and therefore must be organized in a way that reflects this.

Example 3.4: Let’s examine the full paragraph that the thesis statement we analyzed earlier came from:

A systematic review by Aletta et al. (2018) has identified links between positive urban soundscapes (which may also include nature sounds) and health and well-being, including stress recovery. Given the emphasis on nature w ithin restorative environments (see Hartig et al., 2014 ), the present narrative literature review focuses on evidence for positive psychological experiences of nature sounds and soundscapes specifically, and in particular how listening to these can generate perceptions and outcomes of restoration from stress and fatigue. This review has five key objectives, summarized in Figure 1 [in the article] . First, it explores literature regarding the impact of nature sounds on perceptions and experiences of wider natural environments. Second, it examines evidence regarding cognitive and affective appraisals of nature sounds and their contributions to overall perceptions of restorative environments. Third, literature regarding restorative outcomes in response to nature sounds is assessed. Fourth, the relevance of key restoration theories to this top ic is examined and areas where these theories are limited are identified. Fifth, a possible new theoretical area of interest—semantic associations with nature—is discussed and exemplified by recent acoustics research (Ratcliffe, 2021, emphasis added).

Notice how the thesis statement (in bold ) is followed by an explicit description of the five key objectives—which correspond to the titles (usually called headings ) of the five major sections of the body of the literature review. The introduction basically outlines the body of the literature review to make it easier for a researcher to find the specific information they are looking for. What follows each of these headings is an analysis and synthesis of the topic described in the heading—which is what we mean when we say a literature review is organized by topic.

Example 3.5: See how the body sections of a literature review synthesize research and evidence in relation to a focused topic. Read this example taken from a literature review in another discipline, nursing.

The introduction states that the review’s purpose is to understand the issues facing nurses in situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found several themes in the research that all contributed to nurses’ experiences. This paragraph describes one of those themes which the authors label “Professional collegiality”:

3.2.2. Professional collegiality

Professional camaraderie amongst nursing colleagues working during a pandemic was high (Ives et al., 2009, Kim, 2018, Liu a nd Liehr , 2009). Nurses acknowledged the importance of caring for their co-workers and in sharing the load. Some nurses associated the experience with working on a battlefield, whereby they worked together as a team protecting one another (Chung et al., 20 05, Kang et al., 2018, Liu and Liehr , 2009). Appreciation of their nursing colleagues was demonstrated through sharing their experiences, willingness to work together and encouraging a team spirit (Shih et al., 2007, Chung et al., 2005, Chiang et al., 2007 ). (Ratcliffe, 2021, p.4)

In this single paragraph, there are seven different research articles cited, and some of them are cited twice. There is no way to write a coherent paragraph summarizing seven different research articles at once—instead, the authors of this paragraph reviewed what the researchers said about collegiality, found where their findings pointed in the same direction, and put those connections into their own words. This is the importance of the review’s body section: it is here where you really dig into the content, meaning, and implications of the scholarship you are discussing.

The end of a literature review looks different from the one- or two-paragraph conclusion we are used to in other texts. The end is often made up of multiple sections, each with a slightly different purpose, although all are probably recognizable to you. A “Discussion” section is almost always present, where the author summarizes the most important findings of each section. In most cases, the “Discussion” section does not contain new information, but ties the different body sections together in ways that provide a deeper analysis.

The end of a literature review may also contain an “Implications for Future Research” or “Resolution” after the Discussion—sometimes this final section is even called “Conclusion.” What this last section looks like is often dependent upon the type of review you are writing, and whether the review is standing alone as a complete text or part of a larger project.

In any situation, across all disciplines, it is important to understand how your literature review is meant to inform the reader and what kind of review is appropriate for the context, in order to decide how you should structure the beginning and end of your review.

Types of Literature Reviews

There are different types of literature reviews, although in undergraduate study the Traditional or Narrative Review is most common. Narrative reviews are somewhat exploratory in their content—in a narrative review you are synthesizing the results of specific texts selected for their connection to your topic. Narrative reviews almost always end with a section describing areas for future research if they are a stand-alone text, or a section describing why the author’s research is so needed if part of a larger research article. The chart below outlines the key differences between three major literature review types. Notice that each type has a slightly different purpose. You might think about which type best fits your project as you read.

Table 3.1: Types of Literature Reviews

More Resources 3.3: Literature Review Structures

IV. Research Strategies: Developing a Methodology

Systematic and scoping reviews should always contain a Research Methodology that explains to your reader exactly how you found the research you are reviewing. Often Narrative Reviews will also contain a research methodology, although it will be slightly different since they are not comprehensive reviews, meaning, they do not attempt to find all the research on a topic—by design, they cover only a specific portion. Even if you are not required to write up your methodology, you need clear research strategies to find the appropriate scholarship for your literature review.

Example 3.6: Check out this excerpt from the methods sections from a psychology literature review. Note how the authors clearly describe what types of sources they’ll be using as well as their steps throughout the research process.

Drawing on individual case studies, archival reports, correlational studies, and laboratory and field experiments, this monograph scrutinizes a sequence of events during which confessions may be obtained from criminal suspects and used as evidence. First, we examine the pre-interrogation interview, a process by which police …( Kassin and Gudjonsson , 2004, p.33)

Example 3.7: Here is another example from the field of education. In it the authors describe two separate searches they performed to gather the literature—the first search used key terms they decided upon before reading any scholarship, and the second search used the terms that they found were common to that first set of texts (see more about key terms here and in the Annotated Bibliography chapter).

We conducted two rounds of literature searches, utilizing the following databases: World CAT (general search), EB SCO Academic Search Complete, EBSCO Education Source, and Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (ProQuest). In the first round, we searched using every possible combination of the following terms: ‘race,’ ‘language teaching,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘language p edagogy,’ ‘Whiteness,’ ‘racialized,’ ‘antiracism,’ and ‘ nativeness .’ For the second round of our literature search, we searched using terms that we saw emerging from the literature such as ‘racial identities of language learners,’ ‘racial identities of lan guage teachers,’ ‘language varieties and language teaching,’ ‘race and language teacher education,’ ‘race and educational policy,’ ‘race and language programs,’ and ‘race and language curriculum’ and also repeated our earlier searches in order to keep the literature updated. (Von Esch et al., 2020, p. 392)

No matter the type of research (see a description of qualitative vs. quantitative research ), the specific genres (see descriptions of academic research genres ), or the time frame (see a discussion on the importance of publication date ) you use for your review, it is important to think through the options, make a decision, and incorporate all your research knowledge—use of key terms, use of subject filters, use of specialized databases, etc.—into a coherent and meaningful process that results in the best scholarship for your inquiry and review.

Here’s a video to help you get started on using databases for research:

Library Referral: Connecting the Conversation with Scholarly Sources and Beyond​

(by Annie R. Armstrong)

Research involves drawing from numerous voices from a range of source types. The sources you choose to include in your conversation are context-specific and might vary depending on your topic or the parameters of your assignment. Review your assignment description and talk to your instructor about guidelines. While most research papers emphasize scholarly sources, expertise isn’t always equated with scholarliness and you might want to branch out. For example, a research paper focusing on exploitation of Native American land and communities by the mining industry should make some attempt to include sources generated by the communities under discussion, especially if their point of view is not represented in the peer-reviewed, scholarly sources you’ve found. Think about who the stakeholders are as related to various aspects of your topic and how you can tap into their voices through available resources. You may want to consult a librarian about this.

The chart below summarizes the breadth of source types available through library websites versus the open web:

Table 3.2: Scholarly Sources and Beyond

V. Reading Strategies: Intertextuality and Graphic Organizers

Typically we think of reading as something we do to learn the content of a text—and this is absolutely true! But true understanding means knowing the relationships between and impact of separate but related topics, which might mean understanding how different texts—generally focused on one topic—overlap or differ.

Intertextuality refers to the connections that exist between texts. Intertextuality as a reading strategy means looking for the connections between the text you are reading and others you have already read; anticipating connections with other texts that you have not yet read, but plan to; as well as connections to whole disciplines, fields, and social phenomena. Reading for intertextuality means looking for opportunities to connect texts with each other, and keeping track of those connections in a productive way.

This means note-taking is essential to intertextual reading. Once you have thought carefully about why you are reading a text, what types of information to look for, and what you will do with that information, you can better decide how to keep track of that information. In regards to literature reviews, one type of graphic organizer dominates: the Synthesis Matrix.

The synthesis matrix is a way to keep track of the themes, concepts, and patterns that are emerging from your reading—NOT all the individual content of each article. This is important, yes, and you will need the citations, but literature reviews move one step further into the topic than simply identifying the pieces. You will need to synthesize.

If you have an annotated bibliography of sources already, it is the perfect way to start your synthesis matrix. An annotated bibliography is often the first step in preparing for a literature review, and is quite similar to an ingredient list, if we are using the metaphor from the introduction. (For a detailed description of how to write an annotated bibliography, see Chapter 1 ).

In your annotations, you will have selected the most important information that text supplies in relation to your topic. For an example, let’s take the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s statement “ Students’ Right to Their Own Language ,” which contains two annotated bibliographies. The second uses more recent sources and looks most like the annotated bibliographies you will write as a student, so let’s start there.

Example 3.8: Here are three annotations from that bibliography. As you read, take notice of the different highlighted colors. Phrases italicized and highlighted green identify ideas related to linguistic identity , phrases bolded and highlighted in blue identify concepts related to grammar analysis , and phrases underlined and highlighted orange identify groups and ideas related to educational objectives :

Fought, Carmen. Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Based primarily on data collected from adolescent and young adult native speakers in Los Angeles , this book is a comprehensive sociolinguistic study of language and language change in Latino/a communities. It provides the basics of Chicano English (CE) structure (phonology, syntax, and semantics) and its connection to the social and cultural identity of its speakers, along with detailed analyses of particular sociolinguistic variables. Emphasis is given to the historical, social, and linguistic contexts of CE. In addition, the differences between native and non-native CE speakers are covered. A final chapter discusses the future of research on CE.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States . London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

The author examines linguistic facts about the structure and function of language , explores commonly held myths about language, and develops a model of “the language subordination process.” Then, using a case-study approach, she applies the model to specific institutional practices (e.g., in education, news media, business) to show how false assumptions about language lead to language subordination. The author analyzes specific groups and individuals (speakers of African American English, Southern U.S. English, and the foreign-language accent of Latinos and Asian Americans) and discusses why and how some embrace linguistic assimilation while others resist it.

Nero, Shondel J. Englishes in Contact: Anglophone Caribbean Students in an Urban College. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001.

This qualitative study of four anglophone Caribbean students at a New York City college offers an in-depth examination of the students’ written and spoken language and the challenges faced by both students and teachers as such students acquire academic literacy. Case studies of the four participants include excerpts from tape-recorded interviews, which reflect their linguistic self-perception, and sociolinguistic and educational experiences in their home countries and in New York City. Samples of their college writing over four semesters are represented and analyzed on morphosyntactic and discourse levels to determine the patterns that emerge when Creole English speakers attempt to write Standard Written English. Related issues such as language and identity , language attitudes, and educational responses to ethnolinguistic diversity are also discussed.

Once you have identified a concept like “language and identity” for your literature review, you can start getting “intertextual”! Review your other annotated sources and your new sources for their discussion of language and identity, as well as parallel concepts—what else do researchers address when they discuss language and identity? What do they discuss instead? Go back to the methods you used to come up with key terms for your literature search—the same strategies now apply to your reading. Also look for “umbrella” concepts, patterns in methodologies—anything that emerges while you read intertextually, focusing on the text in front of you while also remembering all the others you read before. Look for the themes in your annotated bibliography and keep track of the page numbers where these themes appear—plan to go back to those pages several times as you write your literature review.

This is a different type of reading than you did for the annotated bibliography, and might mean you go back and reread your sources several times in this new way—don’t think of this as just repeating labor you have already performed. This is new work, designed to uncover new things in the research. Re-reading articles multiple times is something all serious writers do, and something you should do, too. It isn’t redundant, it is recur sive .

Table 3.3: Synthesis Matrix for Individuals’ Choices in Linguistic Identity

Put your sources into conversations around your themes, as shown in the table above. Notice that the top row names the themes covered in that column, put into original wording similar, but not identical, to the wording in the annotated bibliographies. Not every source will address every topic—not every article is the same. The last row starts to describe what is happening in each column across the whole collection of texts. In this way, your synthesis matrix takes the ingredient list provided by the annotated bibliography and makes it into a recipe for your final product—the literature review.

More Resources 3.4: Synthesis Matrix

VI. Writing Strategies: Citation, Quotation, and Paraphrase

Citation is when you use the work of other authors in your writing and mark that portion of your writing so your reader understands what idea is being “borrowed.” Citation also tells your reader where they could find that original idea in the original text, and how your text fits together with the web of other texts related to your topic: in other words, citations help create intertextuality. A citation placed in your sentences should refer directly to the full bibliographic information in your Works Cited or References page.

As you read in Chapter 1, there are different styles of citation including AMA, APA, CMS, and MLA. You can refer back to that chapter for a more detailed explanation of each. In this section, we’ll cover the basics that are common to citation practices. Most academic styles use the original author’s last name as the central part of the in-text citation, since References pages usually list cited works alphabetically by last name, but some use footnotes or endnotes instead, listing works in the order they were cited. It is important to know which academic style you are using for your literature review so that you can make the right choice.

In-text citation takes one of two forms: parenthetical or narrative. In a narrative citation the author of the original work is mentioned in the sentence.

Example 3.9: Here’s an example taken from the introduction of the same literature review discussed in the Research Strategies: Developing a Methodology section of this chapter.

Several pieces offered a comprehensive review of the historical literature on the formation of Black English as a construct in the context of slavery and Jim Crow, and the historical teaching of Black English within the U .S. context, including Wheeler ( 2016 ) and Alim and Baugh (2007). Wheeler (2016) equated Standard English with ‘White’ English and challenged its hegemony in dialectically diverse classrooms. She named the “racism inherent in [fostering] bidialectalism [th rough teaching]” (p. 380), arguing that we are acknowledging that the only way for African-Americans to be upwardly mobile was to learn how to speak ‘White’ English. Alim (2010) , explained, “By uncritically presenting language varieties as ‘equal’ but diff ering in levels of ‘appropriateness,’ language and Dialect Awareness programs run the risk of silently legitimizing ‘Standard English’” (p. 215)…. Current work addressing AAVE studies has been shifting focus to translingualism and to promoting such pedag ogies as code-meshing (Young, Barrett, Young Rivera and Lovejoy, 2014) and translanguaging (García & Wei, García and Wei, 2014) , embedded in a critical analysis of the racial logics underpinning the denigration of some languages. This work, combined with e xtensive examinations of the connections between race, language, teaching, and identity ( e.g. Flores & Rosa, 2015; Alim et al., 2016 ), has laid a foundation for a raciolinguistics approach to teaching, which we return to later in this article. (Von Esch et al., 2020, p. 399, emphasis added .)

In the first sentence, we see two narrative citations just before the period. These citations state the authors’ names as a part of the sentence, and put the publication date of the articles in parenthesis. It makes sense to use a narrative citation in the topic sentence, since most of the paragraph is a synthesis of Wheeler and Alim’s research. The second sentence starts with Wheeler’s name in the subject position, and the fourth sentence starts with Alim’s name in the subject position—both are narrative citations, a form chosen by the author to emphasize the importance and similarities in the two articles.

In the last two sentences, we see parenthetical citations. The citation information is in parenthesis within the sentences, which focuses the reader on the ideas, not the research itself. Imagine you were reading this article out loud—you would most certainly say the narrative citations “Wheeler” and “Alim”; you might choose not to say “Young, Barrett, Young-Rivera, & Lovejoy, 2014,” though, and no one listening to you would notice the omission. This is the most important difference between narrative and parenthetical citation—narrative draws attention to the researchers, while parenthetical allows a focus on ideas. In academic writing, you often have reason to use both, but it is important to note that using parenthetical citation is less disruptive to your voice—it keeps a reader focused on the ideas you are explaining.

Usually you are citing a type of quotation in your text (although different disciplines have other situations that they cite). Direct quotation and paraphrase are usually what we talk about when we talk about using resources in your writing, although summary is cited as well.

Direct quotation is when you take the original words of one author and place them in your own text. When you quote in your own writing, you mark the copied text—usually with quotation marks “” around the text and a citation afterwards. Quoting is useful when the original author is an important authority on a topic or if you want to define/describe another’s point of view in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation.

In a literature review, a direct quote will almost always be accompanied by a narrative citation. But direct quoting can cause some issues in your own text, such as a sudden shift in voice and a loss of cohesion; the potential for misunderstanding and misrepresentation, since the quote has been separated from its original context; and wordiness —quotes can take up too much space both in terms of the quote itself, and of the explanation and context you must provide for the introduced idea. For these reasons, literature reviews do not contain much direct quoting.

Paraphrasing is a way to accomplish similar goals to direct quoting without causing the same problems. Paraphrasing is when you use only the original author’s key terms and ideas, but your own words. Paraphrasing still contains a citation afterwards that directs the reader to the full bibliographic information in your Works Cited, but does not require quotation marks since the language is yours. Paraphrase may be longer or shorter than the original author’s text, and uses both narrative and parenthetical citation. Paraphrase also allows you to cite more than one piece of research containing the same idea in a single sentence, such as the last sentence in the example paragraph above. This kind of citation string is important to literature reviews because it clearly identifies patterns and trends in research findings.

Key Takeaways

  • Literature reviews are a synthesis of what other researchers have discovered on your topic. Think of reviews as “the big picture.”
  • Taking so much information from other sources can get confusing–use section headings to keep your review organized and clear.
  • Diverse citation, quotation, and paraphrasing techniques are necessary to help your reader understand where the ideas are coming from, AND to help make the ideas “stick together.”
  • Keeping all the new knowledge you are learning from your sources organized is hard! Take notes using citations and use a graphic organizer to keep yourself on track.

Fernandez, Lord, H., Halcomb, E., Moxham, L., Middleton, R., Alananzeh, I., & Ellwood, L. (2020). Implications for COVID-19: A systematic review of nurses’ experiences of working in acute care hospital settings during a respiratory pandemic. International Journal of Nursing Studies , 111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2020.103637

Kassin, S. M., & Gudjonsson, G. H. (2004). The psychology of confessions. Psychological Science in the Public Interest , 5 (2), 33–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00016.x

National Council of Teachers of English. (2018, June 16). Students’ right to their own language (with bibliography) . Conference on College Composition and Communication. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/srtolsummary

NEIU Libraries. (2020). “How should I search in a database?”  YouTube . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fgBF0EuH_o

Ratcliffe, E. (2021). Summary Flowchart [Image]. Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563/full#B3

Ratcliffe, E. (2021). Sound and soundscape in restorative natural environments: A narrative literature review. Frontiers in Psychology , 12 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563

Sasaki. K. (2022). Synthesis and Recipes [Image].

Von Esch, K., Motha, S., & Kubota, R. (2020). Race and language teaching. Language Teaching, 53 (4), 391-421. doi:10.1017/S0261444820000269

Writing for Inquiry and Research Copyright © 2023 by Charitianne Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Literature Reviews

  • Getting started

What is a literature review?

Why conduct a literature review, stages of a literature review, lit reviews: an overview (video), check out these books.

  • Types of reviews
  • 1. Define your research question
  • 2. Plan your search
  • 3. Search the literature
  • 4. Organize your results
  • 5. Synthesize your findings
  • 6. Write the review
  • Thompson Writing Studio This link opens in a new window
  • Need to write a systematic review? This link opens in a new window

3 structure of literature review

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3 structure of literature review

Definition: A literature review is a systematic examination and synthesis of existing scholarly research on a specific topic or subject.

Purpose: It serves to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge within a particular field.

Analysis: Involves critically evaluating and summarizing key findings, methodologies, and debates found in academic literature.

Identifying Gaps: Aims to pinpoint areas where there is a lack of research or unresolved questions, highlighting opportunities for further investigation.

Contextualization: Enables researchers to understand how their work fits into the broader academic conversation and contributes to the existing body of knowledge.

3 structure of literature review

tl;dr  A literature review critically examines and synthesizes existing scholarly research and publications on a specific topic to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of knowledge in the field.

What is a literature review NOT?

❌ An annotated bibliography

❌ Original research

❌ A summary

❌ Something to be conducted at the end of your research

❌ An opinion piece

❌ A chronological compilation of studies

The reason for conducting a literature review is to:

3 structure of literature review

Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students

While this 9-minute video from NCSU is geared toward graduate students, it is useful for anyone conducting a literature review.

3 structure of literature review

Writing the literature review: A practical guide

Available 3rd floor of Perkins

3 structure of literature review

Writing literature reviews: A guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences

Available online!

3 structure of literature review

So, you have to write a literature review: A guided workbook for engineers

3 structure of literature review

Telling a research story: Writing a literature review

3 structure of literature review

The literature review: Six steps to success

3 structure of literature review

Systematic approaches to a successful literature review

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Doing a systematic review: A student's guide

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Four Ways to Structure Your Literature Review

The literature review is a critical part of any research project. It provides a comprehensive overview of the existing body of knowledge on a topic, and how that knowledge has been developed over time. A literature review can be structured in a number of ways, depending on the purpose and scope of the work. In general, a literature review should be organized around a central question or theme and use a logical approach to synthesizing and evaluating the existing body of work.

In determining the structure of your literature review, it is important to consider the approach you will take. There are four common approaches to organizing a literature review: theoretical, thematic, methodological, and chronological.

🚀 Pro Tip: Use our literature review outline assistant to get help structuring your literature review.

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a written overview of the existing research on a topic. A literature review is a critical component of a dissertation, thesis, or journal article. It can be used to:

– Assess the current state of knowledge on a topic

– Identify gaps in the existing research

– Inform future research directions

The best structure for a literature review depends on the purpose of the review and the audience. Ultimately, it is up to the researcher to decide which type of literature review is best suited for their needs.

Four Common Literature Review Structures

Theoretical

A theoretical literature review is a comprehensive survey of all the theories that relate to a particular area of research. It includes both published and unpublished works and covers both classic and contemporary theory.

Theoretical literature reviews can be divided into two main types: those that focus on a specific theory, and those that adopt a more general approach. In the former case, the review will critically assess the chosen theory and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. In the latter case, the review will survey all the major theories in the field and identify common themes and areas of disagreement.

Theoretical literature reviews can be conducted at any stage in a research project, but they are usually most helpful when developing your research question and methodology. A good theoretical literature review will help to situate your research within the wider field, and to identify the gaps in current knowledge that your research aims to fill.

Example of a Theoretical Literature Review: Burnout in nursing: A theoretical review

A thematic literature review is an evaluation of existing research on a particular topic, with a focus on themes or patterns that emerge from the work as a whole. This type of review can be helpful in identifying gaps in the current body of knowledge, or in pointing out areas where future research may be needed. In order to write a successful thematic literature review, it is important to select a manageable topic and to carefully read and analyze the existing body of work on that topic. It is also crucial to identify and articulate the main theme or pattern that emerges from the literature; this will be the focus of your review.

Example of a Thematic Literature Review: The ethics of digital well-being: A thematic review

Methodological

A methodological literature review is a detailed and comprehensive assessment of all the research methods used in a particular area of study. It involves critically evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of different research methods, and determining which method is best suited to answering a specific research question. A methodological literature review is an important tool for any researcher, as it helps to identify the most appropriate research methods for their particular area of inquiry.

Research methods can be broadly classified into two categories: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative methods are those that aim to gather an in-depth understanding of a phenomenon, often through interviews, observations, or case studies. Quantitative methods, on the other hand, focus on collecting large amounts of data that can be analyzed statistically. A methodological literature review might compare the findings of a single approach or compare the results that have emerged in both approaches.

Example of a Methodological Review: Social media data for conservation science: A methodological overview

Chronological

A chronological literature review is a type of review that looks at the development of a particular topic or idea over time. This can be helpful in understanding how an issue has evolved or changed over time and provide insights into current debates on the topic. In order to write a chronological literature review, you will need to identify and locate relevant sources that cover the topic in question. Once you have gathered your sources, you will need to read and analyze them in order to identify key trends and developments. Finally, you will need to synthesize this information in a way that tells a coherent story about the evolution of the topic.

Example of a Chronological Review: Historical development of definitions of information literacy: A literature review of selected resources

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Literature Review Structure

When choosing a literature review structure, there are several factors to consider.

1.     Purpose of the literature review. Is it to provide an overview of the field, or is it to evaluate a specific theory or research methodology?

2.     Audience for the literature review. Will it be read by scholars in the field, or is it intended for a general audience?

3.     Scope of the literature review. What time period should the sources cover? What types of sources do you need to identify? Are you focusing on a specific research method or theory?

4.     Resources available. What sources will be used, and how will they be accessed? Will you include gray literature? Will you evaluate the quality of the sources?

With these considerations in mind, you can choose a literature review structure that best suits your needs.

Literature reviews are an essential part of any research project. Understanding the different types of structures and how to select the best structure for your specific project is key to ensuring that you create the most effective review possible. We hope this guide has given you a better understanding of what literature reviews are, how they can be used, and which type is right for your needs.

3 structure of literature review

Tips on How to Improve Sentence Cohesion in Academic Papers

10 tips for writing a literature review.

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The Literature Review: 5. Organizing the Literature Review

  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Why Do a Literature Review?
  • 3. Methods for Searching the Literature
  • 4. Analysing the Literature
  • 5. Organizing the Literature Review
  • 6. Writing the Review

1. Organizing Principles

A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It should have a single organizing principle:

  • Thematic - organize around a topic or issue
  • Chronological - sections for each vital time period
  • Methodological - focus on the methods used by the researchers/writers

4. Selected Online Resources

  • Literature Review in Education & Behavioral Sciences This is an interactive tutorial from Adelphi University Libraries on how to conduct a literature review in education and the behavioural sciences using library databases
  • Writing Literature Reviews This tutorial is from the Writing section of Monash University's Language and Learning Online site
  • The Literature Review: A Few Tips on Conducting It This guide is from the Health Services Writing Centre at the University of Toronto
  • Learn How to Write a Review of the Literature This guide is part of the Writer's Handbook provided by the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

2. Structure of the Literature Review

Although your literature review will rely heavily on the sources you read for its information, you should dictate the structure of the review. It is important that the concepts are presented in an order that makes sense of the context of your research project.

There may be clear divisions on the sets of ideas you want to discuss, in which case your structure may be fairly clear. This is an ideal situation. In most cases, there will be several different possible structures for your review.

Similarly to the structure of the research report itself, the literature review consists of:

  • Introduction

Introduction - profile of the study

  • Define or identify the general topic to provide the context for reviewing the literature
  • Outline why the topic is important
  • Identify overall trends in what has been published about the topic
  • Identify conflicts in theory, methodology, evidence, and conclusions
  • Identify gaps in research and scholarlship
  • Explain the criteria to be used in analysing and comparing the literature
  • Describe the organization of the review (the sequence)
  • If necessary, state why certain literature is or is not included (scope)

Body - summative, comparative, and evaluative discussion of literature reviewed

For a thematic review:

  • organize the review into paragraphs that present themes and identify trends relevant to your topic
  • each paragraph should deal with a different theme - you need to synthesize several of your readings into each paragraph in such a way that there is a clear connection between the sources
  • don't try to list all the materials you have identified in your literature search

From each of the section summaries:

  • summarize the main agreements and disagreements in the literature
  • summarize the general conclusions that have been drawn
  • establish where your own research fits in the context of the existing literature

5. A Final Checklist

  • Have you indicated the purpose of the review?
  • Have you emphasized recent developments?
  • Is there a logic to the way you organized the material?
  • Does the amount of detail included on an issue relate to its importance?
  • Have you been sufficiently critical of design and methodological issues?
  • Have you indicated when results were conflicting or inconclusive and discussed possible reasons?
  • Has your summary of the current literature contributed to the reader's understanding of the problems?

3. Tips on Structure

A common error in literature reviews is for writers to present material from one author, followed by information from another, then another.... The way in which you group authors and link ideas will help avoid this problem. To group authors who draw similar conclusions, you can use linking words such as:

  • additionally

When authors disagree, linking words that indicate contrast will show how you have analysed their work. Words such as:

  • on the other hand
  • nonetheless

will indicate to your reader how you have analysed the material. At other times, you may want to qualify an author's work (using such words as specifically, usually, or generally ) or use an example ( thus, namely, to illustrate ). In this way you ensure that you are synthesizing the material, not just describing the work already carried out in your field.

Another major problem is that literature reviews are often written as if they stand alone, without links to the rest of the paper. There needs to be a clear relationship between the literature review and the methodology to follow.

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Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Marco pautasso.

1 Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), CNRS, Montpellier, France

2 Centre for Biodiversity Synthesis and Analysis (CESAB), FRB, Aix-en-Provence, France

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1] . For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2] . Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3] . Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read [4] . For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [5] .

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6] . However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7] . In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8] . The topic must at least be:

  • interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
  • an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
  • a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9] , but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

  • keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10] ),
  • keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
  • use a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
  • define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the review to help define its scope), and
  • do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a literature review ( Figure 1 ), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

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Object name is pcbi.1003149.g001.jpg

The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33] .

  • discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
  • trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
  • incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules apply:

  • be thorough,
  • use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
  • look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11] , but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12] . A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13] , [14] . When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15] .

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice to keep it focused 16 , 17 . Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [18] . If you are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19] . After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

  • the major achievements in the reviewed field,
  • the main areas of debate, and
  • the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20] .

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21] . This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22] .

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers, and rightly so [23] . As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24] .

Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25] ? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies (“sleeping beauties” [26] )). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27] – [32] . I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to M. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, M. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Funding Statement

This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

Research Methods

Chapter 3 literature review, 3.1 introduction.

The literature review is often the weak part in master theses.

There are various reasons for this.

One is that doing a proper literature review is not an easy task, and time-consuming.

It is not easy because two things may happen. - Either there is so much literature that summarizing it all is a daunting task. - Or there is little or even none to be found.

Too much literature is a luxury problem.

The way to handle this problem is by using a mind-map approach.

If your topic is, say, university performance , then zoom in on those aspects that you think are especially relevant.

If you still want to stick to the broad topic of university performance, then you can limit your search to recent items. For example, in Google Scholar you can customize the time range in a search to the last 5 years, thereby reducing the number of hits.

Likewise, refined or advanced searches can be applied in e-libraries like Ebsco and Science Direct . Still, if your research is on historic thinking on your topic, you need to adopt an alternative strategy to narrow down the number of hits.

Obviously, your objective in searching from whichever databases you are using, is in detecting the most relevant items and filtering out irrelevant ones. It takes experience, trial-and-error and common sense thinking to come to good results.

Given the sheer endless of papers, reports, books, newspaper articles and other items that can be found on any topic, the probability that two researchers – equally brilliant – on the same topic will end up with identical reference lists, is zero. For that reason, it is good practice to explicitly state your search strategies at the beginning of chapter 2.

3.2 Search Strategies: Snowballing

One strategy that saves a lot of time, is snowballing.

The idea is that in a first step, you identify, say, three of four key articles which are recent, high quality (published in A or B journals), and relevant (in the sense of being very close to your topic).

Since the authors of these articles have dealt with the same challenge of finding relevant articles, you can select articles from their lists of references. Then the snowball starts rolling and growing, as the second-wave articles again will contain some interesting references.

In this way, you will quickly acquaint yourself with the relevant theories and empirical studies in your field of interest.

The disadvantage of snowballing is that, by definition, you will travel back in time. So, make sure to start with recent articles, published no earlier than two or three years ago.

3.3 Be Selective!

We cannot emphasize enough that the review has to be critical. Often, students tend to write their literature review in the fallen-bookcase style. That is, as a collection of summaries of things that various authors have said but lacking a clear structure, leaving the reader with a why-am-I-reading-this feeling.

The messages are: - Write with an objective in mind - Structure the review - Use your own words and interpretations - Make clear why and how the items reviewed are important to your study.

3.4 Structure

With regard to the structure of your literature review, there are various way to do it. As long as the structure is clear and deliberate, it will ensure that the literature review becomes a relevant part of your thesis.

Three main structures are:

3.4.1 Chronological

This is especially relevant if you want to describe the trends in thinking on the topic over time.

For example, the views on the role of labor continue to change.

Nowadays, robotization and 3D-printing are efficient substitutes for human labor. But already in 1995, Rifkin wrote about the decline of the labor force. What can we learn from the views on the matter, over time?

Note that the snowballing-technique might miss out this old item!

Rifkin, J. (1995). The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons

3.4.2 By schools of thought

It is possible that even today, there are differing views on a certain topic.

For example, while globalization is seen as a trend of converging cultures, many researchers from empirical evidence find that cultural differences between nations persist – and are even reinforced in the face of globalization. Here, it makes sense to group the arguments of both camps, rather than use a chronological structure.

3.4.3 By (sub)topic.

Especially if your topic is broad, like in university performance , it makes sense to break down your discussion by topics.

For example, you can have sections on:

  • Student performance
  • Citations of university publications
  • Performance of private versus public universities

3.5 Critical Review

One indicator of a critical review, is your ability to summarize the various items that you have reviewed in your own words, and in relation to one another. Reviews in the style of Johnson (2010) said “[literal quote]”, and Peters (2017) claimed “[literal quote]”, leave it very much to the reader to give it an interpretation. The value added of the researcher, is more than just selecting or collecting a number of papers. Without structure, and without paraphrasing and interpretation, the review is simply not a critical review of literature.

3.6 Role of the Literature Review in your Research

The literature review is an input to both your research questions and the design of your study.

As we have said before, in the initial stages you start reading driven by your initial research ideas, and you refine your ideas based on reading. It is a creative, circular process – rather than a linear from-goals-to-decisions process.

But once this part of the process is done, a linear type of project appears on the horizon.

The end-point of the first stage is a research model plus methodology.

The research model, in a nutshell, contains all the variables on which you need data, and the relationships between these variables.

The methodology is the way you are going to collect the data, for example doing a survey with a number of respondents in this region and that period of time.

It helps to see the literature as the bridge between the creative process (what do I want?) and the research project (how to collect and analyze the data?). The research model is, in essence, that bridge. The elements of the model are based on your research questions and the literature. We would not expect to see variables in your research model that are not discussed in the review of literature. In the same vein, why would you discuss issues in the review of literature that are not included in the research model?

There are exceptions to this black-and-white view. In your research model, you may include variables that have not been described in literature, like for example country or organization specific actors that you think are of relevance to the solution of the problem at hand (remember: it’s applied research!). You can also deliberately exclude variables that are discussed in the literature as being relevant, on the grounds of the need to focus on the issues that you think are most prevalent. Adding more variables to your research, and questions to your survey, may have consequences for the time and resources available.

3.7 Beware of Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as:

  • To use the ideas or words of someone else as your own
  • To use someone else's work without crediting him or her
  • To present as your new and original idea, a work that is derived from an existing source.

Plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward.

All of following are considered plagiarism:

  • Turning in someone else's work as your own
  • Copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
  • Failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
  • Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
  • Changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
  • Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work - whether you give credit or not.

Plagiarism can be avoided by properly citing sources.

Acknowledging that material has been borrowed and providing the reader with the information necessary to find that source is enough to prevent.

However, as indicated above, a soft form of plagiarism occurs if a substantial part of your thesis is based on ideas from others, and the added value in terms of discussion, interpretation and putting the reviewed items into the context of your thesis, is limited. Even if this soft form of plagiarism is not punished as such, then still the score on your literature review will be low – as it can hardly be called a critical review of literature.

3.8 Referencing

In referencing, it is mandatory to use the so-called APA-style. APA stands for American Psychological Association. A detailed overview of the APA-style can be found using this link .

Detailed information on referencing, using tools in MS Word and Mendeley is provided in the next chapter.

3.9 How To Write A Literature Review In Three Simple Steps

As a guideline, use the three-step approach:

  • Step 1: Find relevant research
  • Step 2: Log, catalog, & synthesize
  • Step 3: Outlining & Writing up

Details on each of these three steps are in the video below.

Literature Reviews

  • Getting Started
  • Choosing a Type of Review
  • Developing a Research Question
  • Searching the Literature
  • Searching Tips
  • ChatGPT [beta]
  • Documenting your Search
  • Using Citation Managers
  • Concept Mapping
  • Concept Map Definition

MindMeister

  • Writing the Review
  • Further Resources

Additional Tools

Google slides.

GSlides can create concept maps using their Diagram feature. Insert > Diagram > Hierarchy will give you some editable templates to use.

Tutorial on diagrams in GSlides .

MICROSOFT WORD

MS Word can create concept maps using Insert > SmartArt Graphic. Select Process, Cycle, Hierarchy, or Relationship to see templates.

NVivo  is software for qualitative analysis that has a concept map feature. Zotero libraries can be uploaded using ris files. NVivo Concept Map information.

A concept map or mind map is a visual representation of knowledge that illustrates relationships between concepts or ideas. It is a tool for organizing and representing information in a hierarchical and interconnected manner. At its core, a concept map consists of nodes, which represent individual concepts or ideas, and links, which depict the relationships between these concepts .

Below is a non-exhaustive list of tools that can facilitate the creation of concept maps.

3 structure of literature review

www.canva.com

Canva is a user-friendly graphic design platform that enables individuals to create visual content quickly and easily. It offers a diverse array of customizable templates, design elements, and tools, making it accessible to users with varying levels of design experience. 

Pros: comes with many pre-made concept map templates to get you started

Cons : not all features are available in the free version

Explore Canva concept map templates here .

Note: Although Canva advertises an "education" option, this is for K-12 only and does not apply to university users.

3 structure of literature review

www.lucidchart.com

Lucid has two tools that can create mind maps (what they're called inside Lucid): Lucidchart is the place to build, document, and diagram, and Lucidspark is the place to ideate, connect, and plan.

Lucidchart is a collaborative online diagramming and visualization tool that allows users to create a wide range of diagrams, including flowcharts, org charts, wireframes, and mind maps. Its mind-mapping feature provides a structured framework for brainstorming ideas, organizing thoughts, and visualizing relationships between concepts. 

Lucidspark , works as a virtual whiteboard. Here, you can add sticky notes, develop ideas through freehand drawing, and collaborate with your teammates. Has only one template for mind mapping.

Explore Lucid mind map creation here .

How to create mind maps using LucidSpark: 

Note: U-M students have access to Lucid through ITS. [ info here ] Choose the "Login w Google" option, use your @umich.edu account, and access should happen automatically.

3 structure of literature review

www.figma.com

Figma is a cloud-based design tool that enables collaborative interface design and prototyping. It's widely used by UI/UX designers to create, prototype, and iterate on digital designs. Figma is the main design tool, and FigJam is their virtual whiteboard:

Figma  is a comprehensive design tool that enables designers to create and prototype high-fidelity designs

FigJam focuses on collaboration and brainstorming, providing a virtual whiteboard-like experience, best for concept maps

Explore FigJam concept maps here .

3 structure of literature review

Note: There is a " Figma for Education " version for students that will provide access. Choose the "Login w Google" option, use your @umich.edu account, and access should happen automatically.

3 structure of literature review

www.mindmeister.com

MindMeister  is an online mind mapping tool that allows users to visually organize their thoughts, ideas, and information in a structured and hierarchical format. It provides a digital canvas where users can create and manipulate nodes representing concepts or topics, and connect them with lines to show relationships and associations.

Features : collaborative, permits multiple co-authors, and multiple export formats. The free version allows up to 3 mind maps.

Explore  MindMeister templates here .

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

The impact of the digital economy on industrial structure upgrading in resource-based cities: Evidence from China

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Resources

¶ ‡ ZL and QZ contributed to the work equally and should be regarded as co-first authors.

Affiliation School of Economics and Management, Hunan Institute of Science and Technology, Yueyang, Hunan, China

Roles Methodology, Software, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China

ORCID logo

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation School of Economics, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

  • Zhenqiang Li, 
  • Qiuyang Zhou, 

PLOS

  • Published: February 23, 2024
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694
  • Peer Review
  • Reader Comments

Fig 1

The digital economy provides a new path to promote industrial structure upgrading. Using panel data from 2011 to 2020 for 85 resource-based cities in China, this paper empirically investigates the impact of the digital economy on industrial structure upgrading and the primary mechanism. The results show that the digital economy is conducive to promoting industrial structure upgrading in resource-based cities, and innovation is the primary mechanism of action. According to the different stages of resource development, we classify resource-based cities into growth, maturity, decline, and regeneration cities, and we further analyze the heterogeneous influence. In terms of influence degree, the digital economy has a more prominent role in promoting industrial structure upgrading in resource-exhausted cities. In addition, we also found that the closer to the provincial capital city, the more pronounced the promotion of the digital economy to the industrial structure upgrading.

Citation: Li Z, Zhou Q, Wang K (2024) The impact of the digital economy on industrial structure upgrading in resource-based cities: Evidence from China. PLoS ONE 19(2): e0298694. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694

Editor: Liang Zhuang, East China Normal University, CHINA

Received: July 27, 2023; Accepted: January 29, 2024; Published: February 23, 2024

Copyright: © 2024 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: Role of Funder statement: Zhenqiang Li: Data, Conceptualization, Funding Acquisition Investigation Qiuyang Zhou: Software Writing, Original Draft Writing, Review & Editing, Formal Analysis Ke Wang: Methodology, Writing, Review & Editing, Formal Analysis Financial Disclosure This work was supported by Key Scientific Research Project of Hunan Provincial Department of Education; The Grand/Award Number is 22A0468.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1 Introduction

Since the Industrial Revolution, society’s need for resources like coal and oil has grown, leading to the emergence of resource-based cities. These cities have grown by utilizing and processing the area’s natural resources [ 1 , 2 ]. Its firm reliance on resources is one of its distinguishing characteristics [ 3 ]. Most resources, such as coal and iron ore, are non-renewable and will soon run out [ 4 ]. The resource reserves of many resource-based cities have gradually decreased over the past few decades because of the ongoing exploitation of natural resources. Resource-based industries, an essential part of the economic systems of resource-based cities, are also declining because of the steady depletion of resources [ 5 , 6 ]. Population loss, unemployment, environmental pollution, homogeneous industrial structure, and stagnant economic growth are a few issues that are becoming apparent [ 7 – 9 ]. The long-term dominance of resource-based sectors makes it harder to develop other industries [ 10 ]. Therefore, the growth of resource-based cities has more difficult obstacles [ 11 ], and it has drawn attention worldwide.

Based on the development experience of some countries, for resource-based cities to transform, the industrial structure is crucial. It is undeniable that natural resources have played a driving role in the economic growth of resource-based cities. However, the resource curse effect has become increasingly apparent in recent years; while natural resources constitute the comparative advantages of regions, they also create imbalances in regional industrial structure. In resource-based cities, long-term resource development has formed an industrial structure dominated by natural resources development and primary processing. As a result, the industrial structure of resource-based cities is relatively homogeneous and elementary. This industrial structure dominated by resource industries formed under the advantage of resource endowment increases the difficulty for cities to realize sustainable development. Thus, industrial structure upgrading is of great significance in the sustainable development process of resource cities. Specifically, in terms of economic development, in the process of industrial structure upgrading, the rapid emergence of new high-tech and service industries can inject new vitality into the economic development of resource-based cities. In terms of employment, upgrading the industrial structure can bring more employment opportunities, especially the development of new industries, which can absorb more labor and promote employment. In addition, in the context of resource scarcity, industrial structure upgrading is also conducive to enhancing the utilization efficiency of resources and promoting the optimal allocation of resources. Overall, industrial structure upgrading is closely related to the long-term development of resource cities. It is necessary to explore the practical path of upgrading the industrial structure of resource cities.

To encourage sustainable growth in resource-based cities, optimizing and regulating the industrial system is essential [ 12 ]. The focus of current discussions on the development of resource-based cities includes energy and environmental studies [ 13 – 16 ], evaluation of transformation development [ 17 ], the summary analysis of transformation policies and implementation effects [ 18 ]. The existing literature has laid the foundation for subsequent research on resource-based cities, but the analysis of this specific component of industrial structure upgrading needs to be further expanded.

The advancement of digital technology, the center of the latest technological revolution, is gaining momentum. The global economic environment is now significantly influenced by the digital economy, which unquestionably opens up new development potential for cities dependent on natural resources. Sustainable development requires information and digitization [ 19 ]. What impact has the digital economy had on the industrial structure of resource-based cities? What is the heterogeneity of this impact? What is the primary action path?

The modernization of resource-based cities’ industrial structures has an apparent impact on the development of the national economy. In China, there are many resource-based cities. Therefore, we examine the effects of the digital economy on the modernization of the industrial structure, selecting 85 typical resource-based cities in China as the research object. The pertinent research findings help encourage to upgrade industrial structures in resource-based cities. This paper makes three contributions compared to earlier studies: (1) Most current research on resource-based cities focuses on ecological environment study and development appraisal [ 20 , 21 ]. Research on other content needs to be expanded. We study the effects of the digital economy on industrial structure upgrading. The related conclusions can provide a new reference path for the industrial structure upgrading of resource-based cities. (2) From the perspective of technological innovation, we also examine the primary mechanism of action. (3) Depending on the development stage and the distance from the provincial capital, we carried out a heterogeneity analysis to recognize the impact of the digital economy on industrial structure upgrading in resource-based cities entirely, enriching the current study.

2 Literature review

2.1 transformation of resource-based cities.

Many scholars have studied the transformation paths of resource-based cities [ 22 – 24 ]. Ecological science, innovation, urbanization development, technology, and political incentives all have some influence on the transformation of resource-based cities. The government plays a crucial role in the transformation development process of resource-based cities [ 25 , 26 ]. On the one hand, an appropriate compensation mechanism is essential for resource-based cities [ 27 ]. Environmental regulation, policy compensation, and financial help are essential for transforming resource-based cities [ 28 ]. In China, government transfer payments promote low-carbon development in resource-based cities [ 29 ]. On the other hand, laws and regulations can improve the transition performance of resource-based cities by constraining people’s behavior [ 6 ], and the effectiveness of laws and regulations largely depends on the government. In addition, national policies often have a crucial influence on urban transformation [ 30 ]. Several scholars have studied the effects of some policies implemented in China. For example, the civilized city policy has significantly improved energy efficiency in resource-based cities [ 31 ]; the resource-based sustainable development policy has contributed to the economic, social, and ecological transformation of resource-based cities [ 32 ]; the new energy demonstration city policy has a significant effect on the green total factor productivity of resource-based cities [ 33 ].

2.2 The digital economy and industrial structural upgrading

Industrial structure upgrading implies the process of evolution from primary to advanced level [ 34 ]. With the acceleration of the global digitalization process, the digital economy has become an essential engine for promoting regional industrial structure upgrading [ 35 ], and resource-based cities are no exception. Due to the excessive reliance on natural resources, the industrial structure of most resource-based cities is relatively single, which crowds out the space for the development of new industries to a large extent. Moreover, the industrial chain of resource-based cities is not long, and there is extreme lack of high-value-added products, which also restricts the space for upgrading the original industries. The digital economy has injected a new driving force into the industrial structure upgrading of resource-based cities. On the one hand, digital technology is the core driving force of the digital economy [ 36 ]. The application of technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence has realized the intelligence of the production process of traditional industries, promoted the digital transformation of traditional industries [ 37 ], and driven the upgrading of the value chain [ 38 ]. Second, digital finance improves financial services coverage and broadens enterprises’ financing channels in resource-based cities [ 39 ]. The broadened coverage and increased financing channels support industrial structure upgrading. Furthermore, the development of the digital economy has given rise to many new industries [ 40 ], and the development of new industries is a crucial driving force for industrial structure upgrading. Due to long-term resource development, the industrial structure of resources-based cities is dominated by natural resources development and primary processing, with apparent characteristics of industrial privatization. The new industries brought about by the digital economy undoubtedly inject endogenous power for industrial structure upgrading.

3 Theoretical analysis and hypotheses

3.1 the direct impact.

With the acceleration of global digitization, the digital economy is closely related to the social economy [ 41 ]. Many industries use digital technology to drive production and business activities. The digital economy has become a continuous driving force to promote industrial structural upgrading.

First, the development of the digital economy is conducive to promoting the upgrading of traditional industries. Digitalization is conducive to optimizing the production process and realizing the innovation of production technology [ 42 ]. The wide application of digital technology and digital equipment in all aspects of production, operation, and sales in traditional industries can significantly improve the production efficiency and promote the intelligent development of traditional industries. For agriculture, the application of digital technology has improved traditional agricultural production methods, and the application of remote sensing, the Internet of Things, and other new-generation information technology has promoted the automation of the production process; at the same time, the development of rural e-commerce has accelerated the speed of circulation of agricultural products in the market and significantly improved the efficiency of agricultural product circulation. For industry, the digital economy provides information support for industrial production. The production process will become more innovative and intensive through the automatic monitoring and intelligent control of production data. The service industry has become the most active field of digital innovation in China. The integration of the digital economy and the service industry has increased the technical content of services, contributing significantly to the optimization of the service industry.

Second, the digital economy fosters new industries and development models [ 42 ]. With the acceleration of the global process, new industries such as the Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, and high-end equipment manufacturing are emerging. Moreover, digital technology breaks the industrial boundaries and promotes industrial extension. The digital economy has accelerated integration with related industries and formed new business forms.

In addition, changes in demand can affect the industrial structure to a large extent. The consumption structure profoundly affects production. The rapid development of the digital economy has changed consumption to a large extent, and online purchases have become a common way of purchasing. With the advancement of big data technology, platforms can accurately analyze consumers’ needs and tendencies and push the appropriate goods for consumers. This process is beneficial to create new consumer demand and promoting upgrading the industrial structure. Based on this, this paper puts forward hypothesis 1 :

The digital economy is conducive to promoting industrial structure upgrading in resource-based cities.

3.2 The impact mechanism

Technological innovation is essential in promoting industrial structure upgrading [ 43 ]. Innovating new technology can promote transforming and upgrading all links in the industrial chain [ 44 ]. Innovation is an essential engine for promoting industrial upgrading [ 45 ], and this main conclusion has been confirmed by most studies [ 46 – 48 ]. Some scholars studied the spatial effect of technological innovation and found that technological innovation positively impacts industrial structure upgrading [ 49 ]. Other scholars also argued that scientific and technological innovation is vital in promoting the rationalization of industrial structures [ 50 ]. Moreover, technological innovation is conducive to stimulating the emergence of new industries and directly promoting the transformation of industrial structure in the direction of rationalization and advancement. At the same time, technological innovation can promote the flow of production resources from high-efficiency production sectors to low-efficiency production sectors and enhance the exchange of knowledge between industries, which in turn promotes the development of industrial structure [ 44 , 51 ].

The digital economy has profoundly impacted innovation [ 52 ]. First, the digital economy provides essential infrastructure and accelerates technological innovation [ 53 ]. Knowledge and talent have an essential impact on innovation activities [ 54 ]. The digital economy facilitates the pooling of knowledge and dramatically improves technological innovation [ 55 ]. In addition, there are uncertainties and risks in the innovation process, and sufficient financial investment is an essential guarantee for innovation to be carried out [ 56 ]. The digital economy has created a more relaxed financing environment, alleviating the financing constraints [ 57 ], which guarantees the smooth implementation of innovation activities. Research has also confirmed that the increase in research investment is one of the critical paths for the digital economy to improve innovation capacity [ 58 ].

Therefore, technological innovation plays a vital role in promoting industrial structure upgrading, and the digital economy significantly improves innovation. Fig 1 clearly shows the specific mechanisms at work. Based on the above analysis, this paper proposes hypothesis 2 :

Innovation is the critical mechanism of the digital economy to promote industrial structure upgrading.

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  • PPT PowerPoint slide
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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694.g001

4 Data and methods

4.1 data and variables.

3 structure of literature review

The digital economy serves as the primary independent variable in this study. We estimate the digital economy’s development level based on Internet growth and digital financial inclusion [ 59 , 60 ]. The number of Internet users per 100 people, the percentage of workers in the information transmission computer services and software industry, the number of telecommunications services per capita, and the number of mobile phones per 100 people are some indicators of Internet development. We use the digital financial inclusion index of Peking University to measure digital financial inclusion [ 61 ].

We also select some control variables: government intervention, human capital, urban investment, and trade, which are measured by government fiscal expenditure, the number of full-time teachers per 10,000 people in higher education, the amount of fixed asset investment in society, and the import and export trade, respectively. The specific descriptions of the variables are shown in Table 1 .

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694.t001

Considering the data availability, this paper uses panel data of 85 resource-based cities in China from 2011 to 2020. All data comes from the “China City Statistical Yearbook”, the Wind and EPS databases. This study mainly uses the interpolation approach or pertinent government reports to fill in individual missing data. We have employed logarithmic processing for all variables.

4.2 Methods

3 structure of literature review

Where, indu stands for the industrial structure upgrading. dig represents the level of digital economy development. Four control variables are denoted by c 1 , c 2 , c 3 and c 4 , and ε is a random error term. The subscripts i and t denote city and time, respectively.

3 structure of literature review

5 Empirical results

5.1 results of benchmark regression.

Table 2 presents the detailed empirical findings. In introducing control variables one by one, the regression coefficient of the digital economy has been significantly positive, indicating that the development of the digital economy promotes the upgrading of the industrial structure of resource-oriented cities.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694.t002

Due to the excessive dependence on natural resources, the industrial structure of resource-based cities has been relatively homogeneous. Resource extraction, smelting, processing, and other associated sectors are typically their primary industries. Upgrading the industrial structure moves slowly. Global businesses are advancing digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing, and resource-based cities are no exception. The upgrading of the industrial structure must be supported by corresponding financial and technical support. Regarding capital, digital finance broadens financing channels and eases financing constraints, guarantee to upgrade the industrial structure of resource cities. Regarding technology, developing a digital economy can promote the transformation of traditional industries in resource-based cities. The application of digital technology makes the production of traditional industries more efficient, intelligent, and automated, which dramatically improves the quality of products and services in traditional industries; at the same time, the digital economy optimizes the supply chain of traditional industries, which significantly improves the operational efficiency and quality. Moreover, the digital economy facilitates the birth of new industries, and the digital industrial system occupies an increasingly crucial economic position. Therefore, the digital economy shows a facilitating effect on upgrading the industrial structure of resource-based cities.

5.2 Robustness tests

To mitigate the possible endogenous problem, we conducted a quasi-natural experiment with the Broadband China strategy. We performed Difference in Difference (DID) estimation, and the results are shown in column (1) of Table 3 . In addition, to check the robustness of the benchmark results, we changed the period to 2015–2020. The regression results are shown in column (2) of Table 3 . The regression coefficient of the digital economy remains significantly positive, consistent with the benchmark regression results. Therefore, the digital economy significantly promotes to upgrade the industrial structure of resource-based cities.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694.t003

5.3 Heterogeneity analysis

5.3.1 heterogeneity of stages of city development..

Referring to the current research [ 62 ], we categorize resource-based cities into four groups: rising cities, mature cities, declining cities, and regenerative cities. In order to promote the sustainable development of all types of cities, it is vital to guide them in exploring their development modes and clarifying the development direction and critical tasks of different types of cities. In order to identify the impact of the digital economy on industrial structure upgrading in different types of resource-based cities, we conducted a heterogeneity test. We show the results in Table 4 .

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694.t004

Regardless of the type of city, the digital economy has a significant role in promoting industrial structure upgrading. In terms of the extent of its role, the digital economy has a more prominent role in promoting the upgrading of industrial structures in declining cities. Among these four types of cities, declining cities have the lowest level of economic development and face more development challenges. Therefore, from a marginal perspective, the digital economy can have a greater marginal facilitating effect on the industrial structure upgrading of such cities. In mature cities, where resource development is at a stable stage and the level of economy and social development is high, the marginal contribution of the digital economy to the upgrading of the local industrial structure is more limited. The resource development of growing cities is in an upward stage, with strong potential for economic and social development; the economic development mode of regenerative cities has been transformed and stepped into a benign development track. From the perspective of the current state of development, the level of economic development of growing cities and regenerative cities is between that of depleted cities and mature cities, so the marginal contribution of the digital economy to the upgrading of the industrial structure of these two types of cities is at an intermediate level.

5.3.2 Heterogeneity in geographic distance.

In addition, in the digital economy, cities are becoming more and more interconnected. According to the “trickle-down” theory and “polarization” theory, provincial cities will have an uncertain influence on the development of neighboring cities. Provincial capitals can adversely affect the development of neighboring cities through the siphoning effect but also drive the development of neighboring cities through the spillover effect. Based on this, we categorize the sample into two groups: those close to and those far from the provincial capital city, where resource-based cities are located. The following are the specific division criteria: The average geography distance between all resource-based cities and the capital city was first determined. If the distance between a city and the provincial capital city is longer than this average, the city is defined as far from the provincial capital city. Conversely, the city is classified into the sample group close to the provincial capital city. In this study, we chose 85 resource-based cities as samples, of which 35 are far from the provincial capital city, and 53 are close to it. Table 5 displays regression results. The influence of the digital economy will diminish as the distance from the provincial capital city increases. The closer to the provincial capital city, the more pronounced the digital economy’s contribution to upgrading the industrial structure. This conclusion can be explained by the borrowing scale between cities. Borrowing scale mainly refers to the fact that small cities can obtain development opportunities by borrowing the scale effect of neighboring big cities. Resource-based cities near provincial capitals can benefit more from the scale effect than those far from provincial capitals. As a result, the digital economy of such cities can realize a higher level of digital economy development, which will have a more significant role in promoting upgrading industrial structures.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694.t005

5.4 Analysis of mediation effect

Technological innovation is closely linked to the evolution of existing industries and the birth of new ones. According to the previous analysis, we use the number of patents granted per 10,000 persons as a proxy for urban innovation. Table 6 displays the regression results.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694.t006

The innovation and digital economy regression coefficients in column (3) are significantly positive. The coefficient value for the digital economy declines when compared to column (1), revealing that innovation exerts a partial mediating effect.

Innovation and technological progress are crucial in promoting industries’ structural upgrading. The digital economy has dramatically facilitated technological innovation. On the one hand, the development of the digital economy eases information asymmetry and greatly facilitates the sharing of innovations.

In addition, the economic development level of resource-oriented cities is low, which hinders innovative activities to a certain extent. The scale effect of the digital economy and digital inclusive finance broaden financing channels, provide financial support for the development of innovative activities, and guarantee the smooth progress of innovative activities. Technological innovation can promote the birth and development of new industrial sectors while enhancing the technological content of traditional industries and ultimately promoting the development of industrial structures in the direction of heightening.

6 Conclusions and recommendation

This paper empirically investigates how the digital economy affected upgrading the industrial structure in resource-based cities in China. We also discuss the critical mechanism and heterogeneity. Our main conclusions are: (1) The digital economy significantly contributes to upgrading the industrial structure in resource-based cities, and this conclusion still holds after accounting for possible endogenous issues. (2) For resource-based cities at various phases of extraction of resources, this promotion effect shows significant variation. The digital economy has a more prominent role in promoting upgrading industrial structures in resource-depleted cities, followed by regenerative and growing cities and, finally, mature cities. Moreover, the closer to the provincial capital city, the more pronounced the promotion of the digital economy. The size of the city acted as a cheerful moderator. (3) Innovation is an effective influence mechanism.

The following recommendations are: (1) Strengthen digital infrastructure construction. The results of the study show that the development of the digital economy is conducive to upgrading industrial structure, and the development of the digital economy cannot be separated from the support of digital infrastructure. Therefore, it is necessary to accelerate the comprehensive construction of digital information infrastructure. The digital economy has a more significant role in promoting industrial structure upgrading for resource-exhausted cities and resource cities far from the central city. Therefore, relevant departments should adequately plan and take reasonable measures to improve digital infrastructure construction to provide a good foundation for upgrading industrial structures. (2) Implement a digital economy development strategy and encourage digitalization. In order to inject new development dynamics into resource-based cities. It is necessary to concentrate on reforming and modernizing established industries and aggressively promoting the deep integration of the digital economy with dominant industries. It is also necessary to adopt some incentive policies to encourage the development of new industries.

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298694.s001

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With the deepening of China’s aging process, changes in the age structure of the population affect the industrial structure and consumption structure in different ways and have a knock-on effect on the whole economic system. Therefore, aging is one of the objective factors affecting future carbon emissions in China. This study analyzes the impact mechanism of aging-related consumption trend on carbon emission efficiency (CEE) based on panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2019. The results show that the aging-related consumption trend is conducive to the improvement of regional CEE, and the mediation transmission mechanism of industrial structure adjustment is obvious, with a coefficient of 0.1496. The core industry closely linked to the demand for aging-related consumption is consumer services. The promotion of the consumption demand of the aging in the eastern region on the CEE and the transmission stimulation of the industrial structure adjustment are the most obvious. The mediation effect in the central and western regions is relatively weak, and the aging-related consumption demand has not formed a positive interaction with the aging industry. Therefore, improving the market construction of products and services for the aging is beneficial to achieve a virtuous cycle of aging-related consumption upgrading and carbon emission efficiency. This research can provide insights for China to promote industrial structure transformation within the aging trend and also help China meet its carbon neutrality target on schedule.

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Introduction

Global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is considered to be an unconventional security threat, and it has become a consensus that sustainable development must be based on reducing greenhouse gas emissions (Böhringer et al. 2012 ; Liu et al. 2015 ). In China, carbon dioxide emission accounts for about 83% of greenhouse gases, and reducing CO 2 emission is the key to controlling the quality of the atmospheric environment. The intensity of carbon emission is closely related to the characteristics of industrial structure, among which the tertiary industry has the lowest carbon emission intensity (Cheng et al. 2018 ; Wang et al. 2021 ). So the adjustment and upgrading of industrial structure and the optimization of factor resource allocation are necessary ways to balance China’s economic development and carbon emission reduction targets (Li and Wang 2019 ; Zhang et al. 2018a , b , 2023a ). The current population age structure in China is facing profound changes and has a chain reaction in the economic system. The aging of the population is causing the “demographic dividend” of economic growth to fade, but meanwhile, the shift in consumption patterns brought by the growth of the elderly population is an opportunity to drive the evolution of an advanced industrial structure. The rise in the proportion of elderly population will drive the growth of service-oriented consumption (Mao and Xu 2014 ), thus forcing the upgrading of industrial structure. It will determine the process of China’s carbon emission control in the mid- and long-term (Guo et al. 2023 ). Therefore, it is essential to consider the dynamic impact of aging trend when formulating low-carbon industrial policies.

Population aging is an important objective factor affecting industrial structure adjustment. On the one hand, population aging reduces the number of the working-age population and labor productivity and restricts the adjustment of industrial structure (Chen and Wang 2023 ; Feyrer 2007 ). On the other hand, the aging population effectively forces China to upgrade its industrial structure through the accumulation of human capital and the expansion of demand (Guo et al. 2023 ; Shen et al. 2022 ; Liu and Peng 2016 ). Compared to the supply-side factors, the demand-side factors are the endogenous driving force of the aging population to affect the industrial structure. The irreversible physiological and psychological changes caused by human senescence determine the rigidity of the demand for aging products and services (Vrhovec and Tajnikar 2016 ).

China’s aging population trend has coexisted with rapid economic growth for a long time (Cai 2021 ). The level of consumption corresponding to population aging in each stage of economic development varies (Sungja et al. 2021 ). The habitual characteristics and the differences in the living space and social changes experienced by elderly in different birth cohorts lead to differences in the consumption patterns of older populations in each age group (Mao and Xu 2014 ). At current stage, China’s oldest seniors belong to the pre-1945 birth cohort. They have experienced the war turmoil and national reconstruction, and the lack of material life in their middle and young adulthood, thus forming habits of hardship and frugality (Seoseonyoung et al. 2021 ). Those born in the 1945–1955 cohort are middle-aged seniors, growing up in a period of tortuous advancement and economic broader reform in China, whose middle and old age have benefited from the dividends of reform and opening up. Their consumption habits are similar to those of the previous period, with basic physiological demands as the guide for consumption (Wang et al. 2022a , b ). The elderly born after 1955 belong to the younger seniors, who participated in the wave of reform and opening up during their youth, and experienced the rapid development of Internet technology during their middle age (Wang and Yu 2020 ). They have accumulated rich assets in their old age and have a modern consumption concept with the sense of pursuing personalized consumption (Sungja et al. 2021 ).

With the deepening of the aging process, the change of generations makes the consumption demand of the elderly tend to diversify (Kuhn and Prettner 2018 ). In order to meet the decline of physiological functions in the elderly, the demand for service products increases (Yang et al. 2021 ). Simultaneously, economic development drives up the spiritual consumption demand (Erlandsen and Nymoen 2008 ), transforming the social consumption structure. It will directly promote the development of silver-haired industries, such as technology-intensive industries and consumer services (Liu and Peng 2016 ), and will have a long-term impact on China’s low-carbon economy development. In this context, it is necessary to analyze whether the transformation of consumption demand caused by population aging can force the industrial restructuring and ultimately affect China’s carbon emission efficiency. That is of great importance to achieve the “peak carbon” and “carbon neutral” goals as scheduled.

This study will adopt industrial structure adjustment as the mediation variable to analyze the mechanism of aging-related consumption trend on carbon emission efficiency. The aims and main contribution of this research are to (1) quantify aging-related consumption trend and analyze the mechanism of its impact on regional carbon emission efficiency; (2) verify the mediation effect of industrial structure adjustment and further consider two specific types of aging-related industries to explain the endogenous driving force of aging-related consumption trend on industrial structure adjustment; and (3) investigate the regional heterogeneity of aging-related consumption trend and mediation effects to identify the carbon emission reduction potential in specific regions. The results of this study can provide scientific guidance for China to formulate low-carbon industrial development policies in the context of population aging.

Literature review

Besides the primary energy structure (Fan et al. 2023 ), economic scale (Sheldon 2019 ), foreign trade (Li and Wei 2021 ), and industrial structure (Sun et al. 2020 ), the age structure of the population is also an important factor influencing carbon emission intensity (Dalton et al. 2008 ; Menz and Welsch 2012 ; Wang and Wang 2021 ). This section will clarify how the aging-related consumption demand trend affects carbon emission by changing the industrial structure in the context of population aging based on existing literature.

The transformation of consumption demand structure in the context of aging

Compared with developed countries, China has entered an aging population in an old before getting rich cases. Due to the deep-rooted frugal lifestyle habits of the current generation of elderly, it was widely believed that the aging trend of the population has depressed social consumption expenditure in China (Seoseonyoung et al. 2021 ; Wang and Yu 2020 ). But as the quality of China’s economic development continues to improve, this phenomenon has changed (Kuhn and Prettner 2018 ). The precautionary saving that comes with increased life expectancy may partially hinder the spending power of the elderly (Hu 2015 ; Wang and Ai 2015 ). However, as the elderly reach a significantly higher level of education and income, they will have a greater propensity and ability to consume at an older age (Qi and Liu 2020 ).

The consumption of the elderly is significantly different from that of other age groups. Aging-related consumption demands tend to be health-oriented and hedonistic due to the decline of physical functions and the pursuit of spiritual satisfaction (Tian et al. 2015 ). The rise in the number of older adults will significantly drive up healthcare consumption expenditure (Yang et al. 2021 ; Zhang et al. 2017 ; Zhang et al. 2018a , b ), and the consumption behavior of the elderly focus on the comfort and convenience of life (Wang and Li 2021 ), promoting the expansion of the corresponding industries and services in society (Mao and Xu 2014 ; Qi and Liu 2020 ). In addition, changes in the lifestyle of the elderly will also affect consumption. With the elderly spending more time at home, residential consumption rises, leading to increased household energy consumption (Yagita and Iwafune 2021 ; Zhu and Lin 2022 ) and more carbon emissions (Yu et al. 2023a , b ; Zheng et al. 2022 ), which is also positively correlated with the age of homebound older adults (O’Neill and Chen 2002 ).

To summarize, the rise in the proportion of the elderly in the total population will obviously stimulate the growth of the development of enjoyment-oriented consumption and, to a certain extent, drive the household energy consumption.

Aging-related consumption trend and industrial structure adjustment

Domestic demand is an endogenous driver of the industrial economic growth. Aging-related consumption demand requires society to provide more aging products and supporting services (Lee and Mason 2010 ; Lu et al. 2018 ). Due to the physiological characteristics of the elderly, they have a high preference for medical services (Yang et al. 2021 ). The aging leads to an increase in the demand for health care, which brings a shift in the labor force from other labor production sectors to the health care sector (Hashimoto and Tabata 2010 ). Beyond the basic health needs, because of the richness of life experience and the growth of demand hierarchy brought by age, aging will also drive the development of household services, senior education, senior tourism, and other consumer services (Wang et al. 2022a , b ; Yenilmez and Meltem 2015 ). And with the deepening of population aging, the aging industry can receive more government industrial policy support (Lee and Mason 2010 ). It is beneficial to the transition from the secondary to the tertiary sector, thus helping to upgrade the industrial structure.

Aging-related consumption trend is one aspect of the impact of aging on the industrial structure, and its impact on the supply side is reflected in that it changes the labor allocation. Population aging reduces the proportion of younger workers, decreases labor productivity in society (Dostie 2011 ; Hernæs et al. 2023 ), and will increase the financial burden (Hock and Weil 2012 ). The aging affects the allocation of labor resources and thus has a negative impact on labor-intensive industries, but it also has the effect of forcing human capital accumulation and promoting the development of technology-intensive industries (Annabi et al. 2009 ; Kim and Song Lee 2023 ).

Nonetheless, compared to labor supply, population aging still has a more direct impact on industrial adjustment on the demand side, which is reflected in the rise of the proportion of the elderly changing the social consumption structure (Erlandsen and Nymoen 2008 ), leading to a shift in the direction of industrial development (Wakabayashi and Hewings 2007 ; Chu et al. 2017a , b ). Based on this, we propose research hypothesis 1: Aging-related consumption trend will drive the growth of consumer services, thus contributing to the industrial structure upgrading.

The impact of industrial structure upgrading on carbon emission

The growth of the service sectors driven by aging-related consumption trend is consistent with the direction of industrial structural upgrading. Advanced industrial structure manifests in the proportion of the tertiary sector in the national economy will continue to rise with the increase in the level of economic development. Although the economic activities of all three industries depend on energy consumption (Chunmei et al. 2011 ), the secondary industry has the highest energy intensity and pollution emissions (Panayotou 1997 ). The carbon emission intensity of the tertiary industry is significantly lower than that of the secondary industry (Wu et al. 2021 ; Zhang et al. 2019 ). Among the tertiary sectors, the energy consumption of consumer services is lower than that of the transportation sector (Fourcroy et al. 2012 ). Therefore, expanding the scale of tertiary services in the economic structure and upgrading the industrial structure is a crucial way to reduce the total carbon emissions and improve energy use efficiency (Tian et al. 2014 ).

So we propose research hypothesis 2: Aging-related consumption trends can contribute to the improvement of carbon emission efficiency by driving industrial structure upgrading.

Existing research mainly considered the impact of population aging on production or consumption, or directly explored the influence of aging or industrial structure on carbon emissions. But these studies fail to establish an effective linkage of the mechanism path of “aging-related consumption trend–—industrial structure adjustment—carbon emission efficiency.” There is a lack of quantification of aging-related consumption trends. And there is also a gap in analyzing whether aging-related consumption trend changes carbon emission efficiency by driving adjustment of specific industrial structure. The impact of population aging on industrial structure adjustment is an important intermediate mechanism affecting carbon emission intensity. By driving the transformation of consumption structure, population aging can promote the development of silver-haired industries, which are mainly tertiary sectors. Thus, the increase of aging-related consumption demand theoretically helps to promote the upgrading of industrial structure and then improves the carbon emission efficiency in the process of economic development. This study will conduct an empirical test on this mechanism.

Methodology

Super-sbm-dea model based on undesired output.

This study uses the super-slacks-based model data envelopment analysis (Super-SBM-DEA) the SBM model based on undesirable output to measure the carbon emission efficiency of 30 provinces in China (except Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Tibet) from 2000 to 2019. The SBM model introduces slack and residual variables into the linear programming equation model, compensating for the neglect of the input–output slack problem in traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models (Tran et al. 2019 ). The efficiency values obtained from the SBM model are in the range of [0, 1], but in most situations, there may be multiple efficient decision-making units (DMUs) with efficiency values equal to 1. Therefore, this study uses the Super-SBM-DEA model to estimate carbon emission efficiency, which can have an efficiency evaluation value of 1 or more, and thus can effectively rank the DMUs with efficiency values higher than 1.

Assuming that there are n decision units in the carbon efficiency assessment ( j  = 1,2,⋯, n ), each with m input indicators x i ( i  = 1,2,⋯, m ), q 1 desirable outputs y r ( r  = 1,2,⋯, q1 ), and q 2 undesirable outputs b t  = ( t  = 1,2,⋯, q 2 ). The model is as follows:

In Eq. ( 2 ), ρ is the carbon efficiency of the DMU. \({S}_{i}^{-}\) . \({S}_{r}^{+}\) . \({S}_{t}^{b-}\) are slack variables for the input indicator, desirable output, and undesirable output, respectively; λ is the weight. A DMU’s efficiency value for the year is efficient if the efficiency value ρ  ≥ 1.

In an undesirable output-based SBM model, each decision unit includes several input variables and output variables. In this study, the input variables are labor force, fixed capital, and energy consumption. The desirable output is the gross regional product, and the undesirable output is the CO 2 emission. The description of input and output variables is shown in Table 1 .

CO 2 emission from energy consumption (except heat and electricity) is estimated using the methodology recommended by the IPCC:

In Eq. ( 3 ), CO 2 j is the CO 2 emission of the j energy; E j is the consumption of the j energy (including raw coal, coke, gasoline, diesel oil, kerosene, fuel oil, and natural gas); G j is the net calorific value of the j energy; A j is the CO 2 emission coefficient; and B j is the carbon oxidation factor. Footnote 1

Electricity and heat are different from their traditional fossil counterparts. The annual carbon emission factors for electricity and heat depend on the type and proportion of energy consumed in the energy conversion process. In this paper, the carbon emission factors for electricity and heat are calculated using the following equation:

Among them, \({COE}_{h}^{t}\) and \({COE}_{e}^{t}\) are the carbon emission coefficients of heat and electricity in year t respectively; \({CH}_{i}^{t}\) and \({CE}_{i}^{t}\) are the carbon emissions generated by the i energy consumed of heat and electricity production in year t respectively; \({\mathrm{Heat}}^{t}\) and \({Ele}^{t}\) are the total consumption of heat and electricity in year t in China.

Mediation effects model

This paper uses a mediation effects model to quantify the impact of the rising demand for aging-related consumption on carbon emission efficiency. First, the Tobit model is adopted as a benchmark model to analyze the impact of population aging and consumption structure on carbon emissions efficiency. The Tobit model is a limited dependent variable regression model that describes the association between a non-negative dependent variable and the independent variables when data are censored or truncated. Since the relative efficiency scores obtained from the Super-SBM-DEA model are a series of discrete variables that are censored from the left-hand side of 0 (Li and Zeng 2020 ). The Tobit model can effectively avoid the biased parameter estimation of the ordinary least squares method due to the truncation of the efficiency score and can mitigate the interference of heteroskedasticity (Li and Zeng 2020 ). So in this study, the Tobit model is chosen to analyze the factors influencing carbon emission efficiency, and the form is as follows:

where CEE is carbon emission efficiency; age represents the dependency ratio of the elderly population: and cons is the consumption structure. Since population aging promotes the upgrading of consumption structure related to the demand of the elderly, there is a synergistic effect between aging and consumption structure when considering its effect on carbon emission efficiency, so this study constructs an interaction term of age*cons and uses it to reflect the aging-related consumption trend. X represents a series of control variables, including regional economic development level ( pgdp ), foreign direct investment ( fdi ), technological innovation ( tech ), energy structure ( es ), urbanization level ( urz ), and human capital ( hc ).

Logically, the aging-related consumption trend should affect the carbon emission efficiency through the transmission mechanism of adjusting the industrial structure. In order to identify whether this transmission mechanism exists, this study constructs the following mediation effect model:

where M it is the mediation variable, including the industrial structure adjustment ( ind ), the proportion of high-tech industries ( ahti ), and the per capita output value of the health and resident services industry of the elderly population ( hrs ). When the estimated results of λ 3 and η are significant, the mediation effect is valid. If at least one of λ 3 and η is not significant, the existence of the mediation effect needs to be determined by Sobel’s test.

Variable description

Explained variables, carbon emission efficiency (cee).

The calculation results of the Super-SBM-DEA model based on undesirable output are shown in Fig.  1 . The provinces with the highest CEE are Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, corresponding to the three most economically developed regions in China. For the regional heterogeneity, the CEE of provinces in the eastern region is significantly higher than those in the central and western regions. The CEE of the western region is generally lower than the national average. It confirms the existence of a certain positive correlation between carbon emission efficiency and the level of regional economic development. Hebei, Shanxi, and Henan are heavy industrial regions with a high proportion of secondary industries, and their economic development is overly dependent on local natural resource exploitation and energy consumption, resulting in the CEE remaining at a low level.

figure 1

Box line plot of carbon emissions efficiency for 30 Chinese provinces, 2000–2019

Core explanatory variables

Population aging ( age ).

The elderly dependency ratio is chosen to measure the degree of aging in a region, expressed as the share of the population aged 65 and over in the working age (15–64) population (Lu et al. 2018 ).

Consumption structure ( cons )

This paper aims to measure the structure of aging-related consumption. The rise in the elderly will help to promote the development of enjoyment-based consumption to increase (Mao and Xu 2014 ; Qi and Liu 2020 ). In addition, as the elderly spend more time at home, household energy consumption will also rise (Yagita and Iwafune 2021 ). Therefore, this paper selects four types of consumption, namely health care expenditure, cultural, educational and recreational consumption, household equipment supplies and services consumption, and housing consumption, as consumption expenditure is closely related to the elderly population, and calculates their proportion of the overall expenditure to characterize the consumption structure.

Aging-related consumption trend ( age*cons )

This study characterizes the aging-related consumption trend by constructing an interaction term between population aging ( age ) and consumption structure ( cons ). As shown in Fig.  2 , the correlation analysis of the 30 provinces shows that the elderly dependency ratio is significant positively correlated with the consumption structure. It means that there is a synergistic effects between population aging and consumption structure, so a rise in the value of age*cons represents an upgrading of aging-related consumption demand, indicating a deepening of aging-related consumption trend.

figure 2

Correlation analysis between population aging and consumption structure

Mediation variables

Industrial structure adjustment ( ind ).

The supply-side transmission mechanism of the aging-related consumption trend is mainly reflected in the expansion of the tertiary services sector (Yu et al. 2023a , b ). This study uses the industrial structure upgrading index, i.e., the ratio of the tertiary sector to the secondary sector, to indicate the industrial structure adjustment.

The proportion of high-tech industries ( ahti )

The rise in the proportion of technology-intensive industries is the main feature of the upgrading of the low-carbon structure within the secondary industry (Zhang et al. 2023a , b ). Thus, the ratio of the main operating revenue of pharmaceutical and medical equipment manufacturing to the overall manufacturing output value is used to measure the proportion of aging-related high-tech industries according to the physiological demand characteristics of the elderly.

Per capita silver-haired services output for the elderly ( hrs )

Two major service industries closely related to the aging demands, the health and residential service sectors (Sungja et al. 2021 ), are chosen to measure the silver-haired services. Due to data limitation, we use the product of the number of urban employees in these sectors and the output value per person employed in the tertiary sector to approximate the annual output value of the silver-haired services.

Control variables

Gross regional product per capita (pgdp).

The actual GDP of each region is divided by the total population. Per capita GDP reflects the level of economic development of a region, which is closely related to carbon emission efficiency (Zheng et al. 2020a , b ).

Foreign direct investment (fdi)

The total import and export of goods by foreign-invested enterprises is selected as a proxy variable for FDI. According to the “pollution halo” (Tian et al. 2023 ) and “pollution paradise” (Jiang et al. 2022 ) hypotheses, there are two-sided effects of FDI on local environmental quality.

Technological innovation (tech)

Measured by the number of annual patent applications granted locally. Technological innovation is a direct and effective way to reduce carbon emissions per unit of output (Jin et al. 2022 ).

Energy structure (cs)

The proportion of coal consumption is used to measure the energy structure.

Urbanization rate (urz)

This is measured using the proportion of urban population in the total population. An increasing level of urbanization is closely linked to the transformation of the local industrial structure (Yao et al. 2023 ).

Human capital (hc)

This is measured by the years of education per capita in a region. Human capital is necessary to drive technological progress (Wu and Liu 2021 ), and its role in the restructuring of local industries and the improvement of carbon intensity cannot be ignored (Yu et al. 2023a , b ).

The raw data for all variables are obtained from China Statistical Yearbook, China Regional Economic Statistics Yearbook, China Energy Statistical Yearbook, China Labor Statistics Yearbook, and the statistical yearbooks of each province published in previous years. The descriptive analysis of the main variables is shown in Table 2 .

Results and discussion

Benchmark results.

As shown in Table 3 , the coefficient of age is significantly negative, indicating that the process of population aging reduces carbon emission efficiency, which is closely related to the characteristics of the scale of labor-intensive industries in China. However, the coefficient of the interaction term age*cons are significantly positive, and the value in the Tobit model (model (2) in Table 3 ) is 7.4123, indicating that the upgrading of the aging-related consumption demand is a key factor in improving the efficiency of carbon emission. The net effect of cons on carbon efficiency is negative. It is related to that the consumption structure measured in this paper includes consumption of household equipment and daily necessities and housing energy consumption. When considering the impact of consumption structure on carbon efficiency, the scale of residents’ consumption of industrial manufacturing products and household energy is larger than that of products in the tertiary sector.

Aging leads to a rise in the average age of the labor force, which is an important factor affecting the physical state and skill level of workers (Feyrer 2007 ). The older labor force will cause a decrease in unit labor productivity. In addition, aging leads to an increase in the difficulty and cost of learning new knowledge for workers (Börsch-Supan and Weiss 2016 ), making it difficult for them to adapt to the development requirements of high-technology sectors. The average quality of the workforce decreases, which is not conducive to productivity.

But on the demand side, aging-related consumption trend is directly related to the increase of the income level and consumption ability of the elderly (Addessi 2018 ). With the upgrading of the consumption structure, the market demand for aging products and services expands, which leads to the adjustment of industries (Hock and Weil 2012 ). The industrial sectors closely related to the demand of the elderly are mainly tertiary industries, whose energy consumption per unit of product production is lower compared to other industries, thus contributing to the improvement of carbon emission efficiency.

According to model (2) in Table 3 , the coefficients of pgdp , fdi , tech , and hc are significantly positive, implying that each of these control variables has a positive effect on the regional carbon emission efficiency improvement.

Regional economic development is conducive to the improvement of carbon emission efficiency. This is due to China’s transition from a “crude” economic growth model to an “intensive” sustainable development model (Gu et al. 2021 ; Yang et al. 2022 ), which has enabled the development of developed regions to gradually break away from their dependence on energy inputs (Zheng et al. 2020a , b ). As incomes rise, residents have the will and ability to consume products from the service sector, thus promoting the development of the tertiary sector.

The purpose of technological innovation activities by enterprises is to reduce marginal production costs, which are exogenously motivated by government policies on environmental regulation (Song et al. 2019 ). Thus enterprises’ R&D investments in science and technology are focused on improving cleaner production efficiency (Chen et al. 2022 ), bringing a reduction in the intensity of energy consumption in industrial economic activities.

Human capital accumulation can significantly promote a low-carbon economy. The reason is that highly educated workers have comprehensive and integrated skills (Sánchez-Romero et al. 2016 ), thus facilitating the development of technology and knowledge-intensive industries (Wu and Liu 2021 ).

This study also supports the “pollution halo” hypothesis, suggesting that foreign investment has a technology spillover effect (Tian et al. 2023 ). By opening up the market, foreign investment can bring advanced green production technologies to local enterprises (Wang and Luo 2020 ), thus leading to cleaner production efficiency in the local industry.

Mediation effects of industrial structure adjustment

The benchmark results verify that aging affects carbon efficiency on both the supply and demand sides. We further incorporate aging-induced industrial structure upgrading as a mediation variable in the analysis. As shown in Table 4 , the coefficient of age is significantly negative (model (2) in Table 4 ), while the coefficient of age*cons is significantly positive, indicating that the upgrading of the consumption demand due to population aging is an important way for it to promote the advanced adjustment of industrial structure. After controlling for the demand-side effects, the supply-side factors such as the rise in the average age of the workforce and the decline in labor productivity will hinder the upgrading of the industrial structure (Chen and Wang 2023 ; Feyrer 2007 ).

As shown in model (4) in Table 4 , the coefficient of the core explanatory variables did not change significantly after the addition of the mediation variable. The coefficient of the mediation variable ( ind ) is significantly positive, indicating that there is a significant mediation effect. The expansion of the scale of the tertiary sector contributes to the improvement of carbon emission efficiency in production by gradually replacing the excess capacity of the secondary sector. Therefore, the research hypothesis 2 is proved to be correct.

With the addition of the mediation variable, the value of age*cons decreases from 7.4123 to 4.8387, proving that the aging-related consumption trend is contributing to the improvement of the regional carbon emission efficiency level by promoting the advanced industrial structure. In the context of an aging population, the growing demand for aging-related consumption will lead to a rapid increase in products and services in the silver-haired sectors due to the transmission mechanism between the supply and demand structure (Shen et al. 2022 ; Wang and Yu 2020 ). Most of the silver-haired industries are oriented towards technological and professional skill inputs and are tertiary industries (Xu and Liu 2023 ). This means that regional economic growth is much less dependent on energy inputs, which is conducive to reducing energy consumption per unit of output and correspondingly improving the regional carbon emission efficiency.

Robustness tests

To test the robustness of the estimation results of the baseline regression, this section chooses to replace the measure of population aging by using the ratio of the population aged 65 years or older to the total population at the end of the year in each province. The results are shown in Table 5 . The estimated results and significance of the main explanatory variables remain largely consistent with those in Tables 3 and 4 , where age still has a significant negative effect on CEE , and the coefficient of age*cons remaining significantly positive. In the model (3), the effect of ind on CEE is still significantly positive, which are consistent with the previous results, indicating that aging-related consumption trend does contribute to the improvement of carbon emission efficiency by promoting the upgrading of industrial structure. Therefore, the robustness test confirms that the results of the baseline regression and mediation effects model are reliable.

Refined analysis of industrial structure adjustment based on specific aging-related industries

Considering the demand characteristics of the elderly, the scope of the silver-haired industry does not include all tertiary sectors, but rather focuses on the consumer services sector (Sungja et al. 2021 ), while also involving some technology-intensive manufacturing. Therefore, it is necessary to refine the discussion of the impact of population aging and the change in consumption structure on the development of these specific industries, and examine whether they have a mediation transmission mechanism of aging-related consumption trend affecting carbon emission efficiency. The results are shown in Table 6 .

First, the proportion of age-related high-tech industries ( ahti ) was used as a mediation variable to analyze the transmission mechanism between the aging-related consumption trend and carbon emission efficiency within the secondary sector. As shown in models (1) and (2) in Table 6 , although ahti is positively correlated with CEE , the effect of age*cons on ahti is insignificant, indicating that the deepening of aging does not significantly promote the development of high-technology industries. For Sobel test, the Z value is 1.3480 and P  = 0.1777, meaning the mediation effect is not significant.

Aging-related consumption trend did not significantly stimulate the growth of the medical-related high-tech industry. This is related to the fact that China’s medical high-tech industry is still dominated by national policies and government investment (Chu et al. 2017a , b ), and the market-oriented construction of related industries is still imperfect (Wang et al. 2015 ). The supply of pharmaceutical and medical products and services for specific elderly groups is relatively scarce, resulting in the inability to form effective feedback on the specific needs of the elderly.

Secondly, in order to verify the specific transmission mechanism of the aging-related consumption trend at the tertiary industry level, the per capita silver-haired services output for the elderly ( hrs ) is used as the mediation variable. The results of the empirical analysis are shown in models (3) and (4) in Table 6 . When hrs is used as the explanatory variable, the coefficient of age*cons is significantly positive, and hrs is significantly positively correlated with CEE , confirming that the mediation effect stands. The growth of the silver-haired service sectors helps to accelerate the low-carbon development of the industry.

The upgrading of the consumption structure due to population aging in the tertiary sector significantly contributes to the expansion of the output value of health and residential services and other services related to the demand of the elderly. With the deepening of China’s aging population, targeted silver-haired services are developing rapidly to meet the growing material and health needs of the elderly (Seoseonyoung et al. 2021 ), while positively influencing the upgrading of the industrial structure. It also reflects the initial effectiveness of the development of China’s silver hair industry (Sungja et al. 2021 ), which can meet the service needs of the elderly to a certain extent.

In model (4) in Table 6 , the coefficient of age*cons is significantly positive, with a decrease in absolute value compared to the baseline model (6.0412 < 7.4123), indicating that the growth of the healthcare sector and residential services, which are most closely linked to the elderly in the context of population aging, is the core transmission mechanism through which aging-related consumption trend contributes to the improvement of regional carbon efficiency. It can be concluded that the positive impact of aging-related consumption trend on industrial structure upgrading is mainly reflected in the growth and expansion of the health care and residential services (Liu and Peng 2016 ). The above results verify that research hypothesis 1 is valid.

Regional heterogeneity in aging-related consumption trend and mediation effects

Due to the imbalance in China’s regional economic development, there are significant disparities among the development levels of the three industries in different regions. There may be heterogeneity in the socio-economic impacts of population aging in regions with different levels of development. Therefore, this paper classifies the research sample into three sub-samples: eastern, central, and western region Footnote 2 for discussion.

As shown in models (1) and (2) in Table 7 , the results of the analysis of the core variables in the eastern region are basically consistent with the full sample. The coefficients of age*cons and ind are significant positive. There is a strong mediation effect of industrial structure adjustment. Models (3) and (4) in Table 7 show that the effects of age*cons on ind , as well as CEE in the central region, are not significant. Whether the mediation mechanism of ind holds needs to be determined using the Sobel test. The Z value of the Sobel test is 0.3883 and P  = 0.6978, which cannot reject the original hypothesis, so the mediation effect is not significant. The aging-related consumption trend in the western region has a positive impact on industrial structure upgrading (see in model (5) in Table 7 ), and the mediation transmission effect is stands (see in model (6) in Table 7 ).

For the eastern region, aging-related consumption trend can help promote the transformation of the local secondary industry to the tertiary industry, achieve the upgrading of the industrial structure, and, thus, significantly improve local carbon emission efficiency. It is closely related to the high standard of living in the eastern region with a well-developed social welfare guarantee system (Zhang 2017 ). Above the basic health needs, the elderly has the ability and conditions to pursue cultural and entertainment consumption on a spiritual level (Wang and Li 2021 ). Due to the solid economic base in the eastern region, the construction of the silver-haired industry is ahead of the country (Sungja et al. 2021 ), which can effectively support the aging-related consumption demand. Therefore, the consumption demand of the elderly can actually be translated into consumption behavior, driving the scale growth of related industries and promoting the low-carbon development of the economy.

There is no mediation effect of aging-related consumption trend and industrial structure adjustment in the central region. The main reason is related to the fact that the current dominant industries in the central region are still dominated by industrial raw material processing and equipment manufacturing (Zheng et al. 2020a , b ). In comparison, the silver-haired industry has not yet formed a certain market scale (Xu and Liu 2023 ). Due to the supply of products and services lagging behind the demand of the elderly, consumption demands of the elderly beyond health needs are hardly fulfilled (Sungja et al. 2021 ). The constraints on both the supply and demand sides make the transformation of aging-related consumption trend in the central region lack a positive interaction with sustainable economic development.

For the western region, although aging-related consumption trend has contributed to the upgrading of the industrial structure, the mediation transmission effect on the improvement of carbon emission efficiency is weak. The possible reason is the time period of this study coincides with that of the implementation of the Western Development Plan, and the results of the upgrading of the local industrial structure are more influenced by these national policies. The western region is rich in natural resources and has an important strategic ecological position (Dai et al. 2022 ); thus, the scale of secondary industry in the western region is less than in the central region (Zheng et al. 2020a , b ). And relying on a series of policy support and geographical advantages and reserves of scientific and educational resources, the aerospace, equipment manufacturing, and high-tech industries in the west have grown rapidly and become an important part of the tertiary industry (Wang et al. 2019 ). As for the elderly itself, the plight of the western and central regions is similar, that is the imbalance between the supply and demand of aging products (Xu and Liu 2023 ), and therefore the lack of diversity in aging consumer demand, which translates into very limited contribution to the development of a low-carbon economy.

In addition, the impact coefficient of ind in the eastern region is significantly higher than that of the central and western regions, reflecting that the advanced level of industry in the developed eastern region is substantially ahead of other less developed regions (Wu and Liu 2021 ). Environmental regulations in China have become increasingly rigorous in recent years, but there are obvious differences among regions (Mi et al. 2018 ). The environmental regulations in economically developed regions are more stringent (Peng 2020 ). The market access threshold for highly polluting and energy-consuming industries has been raised, making it impossible for new highly polluting enterprises to settle in the region (Lian et al. 2016 ). Meanwhile, developed regions are more able to attract high-level advanced talents (Long et al. 2022 ), forming a cluster of high-tech industries and tertiary services. Coupled with strong support for these industries in the eastern region, the secondary and tertiary industrial structure in the east is more inclined to cleanliness and technology (Zhang et al. 2022 ), and the marginal contribution of industrial restructuring is relatively greater.

The impact of ind in the central region on CEE is negative, and the absolute value of ind in the western region is smaller. On the one hand, the central and western regions are rich in energy endowments (Wang et al. 2022a , b ), such as natural gas and coal. Resource curse makes the economic growth of the central and western regions depend on energy input (Yang and Song 2019 ), which limits the development of local high-tech industries. On the other hand, the production technology advantage of the central and western regions is lacking (Chen et al. 2010 ). Due to the characteristics of resource distribution, local governments prefer to introduce resource-intensive industries (Wang and Chen 2020 ), resulting in the advanced upgrading of local industries being hindered, which is not conducive to the low-carbon transformation of economic growth.

Conclusion and implications

Based on panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2019, this study empirically investigates the impact of aging-related consumption trend on regional carbon emission efficiency and tests the transmission mechanism of industrial structure adjustment in this context. The main findings are as follows:

(1) the impact of aging-related consumption trend is conducive to promoting the carbon emission efficiency. (2) There is a mediation effect mechanism of industrial structure adjustment. The transformation of China’s aging-related consumption demand has significantly contributed to the adjustment of the advanced industrial structure, thus improving carbon emission efficiency. (3) The core industry closely linked to the demand for aging-related consumption is consumer services, which are mainly health and medical care and residential services. (4) The mediation effect of the industrial structure adjustment on the improvement of carbon emission efficiency in the eastern region is obvious, but that in the central and western regions is relatively weak. The aging demand in the central and western regions fails to form a positive interaction with the low-carbon development of the local economy.

Policy implications

The upgrading of consumption structure due to aging-related consumption trend can contribute to low-carbon economic growth by promoting the advanced industrial structure and improving the efficiency of regional carbon emissions. As China’s aging process continues to deepen, the government needs to ensure investment in the aging careers and build a sound system of social welfare guarantee to maintain the financial resources of the retired elderly. Chinese government should learn from the multi-level pension system models of developed countries, improving the legally mandatory public pension scheme to provide fundamental guarantee for the elderly in their twilight years. At the same time, enterprises should be urged to pay occupational pensions for their employees, and preferential policies should be introduced to encourage individuals to participate in personal pension savings plans. By broadening individual sources of income in their twilight years, elderly populations can be assured of a consumption capacity that matches their multiple demands.

On the supply side, it is necessary to continuously promote the construction of markets for the silver-haired industries and increase capital investment in corresponding industries such as healthcare and residential services, elderly service facilities, elderly living goods, elderly real estate, elderly tourism, and elderly education, and these industries are clean tertiary industries. The development of these industries will not only stimulate the consumption desire of the elderly but also enhance the level of industrial structure and contribute to sustainable economic development. However, the supply of aging services solely relying on the state’s financial resources is not sufficient, the development of aging-related industries requires diversified sources of funding, and the involvement of social capital can effectively fill the gap. By enriching the investment corpus, the competitive behavior of the market can be utilized to make the allocation of resources in the aging-related service sectors more reasonable.

More importantly, the aging health and service industries require knowledge in a variety of fields, such as medicine, pharmacy, nursing, and psychology. There is a need to accelerate the training of talents and promote the specialization of practitioners in aging-related industries. Government departments can cultivate a group of high-level integrated talents for aging health services by cooperating with universities in discipline construction. They can also fully mobilize the enthusiasm and creativity of professional and technical personnel through a sound talent evaluation and incentive mechanism. For irregularities in the aging market, the relevant departments still need to strengthen the legalization of aging-related industries and regulate the market order, such as improving the social insurance law and establishing a universal long-term care insurance system, using laws and regulations to provide support for the benign development of the silver-haired industries.

In addition, the eastern region is developing ahead of the central and western regions, so it is urgent to learn from the eastern experience to promote the industrial upgrading driving effect of the aging-related consumption trend in the central and western regions. Population aging is an irreversible trend; the central and western regions should focus on fostering the vitality of the silver-haired market while developing locally advantageous industries. Local governments should target the development of aging services and focus on the training of professionals, tax breaks, and subsidies for home purchase and residence are needed to enhance the willingness of professional talents to reside locally, following the example of the eastern region to accumulate capital for the development of the technical services through the retention of talents.

Limitations and prospects

While this study provides valuable insights, it is important to acknowledge its limitations and propose future research directions. Firstly, this study fails to discuss the effect of different levels of aging because of data missing. Significant differences in cognition and habits between older and younger seniors can lead to specific consumption tendencies, which have uncertain effects on industrial structure adjustment. Further quantification of elderly population number in different age groups is needed to clarify their impact on industrial low-carbon development. Secondly, due to data limitations, some specific service industries closely related to aging demands, such as the long-term care industry, were not considered in this study. But from a long-term perspective, the health care industry is a crucial growth point for the future development of the silver-haired services. Therefore, expanding the dataset to identify synergies between the growth of the elderly population and the development of the long-term care industry and its contribution to low-carbon economy is an important direction for future research.

Net energy heating value G j data from Appendix 4 of the China Energy Statistics Yearbook, carbon emission factor A j from IPCC, carbon oxidation factor B j from the National Climate Change Coordination Group Working Group III.

Eastern Region: Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Liaoning, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Shandong, Guangdong, Hainan. Central region: Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Hubei, Hunan. Western region: Guangxi, Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, Xinjiang.

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This research was funded by the National Key R&D Plan NQI “Research on Key Technologies for Sustainable Management and Improvement of Industrial Enterprises”, 2018YFF0215802.

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Ran Yu, Zhangchi Wang & Yan Li

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Yu, R., Wang, Z. & Li, Y. Impact of aging-related consumption trend on carbon emission efficiency in China: mediation effect model based on industrial structure adjustment. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30 , 114001–114016 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-30400-3

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Received : 02 August 2023

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Published : 19 October 2023

Issue Date : November 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-30400-3

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