The literature review is a stepping stone in the process of writing a dissertation. It helps narrow down the scope of the research and allows the dissertation proposal itself to be concise.
Ariadne recommended the University of Toronto’s website as a good free source, and I also found a useful page from the University of Edinburgh (link in Bibliography).
Ariadne likened the research/dissertation process to being a cartographer as opposed to a map reader, a way of becoming more conscious of the study ground.
The literature review allows you to:
- Scan the literature to identify a set of useful and accredited sources
- Critically review the material
The point is to identify the building blocks of an interesting argument guided by your research topic/dissertation title. This can be thought of as the introduction to the thesis, reviewing what has gone before. The sources should be peer-reviewed academic papers and books from a recognised publisher, not wikipedia, student blogs or self-published books. It does not have to be every book published or even read on the topic, but those that contain the details relevant to the argument being developed. The literature review is not the argument itself.
The literature review is a piece of discursive prose, and should be organised along the theme(s) of the dissertation proposal. In comparison:
- Bibliography is a list of books
- Annotated bibliography also identifies the authors’ argument and it’s relevance to the student’s proposal
Note that OCA literature reviews are quite short so while they aim to go beyond the annotated bibliography this is not a bad place to start and the word count should be used carefully.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Level 3.1 Learning Log 
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