Introduction
This interactive digital project guides users through a prototypical literature review.
By revealing their structural conventions, the project aims to demystify lit reviews and, in doing so, to empower both writers and researchers.
The literature review as an information resource
Writers like Concetta Castiglione and Davide Infante, who coauthored the article on which this digital project is based, seek to contribute to an ongoing scholarly conversation. They might introduce to this conversation original data or a reinterpretation of existing data or new methods of observation. In any case, they must demonstrate how their work offers something novel, important, and interesting. Through literature reviews, which often are located in the introductory sections of academic articles and in the first or second chapters of books, writers attempt to bring their readers up to speed on what already has been said about the subject and to identify important gaps and omissions. What, the lit review asks, have previous scholars found and what have they overlooked?
The literature review writer's goals often dovetail neatly with the researcher's needs. The same qualities that distinguish a well-crafted literature review--exhaustive survey of existing scholarship, clear organization of schools of thought, etc.--make it for the researcher an invaluable reference source.
This digital project aims to advance your literature review fluency. The greater your fluency, the greater your ability both to harvest existing literature reviews for useful information and to compose lit reviews that demonstrate the merit of your original research.
Castiglione & Infante (2016)
The scholarly article in which our literature review appears, "," was published in 2016 by the Journal of Cultural Economics. As the journal title suggests, this article contributes to the subfield of cultural economics and to the broader discipline of economics. Accordingly, its literature review follows stylistic conventions (e.g., citation formatting, phrasings, etc.) unique to economics. Its structure, however, is representative of literature reviews across academia. The following digital project therefore should have value regardless of discipline.
We review only the first four pages of Castiglione and Infante's 28-page article. While the project concerns the literature review's form, even these few pages introduce economic theories with which you may be unfamiliar: habit formation, learning by consumption, rational addiction, etc. Grasping the structure of this literature review is not contingent on a thorough understanding of these concepts. We attempted through our annotations to clarify as much of the content as we deemed necessary to follow Castiglione and Infante's argument.
Nevertheless, we provide on the Credits page a full-text link in case you remain confused or seek greater clarification. Castiglione and Infante go on in the article to add considerable flesh to many of the bones that they introduce in the sections excerpted here.
Navigating the project
The project proceeds linearly from the previous cover page to this introduction, through the following annotated journal article, our concluding remarks, and the final Credits page. Follow the blue buttons located at the bottom of each page to advance through the project. You also may backtrack by clicking the narrow grey extensions attached to the left side of the blue buttons. Castiglione and Infante's article, which begins on the following page, contains extensive commentary. To expand the annotations, hover over the boxes that appear both beside and within the body of the text.
This digital project tolerates mobile devices, but it prefers laptops and desktops.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
University of Richmond Library