Introduction
This interactive digital project guides users through a prototypical literature review.
By revealing their underlying structures, the project aims to demystify lit reviews and, in doing so, to empower both writers and researchers.
The literature review in brief
Whether they publish their findings in academic journals or books, writers seek to contribute to an existing body of scholarship or "scholarly conversation." They might introduce to this conversation original data or a reinterpretation of publicly available data or a new method of observation. In any case, they must demonstrate how their work offers something novel, important, and interesting. Frequently located in the introductory sections of academic articles and in the first or second chapters of books, literature reviews bring readers up to speed on what already has been said about a subject. Simultaneously, they identify important gaps and omissions in the existing scholarship. What, the lit review asks, have previous scholars found, what have they overlooked, and why do these oversights matter?
Ultimately, the literature review justifies the need for its authors' research. It suggests that the current scholarly conversation suffers shortcomings to which their study offers a vital corrective. The literature review, in other words, sets up what the authors' scholarship pays off.
Meanwhile, literature review writers' goals often dovetail with researchers' needs. The same qualities that distinguish a well-crafted literature review--exploration of existing scholarship, organization of schools of thought, identification of classic works and influential thinkers, etc.--make it for researchers 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 valuable 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, Castiglione and Infante's "Rational addiction and cultural goods: The case of the Italian theatregoer," was published in 2016 in 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 these fields. 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.
We attempted through our annotations to clarify as much of the content as we deemed necessary to follow Castiglione and Infante's argument. Nevertheless, if you remain confused or seek further explanation, then we encourage you to use the full-text article link, which we provide on the project's final page. 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 preceding cover page and this introduction through the following annotated journal article, concluding remarks, and 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 designed to reveal the literature review's underlying structure and organizational logic. 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
Paul Rosenstein for University of Richmond Library System