Skip to Main Content

Literature Reviews

Choosing a topic

Undergraduate students

Your lecturer will usually provide a topic for your literature review in a piece of assessment. However topics are often quite broad and you will need to develop a focus and title for your review.

Postgraduate students and researchers

You should have an idea of what you want to research when you applied to study. Once you have a supervisor allocated, they may suggest a working title that you should keep as close as possible to the spirit of.

 

You must ultimately have a focused topic to do a focused review.

  • Keep your working title in front of you so that you don't get distracted by fascinating but peripheral things. 
     
  • Work out your parameters, such as demographics (age, sex, income, education), geography, methodologies, currency of and types of resources
     
  • Do not change the focus of your review just because you find a couple of very useful and interesting papers in an alternative focus area!
     
  • However, it is possible that you will have to further refine your topic once you have started searching and have an idea of the scope of your topic.

We acknowledge the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and acknowledge Traditional Owners of the lands where our staff and students, live, learn and work.Acknowledgement of Country

Creative Commons Licence
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International License. Content from this Guide should be attributed to James Cook University Library. This does not apply to images, third party material (seek permission from the original owner) or any logos or insignia belonging to JCU or other bodies, which remain All Rights Reserved.

.