academic research reviews

How to write a superb literature review

Andy Tay is a freelance writer based in Singapore.

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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.

WENTING ZHAO: Be focused and avoid jargon

Assistant professor of chemical and biomedical engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

When I was a research student, review writing improved my understanding of the history of my field. I also learnt about unmet challenges in the field that triggered ideas.

For example, while writing my first review 1 as a PhD student, I was frustrated by how poorly we understood how cells actively sense, interact with and adapt to nanoparticles used in drug delivery. This experience motivated me to study how the surface properties of nanoparticles can be modified to enhance biological sensing. When I transitioned to my postdoctoral research, this question led me to discover the role of cell-membrane curvature, which led to publications and my current research focus. I wouldn’t have started in this area without writing that review.

Collection: Careers toolkit

A common problem for students writing their first reviews is being overly ambitious. When I wrote mine, I imagined producing a comprehensive summary of every single type of nanomaterial used in biological applications. It ended up becoming a colossal piece of work, with too many papers discussed and without a clear way to categorize them. We published the work in the end, but decided to limit the discussion strictly to nanoparticles for biological sensing, rather than covering how different nanomaterials are used in biology.

My advice to students is to accept that a review is unlike a textbook: it should offer a more focused discussion, and it’s OK to skip some topics so that you do not distract your readers. Students should also consider editorial deadlines, especially for invited reviews: make sure that the review’s scope is not so extensive that it delays the writing.

A good review should also avoid jargon and explain the basic concepts for someone who is new to the field. Although I trained as an engineer, I’m interested in biology, and my research is about developing nanomaterials to manipulate proteins at the cell membrane and how this can affect ageing and cancer. As an ‘outsider’, the reviews that I find most useful for these biological topics are those that speak to me in accessible scientific language.

Bozhi Tian likes to get a variety of perspectives into a review. Credit: Aleksander Prominski

BOZHI TIAN: Have a process and develop your style

Associate professor of chemistry, University of Chicago, Illinois.

In my lab, we start by asking: what is the purpose of this review? My reasons for writing one can include the chance to contribute insights to the scientific community and identify opportunities for my research. I also see review writing as a way to train early-career researchers in soft skills such as project management and leadership. This is especially true for lead authors, because they will learn to work with their co-authors to integrate the various sections into a piece with smooth transitions and no overlaps.

After we have identified the need and purpose of a review article, I will form a team from the researchers in my lab. I try to include students with different areas of expertise, because it is useful to get a variety of perspectives. For example, in the review ‘An atlas of nano-enabled neural interfaces’ 2 , we had authors with backgrounds in biophysics, neuroengineering, neurobiology and materials sciences focusing on different sections of the review.

After this, I will discuss an outline with my team. We go through multiple iterations to make sure that we have scanned the literature sufficiently and do not repeat discussions that have appeared in other reviews. It is also important that the outline is not decided by me alone: students often have fresh ideas that they can bring to the table. Once this is done, we proceed with the writing.

I often remind my students to imagine themselves as ‘artists of science’ and encourage them to develop how they write and present information. Adding more words isn’t always the best way: for example, I enjoy using tables to summarize research progress and suggest future research trajectories. I’ve also considered including short videos in our review papers to highlight key aspects of the work. I think this can increase readership and accessibility because these videos can be easily shared on social-media platforms.

ANKITA ANIRBAN: Timeliness and figures make a huge difference

Editor, Nature Reviews Physics .

One of my roles as a journal editor is to evaluate proposals for reviews. The best proposals are timely and clearly explain why readers should pay attention to the proposed topic.

It is not enough for a review to be a summary of the latest growth in the literature: the most interesting reviews instead provide a discussion about disagreements in the field.

Careers Collection: Publishing

Scientists often centre the story of their primary research papers around their figures — but when it comes to reviews, figures often take a secondary role. In my opinion, review figures are more important than most people think. One of my favourite review-style articles 3 presents a plot bringing together data from multiple research papers (many of which directly contradict each other). This is then used to identify broad trends and suggest underlying mechanisms that could explain all of the different conclusions.

An important role of a review article is to introduce researchers to a field. For this, schematic figures can be useful to illustrate the science being discussed, in much the same way as the first slide of a talk should. That is why, at Nature Reviews, we have in-house illustrators to assist authors. However, simplicity is key, and even without support from professional illustrators, researchers can still make use of many free drawing tools to enhance the value of their review figures.

Yoojin Choi recommends that researchers be open to critiques when writing reviews. Credit: Yoojin Choi

YOOJIN CHOI: Stay updated and be open to suggestions

Research assistant professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon.

I started writing the review ‘Biosynthesis of inorganic nanomaterials using microbial cells and bacteriophages’ 4 as a PhD student in 2018. It took me one year to write the first draft because I was working on the review alongside my PhD research and mostly on my own, with support from my adviser. It took a further year to complete the processes of peer review, revision and publication. During this time, many new papers and even competing reviews were published. To provide the most up-to-date and original review, I had to stay abreast of the literature. In my case, I made use of Google Scholar, which I set to send me daily updates of relevant literature based on key words.

Through my review-writing process, I also learnt to be more open to critiques to enhance the value and increase the readership of my work. Initially, my review was focused only on using microbial cells such as bacteria to produce nanomaterials, which was the subject of my PhD research. Bacteria such as these are known as biofactories: that is, organisms that produce biological material which can be modified to produce useful materials, such as magnetic nanoparticles for drug-delivery purposes.

Synchronized editing: the future of collaborative writing

However, when the first peer-review report came back, all three reviewers suggested expanding the review to cover another type of biofactory: bacteriophages. These are essentially viruses that infect bacteria, and they can also produce nanomaterials.

The feedback eventually led me to include a discussion of the differences between the various biofactories (bacteriophages, bacteria, fungi and microalgae) and their advantages and disadvantages. This turned out to be a great addition because it made the review more comprehensive.

Writing the review also led me to an idea about using nanomaterial-modified microorganisms to produce chemicals, which I’m still researching now.

PAULA MARTIN-GONZALEZ: Make good use of technology

PhD student, University of Cambridge, UK.

Just before the coronavirus lockdown, my PhD adviser and I decided to write a literature review discussing the integration of medical imaging with genomics to improve ovarian cancer management.

As I was researching the review, I noticed a trend in which some papers were consistently being cited by many other papers in the field. It was clear to me that those papers must be important, but as a new member of the field of integrated cancer biology, it was difficult to immediately find and read all of these ‘seminal papers’.

That was when I decided to code a small application to make my literature research more efficient. Using my code, users can enter a query, such as ‘ovarian cancer, computer tomography, radiomics’, and the application searches for all relevant literature archived in databases such as PubMed that feature these key words.

The code then identifies the relevant papers and creates a citation graph of all the references cited in the results of the search. The software highlights papers that have many citation relationships with other papers in the search, and could therefore be called seminal papers.

My code has substantially improved how I organize papers and has informed me of key publications and discoveries in my research field: something that would have taken more time and experience in the field otherwise. After I shared my code on GitHub, I received feedback that it can be daunting for researchers who are not used to coding. Consequently, I am hoping to build a more user-friendly interface in a form of a web page, akin to PubMed or Google Scholar, where users can simply input their queries to generate citation graphs.

Tools and techniques

Most reference managers on the market offer similar capabilities when it comes to providing a Microsoft Word plug-in and producing different citation styles. But depending on your working preferences, some might be more suitable than others.

Reference managers

Here is a comparison of the more popular collaborative writing tools, but there are other options, including Fidus Writer, Manuscript.io, Authorea and Stencila.

Collaborative writing tools

*Markdown and LaTex are code-based formatting languages favoured by physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists who code on a regular basis, and less popular in other disciplines such as biology and chemistry.

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.

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

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Review articles: purpose, process, and structure

• Published: 02 October 2017
• Volume 46 , pages 1–5, ( 2018 )

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• Robert W. Palmatier 1 ,
• Mark B. Houston 2 &
• John Hulland 3  

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Many research disciplines feature high-impact journals that are dedicated outlets for review papers (or review–conceptual combinations) (e.g., Academy of Management Review , Psychology Bulletin , Medicinal Research Reviews ). The rationale for such outlets is the premise that research integration and synthesis provides an important, and possibly even a required, step in the scientific process. Review papers tend to include both quantitative (i.e., meta-analytic, systematic reviews) and narrative or more qualitative components; together, they provide platforms for new conceptual frameworks, reveal inconsistencies in the extant body of research, synthesize diverse results, and generally give other scholars a “state-of-the-art” snapshot of a domain, often written by topic experts (Bem 1995 ). Many premier marketing journals publish meta-analytic review papers too, though authors often must overcome reviewers’ concerns that their contributions are limited due to the absence of “new data.” Furthermore, relatively few non-meta-analysis review papers appear in marketing journals, probably due to researchers’ perceptions that such papers have limited publication opportunities or their beliefs that the field lacks a research tradition or “respect” for such papers. In many cases, an editor must provide strong support to help such review papers navigate the review process. Yet, once published, such papers tend to be widely cited, suggesting that members of the field find them useful (see Bettencourt and Houston 2001 ).

In this editorial, we seek to address three topics relevant to review papers. First, we outline a case for their importance to the scientific process, by describing the purpose of review papers . Second, we detail the review paper editorial initiative conducted over the past two years by the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science ( JAMS ), focused on increasing the prevalence of review papers. Third, we describe a process and structure for systematic ( i.e. , non-meta-analytic) review papers , referring to Grewal et al. ( 2018 ) insights into parallel meta-analytic (effects estimation) review papers. (For some strong recent examples of marketing-related meta-analyses, see Knoll and Matthes 2017 ; Verma et al. 2016 ).

Purpose of review papers

In their most general form, review papers “are critical evaluations of material that has already been published,” some that include quantitative effects estimation (i.e., meta-analyses) and some that do not (i.e., systematic reviews) (Bem 1995 , p. 172). They carefully identify and synthesize relevant literature to evaluate a specific research question, substantive domain, theoretical approach, or methodology and thereby provide readers with a state-of-the-art understanding of the research topic. Many of these benefits are highlighted in Hanssens’ ( 2018 ) paper titled “The Value of Empirical Generalizations in Marketing,” published in this same issue of JAMS.

The purpose of and contributions associated with review papers can vary depending on their specific type and research question, but in general, they aim to

Resolve definitional ambiguities and outline the scope of the topic.

Provide an integrated, synthesized overview of the current state of knowledge.

Identify inconsistencies in prior results and potential explanations (e.g., moderators, mediators, measures, approaches).

Evaluate existing methodological approaches and unique insights.

Develop conceptual frameworks to reconcile and extend past research.

Describe research insights, existing gaps, and future research directions.

Not every review paper can offer all of these benefits, but this list represents their key contributions. To provide a sufficient contribution, a review paper needs to achieve three key standards. First, the research domain needs to be well suited for a review paper, such that a sufficient body of past research exists to make the integration and synthesis valuable—especially if extant research reveals theoretical inconsistences or heterogeneity in its effects. Second, the review paper must be well executed, with an appropriate literature collection and analysis techniques, sufficient breadth and depth of literature coverage, and a compelling writing style. Third, the manuscript must offer significant new insights based on its systematic comparison of multiple studies, rather than simply a “book report” that describes past research. This third, most critical standard is often the most difficult, especially for authors who have not “lived” with the research domain for many years, because achieving it requires drawing some non-obvious connections and insights from multiple studies and their many different aspects (e.g., context, method, measures). Typically, after the “review” portion of the paper has been completed, the authors must spend many more months identifying the connections to uncover incremental insights, each of which takes time to detail and explicate.

The increasing methodological rigor and technical sophistication of many marketing studies also means that they often focus on smaller problems with fewer constructs. By synthesizing these piecemeal findings, reconciling conflicting evidence, and drawing a “big picture,” meta-analyses and systematic review papers become indispensable to our comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon, among both academic and practitioner communities. Thus, good review papers provide a solid platform for future research, in the reviewed domain but also in other areas, in that researchers can use a good review paper to learn about and extend key insights to new areas.

This domain extension, outside of the core area being reviewed, is one of the key benefits of review papers that often gets overlooked. Yet it also is becoming ever more important with the expanding breadth of marketing (e.g., econometric modeling, finance, strategic management, applied psychology, sociology) and the increasing velocity in the accumulation of marketing knowledge (e.g., digital marketing, social media, big data). Against this backdrop, systematic review papers and meta-analyses help academics and interested managers keep track of research findings that fall outside their main area of specialization.

JAMS’ review paper editorial initiative

With a strong belief in the importance of review papers, the editorial team of JAMS has purposely sought out leading scholars to provide substantive review papers, both meta-analysis and systematic, for publication in JAMS . Many of the scholars approached have voiced concerns about the risk of such endeavors, due to the lack of alternative outlets for these types of papers. Therefore, we have instituted a unique process, in which the authors develop a detailed outline of their paper, key tables and figures, and a description of their literature review process. On the basis of this outline, we grant assurances that the contribution hurdle will not be an issue for publication in JAMS , as long as the authors execute the proposed outline as written. Each paper still goes through the normal review process and must meet all publication quality standards, of course. In many cases, an Area Editor takes an active role to help ensure that each paper provides sufficient insights, as required for a high-quality review paper. This process gives the author team confidence to invest effort in the process. An analysis of the marketing journals in the Financial Times (FT 50) journal list for the past five years (2012–2016) shows that JAMS has become the most common outlet for these papers, publishing 31% of all review papers that appeared in the top six marketing journals.

As a next step in positioning JAMS as a receptive marketing outlet for review papers, we are conducting a Thought Leaders Conference on Generalizations in Marketing: Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses , with a corresponding special issue (see www.springer.com/jams ). We will continue our process of seeking out review papers as an editorial strategy in areas that could be advanced by the integration and synthesis of extant research. We expect that, ultimately, such efforts will become unnecessary, as authors initiate review papers on topics of their own choosing to submit them to JAMS . In the past two years, JAMS already has increased the number of papers it publishes annually, from just over 40 to around 60 papers per year; this growth has provided “space” for 8–10 review papers per year, reflecting our editorial target.

Consistent with JAMS ’ overall focus on managerially relevant and strategy-focused topics, all review papers should reflect this emphasis. For example, the domains, theories, and methods reviewed need to have some application to past or emerging managerial research. A good rule of thumb is that the substantive domain, theory, or method should attract the attention of readers of JAMS .

The efforts of multiple editors and Area Editors in turn have generated a body of review papers that can serve as useful examples of the different types and approaches that JAMS has published.

Domain-based review papers

Domain-based review papers review, synthetize, and extend a body of literature in the same substantive domain. For example, in “The Role of Privacy in Marketing” (Martin and Murphy 2017 ), the authors identify and define various privacy-related constructs that have appeared in recent literature. Then they examine the different theoretical perspectives brought to bear on privacy topics related to consumers and organizations, including ethical and legal perspectives. These foundations lead in to their systematic review of privacy-related articles over a clearly defined date range, from which they extract key insights from each study. This exercise of synthesizing diverse perspectives allows these authors to describe state-of-the-art knowledge regarding privacy in marketing and identify useful paths for research. Similarly, a new paper by Cleeren et al. ( 2017 ), “Marketing Research on Product-Harm Crises: A Review, Managerial Implications, and an Agenda for Future Research,” provides a rich systematic review, synthesizes extant research, and points the way forward for scholars who are interested in issues related to defective or dangerous market offerings.

Theory-based review papers

Theory-based review papers review, synthetize, and extend a body of literature that uses the same underlying theory. For example, Rindfleisch and Heide’s ( 1997 ) classic review of research in marketing using transaction cost economics has been cited more than 2200 times, with a significant impact on applications of the theory to the discipline in the past 20 years. A recent paper in JAMS with similar intent, which could serve as a helpful model, focuses on “Resource-Based Theory in Marketing” (Kozlenkova et al. 2014 ). The article dives deeply into a description of the theory and its underlying assumptions, then organizes a systematic review of relevant literature according to various perspectives through which the theory has been applied in marketing. The authors conclude by identifying topical domains in marketing that might benefit from additional applications of the theory (e.g., marketing exchange), as well as related theories that could be integrated meaningfully with insights from the resource-based theory.

Method-based review papers

Method-based review papers review, synthetize, and extend a body of literature that uses the same underlying method. For example, in “Event Study Methodology in the Marketing Literature: An Overview” (Sorescu et al. 2017 ), the authors identify published studies in marketing that use an event study methodology. After a brief review of the theoretical foundations of event studies, they describe in detail the key design considerations associated with this method. The article then provides a roadmap for conducting event studies and compares this approach with a stock market returns analysis. The authors finish with a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the event study method, which in turn suggests three main areas for further research. Similarly, “Discriminant Validity Testing in Marketing: An Analysis, Causes for Concern, and Proposed Remedies” (Voorhies et al. 2016 ) systematically reviews existing approaches for assessing discriminant validity in marketing contexts, then uses Monte Carlo simulation to determine which tests are most effective.

Our long-term editorial strategy is to make sure JAMS becomes and remains a well-recognized outlet for both meta-analysis and systematic managerial review papers in marketing. Ideally, review papers would come to represent 10%–20% of the papers published by the journal.

Process and structure for review papers

In this section, we review the process and typical structure of a systematic review paper, which lacks any long or established tradition in marketing research. The article by Grewal et al. ( 2018 ) provides a summary of effects-focused review papers (i.e., meta-analyses), so we do not discuss them in detail here.

Systematic literature review process

Some review papers submitted to journals take a “narrative” approach. They discuss current knowledge about a research domain, yet they often are flawed, in that they lack criteria for article inclusion (or, more accurately, article exclusion), fail to discuss the methodology used to evaluate included articles, and avoid critical assessment of the field (Barczak 2017 ). Such reviews tend to be purely descriptive, with little lasting impact.

In contrast, a systematic literature review aims to “comprehensively locate and synthesize research that bears on a particular question, using organized, transparent, and replicable procedures at each step in the process” (Littell et al. 2008 , p. 1). Littell et al. describe six key steps in the systematic review process. The extent to which each step is emphasized varies by paper, but all are important components of the review.

Topic formulation . The author sets out clear objectives for the review and articulates the specific research questions or hypotheses that will be investigated.

Study design . The author specifies relevant problems, populations, constructs, and settings of interest. The aim is to define explicit criteria that can be used to assess whether any particular study should be included in or excluded from the review. Furthermore, it is important to develop a protocol in advance that describes the procedures and methods to be used to evaluate published work.

Sampling . The aim in this third step is to identify all potentially relevant studies, including both published and unpublished research. To this end, the author must first define the sampling unit to be used in the review (e.g., individual, strategic business unit) and then develop an appropriate sampling plan.

Data collection . By retrieving the potentially relevant studies identified in the third step, the author can determine whether each study meets the eligibility requirements set out in the second step. For studies deemed acceptable, the data are extracted from each study and entered into standardized templates. These templates should be based on the protocols established in step 2.

Data analysis . The degree and nature of the analyses used to describe and examine the collected data vary widely by review. Purely descriptive analysis is useful as a starting point but rarely is sufficient on its own. The examination of trends, clusters of ideas, and multivariate relationships among constructs helps flesh out a deeper understanding of the domain. For example, both Hult ( 2015 ) and Huber et al. ( 2014 ) use bibliometric approaches (e.g., examine citation data using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis techniques) to identify emerging versus declining themes in the broad field of marketing.

Reporting . Three key aspects of this final step are common across systematic reviews. First, the results from the fifth step need to be presented, clearly and compellingly, using narratives, tables, and figures. Second, core results that emerge from the review must be interpreted and discussed by the author. These revelatory insights should reflect a deeper understanding of the topic being investigated, not simply a regurgitation of well-established knowledge. Third, the author needs to describe the implications of these unique insights for both future research and managerial practice.

A new paper by Watson et al. ( 2017 ), “Harnessing Difference: A Capability-Based Framework for Stakeholder Engagement in Environmental Innovation,” provides a good example of a systematic review, starting with a cohesive conceptual framework that helps establish the boundaries of the review while also identifying core constructs and their relationships. The article then explicitly describes the procedures used to search for potentially relevant papers and clearly sets out criteria for study inclusion or exclusion. Next, a detailed discussion of core elements in the framework weaves published research findings into the exposition. The paper ends with a presentation of key implications and suggestions for the next steps. Similarly, “Marketing Survey Research Best Practices: Evidence and Recommendations from a Review of JAMS Articles” (Hulland et al. 2017 ) systematically reviews published marketing studies that use survey techniques, describes recent trends, and suggests best practices. In their review, Hulland et al. examine the entire population of survey papers published in JAMS over a ten-year span, relying on an extensive standardized data template to facilitate their subsequent data analysis.

Structure of systematic review papers

There is no cookie-cutter recipe for the exact structure of a useful systematic review paper; the final structure depends on the authors’ insights and intended points of emphasis. However, several key components are likely integral to a paper’s ability to contribute.

Depth and rigor

Systematic review papers must avoid falling in to two potential “ditches.” The first ditch threatens when the paper fails to demonstrate that a systematic approach was used for selecting articles for inclusion and capturing their insights. If a reader gets the impression that the author has cherry-picked only articles that fit some preset notion or failed to be thorough enough, without including articles that make significant contributions to the field, the paper will be consigned to the proverbial side of the road when it comes to the discipline’s attention.

Authors that fall into the other ditch present a thorough, complete overview that offers only a mind-numbing recitation, without evident organization, synthesis, or critical evaluation. Although comprehensive, such a paper is more of an index than a useful review. The reviewed articles must be grouped in a meaningful way to guide the reader toward a better understanding of the focal phenomenon and provide a foundation for insights about future research directions. Some scholars organize research by scholarly perspectives (e.g., the psychology of privacy, the economics of privacy; Martin and Murphy 2017 ); others classify the chosen articles by objective research aspects (e.g., empirical setting, research design, conceptual frameworks; Cleeren et al. 2017 ). The method of organization chosen must allow the author to capture the complexity of the underlying phenomenon (e.g., including temporal or evolutionary aspects, if relevant).

Replicability

Processes for the identification and inclusion of research articles should be described in sufficient detail, such that an interested reader could replicate the procedure. The procedures used to analyze chosen articles and extract their empirical findings and/or key takeaways should be described with similar specificity and detail.

We already have noted the potential usefulness of well-done review papers. Some scholars always are new to the field or domain in question, so review papers also need to help them gain foundational knowledge. Key constructs, definitions, assumptions, and theories should be laid out clearly (for which purpose summary tables are extremely helpful). An integrated conceptual model can be useful to organize cited works. Most scholars integrate the knowledge they gain from reading the review paper into their plans for future research, so it is also critical that review papers clearly lay out implications (and specific directions) for research. Ideally, readers will come away from a review article filled with enthusiasm about ways they might contribute to the ongoing development of the field.

Helpful format

Because such a large body of research is being synthesized in most review papers, simply reading through the list of included studies can be exhausting for readers. We cannot overstate the importance of tables and figures in review papers, used in conjunction with meaningful headings and subheadings. Vast literature review tables often are essential, but they must be organized in a way that makes their insights digestible to the reader; in some cases, a sequence of more focused tables may be better than a single, comprehensive table.

In summary, articles that review extant research in a domain (topic, theory, or method) can be incredibly useful to the scientific progress of our field. Whether integrating the insights from extant research through a meta-analysis or synthesizing them through a systematic assessment, the promised benefits are similar. Both formats provide readers with a useful overview of knowledge about the focal phenomenon, as well as insights on key dilemmas and conflicting findings that suggest future research directions. Thus, the editorial team at JAMS encourages scholars to continue to invest the time and effort to construct thoughtful review papers.

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Palmatier, R.W., Houston, M.B. & Hulland, J. Review articles: purpose, process, and structure. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 46 , 1–5 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-017-0563-4

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Published : 02 October 2017

Issue Date : January 2018

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-017-0563-4

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Approaching literature review for academic purposes: The Literature Review Checklist

Debora f.b. leite.

I Departamento de Ginecologia e Obstetricia, Faculdade de Ciencias Medicas, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, SP, BR

II Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Pernambuco, PE, BR

III Hospital das Clinicas, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Pernambuco, PE, BR

Maria Auxiliadora Soares Padilha

Jose g. cecatti.

A sophisticated literature review (LR) can result in a robust dissertation/thesis by scrutinizing the main problem examined by the academic study; anticipating research hypotheses, methods and results; and maintaining the interest of the audience in how the dissertation/thesis will provide solutions for the current gaps in a particular field. Unfortunately, little guidance is available on elaborating LRs, and writing an LR chapter is not a linear process. An LR translates students’ abilities in information literacy, the language domain, and critical writing. Students in postgraduate programs should be systematically trained in these skills. Therefore, this paper discusses the purposes of LRs in dissertations and theses. Second, the paper considers five steps for developing a review: defining the main topic, searching the literature, analyzing the results, writing the review and reflecting on the writing. Ultimately, this study proposes a twelve-item LR checklist. By clearly stating the desired achievements, this checklist allows Masters and Ph.D. students to continuously assess their own progress in elaborating an LR. Institutions aiming to strengthen students’ necessary skills in critical academic writing should also use this tool.

INTRODUCTION

Writing the literature review (LR) is often viewed as a difficult task that can be a point of writer’s block and procrastination ( 1 ) in postgraduate life. Disagreements on the definitions or classifications of LRs ( 2 ) may confuse students about their purpose and scope, as well as how to perform an LR. Interestingly, at many universities, the LR is still an important element in any academic work, despite the more recent trend of producing scientific articles rather than classical theses.

The LR is not an isolated section of the thesis/dissertation or a copy of the background section of a research proposal. It identifies the state-of-the-art knowledge in a particular field, clarifies information that is already known, elucidates implications of the problem being analyzed, links theory and practice ( 3 - 5 ), highlights gaps in the current literature, and places the dissertation/thesis within the research agenda of that field. Additionally, by writing the LR, postgraduate students will comprehend the structure of the subject and elaborate on their cognitive connections ( 3 ) while analyzing and synthesizing data with increasing maturity.

At the same time, the LR transforms the student and hints at the contents of other chapters for the reader. First, the LR explains the research question; second, it supports the hypothesis, objectives, and methods of the research project; and finally, it facilitates a description of the student’s interpretation of the results and his/her conclusions. For scholars, the LR is an introductory chapter ( 6 ). If it is well written, it demonstrates the student’s understanding of and maturity in a particular topic. A sound and sophisticated LR can indicate a robust dissertation/thesis.

A consensus on the best method to elaborate a dissertation/thesis has not been achieved. The LR can be a distinct chapter or included in different sections; it can be part of the introduction chapter, part of each research topic, or part of each published paper ( 7 ). However, scholars view the LR as an integral part of the main body of an academic work because it is intrinsically connected to other sections ( Figure 1 ) and is frequently present. The structure of the LR depends on the conventions of a particular discipline, the rules of the department, and the student’s and supervisor’s areas of expertise, needs and interests.

Interestingly, many postgraduate students choose to submit their LR to peer-reviewed journals. As LRs are critical evaluations of current knowledge, they are indeed publishable material, even in the form of narrative or systematic reviews. However, systematic reviews have specific patterns 1 ( 8 ) that may not entirely fit with the questions posed in the dissertation/thesis. Additionally, the scope of a systematic review may be too narrow, and the strict criteria for study inclusion may omit important information from the dissertation/thesis. Therefore, this essay discusses the definition of an LR is and methods to develop an LR in the context of an academic dissertation/thesis. Finally, we suggest a checklist to evaluate an LR.

WHAT IS A LITERATURE REVIEW IN A THESIS?

Conducting research and writing a dissertation/thesis translates rational thinking and enthusiasm ( 9 ). While a strong body of literature that instructs students on research methodology, data analysis and writing scientific papers exists, little guidance on performing LRs is available. The LR is a unique opportunity to assess and contrast various arguments and theories, not just summarize them. The research results should not be discussed within the LR, but the postgraduate student tends to write a comprehensive LR while reflecting on his or her own findings ( 10 ).

Many people believe that writing an LR is a lonely and linear process. Supervisors or the institutions assume that the Ph.D. student has mastered the relevant techniques and vocabulary associated with his/her subject and conducts a self-reflection about previously published findings. Indeed, while elaborating the LR, the student should aggregate diverse skills, which mainly rely on his/her own commitment to mastering them. Thus, less supervision should be required ( 11 ). However, the parameters described above might not currently be the case for many students ( 11 , 12 ), and the lack of formal and systematic training on writing LRs is an important concern ( 11 ).

An institutional environment devoted to active learning will provide students the opportunity to continuously reflect on LRs, which will form a dialogue between the postgraduate student and the current literature in a particular field ( 13 ). Postgraduate students will be interpreting studies by other researchers, and, according to Hart (1998) ( 3 ), the outcomes of the LR in a dissertation/thesis include the following:

• To identify what research has been performed and what topics require further investigation in a particular field of knowledge;
• To determine the context of the problem;
• To recognize the main methodologies and techniques that have been used in the past;
• To place the current research project within the historical, methodological and theoretical context of a particular field;
• To identify significant aspects of the topic;
• To elucidate the implications of the topic;
• To offer an alternative perspective;
• To discern how the studied subject is structured;
• To improve the student’s subject vocabulary in a particular field; and
• To characterize the links between theory and practice.

A sound LR translates the postgraduate student’s expertise in academic and scientific writing: it expresses his/her level of comfort with synthesizing ideas ( 11 ). The LR reveals how well the postgraduate student has proceeded in three domains: an effective literature search, the language domain, and critical writing.

Effective literature search

All students should be trained in gathering appropriate data for specific purposes, and information literacy skills are a cornerstone. These skills are defined as “an individual’s ability to know when they need information, to identify information that can help them address the issue or problem at hand, and to locate, evaluate, and use that information effectively” ( 14 ). Librarian support is of vital importance in coaching the appropriate use of Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT) and other tools for highly efficient literature searches (e.g., quotation marks and truncation), as is the appropriate management of electronic databases.

Language domain

Academic writing must be concise and precise: unnecessary words distract the reader from the essential content ( 15 ). In this context, reading about issues distant from the research topic ( 16 ) may increase students’ general vocabulary and familiarity with grammar. Ultimately, reading diverse materials facilitates and encourages the writing process itself.

Critical writing

Critical judgment includes critical reading, thinking and writing. It supposes a student’s analytical reflection about what he/she has read. The student should delineate the basic elements of the topic, characterize the most relevant claims, identify relationships, and finally contrast those relationships ( 17 ). Each scientific document highlights the perspective of the author, and students will become more confident in judging the supporting evidence and underlying premises of a study and constructing their own counterargument as they read more articles. A paucity of integration or contradictory perspectives indicates lower levels of cognitive complexity ( 12 ).

Thus, while elaborating an LR, the postgraduate student should achieve the highest category of Bloom’s cognitive skills: evaluation ( 12 ). The writer should not only summarize data and understand each topic but also be able to make judgments based on objective criteria, compare resources and findings, identify discrepancies due to methodology, and construct his/her own argument ( 12 ). As a result, the student will be sufficiently confident to show his/her own voice .

Writing a consistent LR is an intense and complex activity that reveals the training and long-lasting academic skills of a writer. It is not a lonely or linear process. However, students are unlikely to be prepared to write an LR if they have not mastered the aforementioned domains ( 10 ). An institutional environment that supports student learning is crucial.

Different institutions employ distinct methods to promote students’ learning processes. First, many universities propose modules to develop behind the scenes activities that enhance self-reflection about general skills (e.g., the skills we have mastered and the skills we need to develop further), behaviors that should be incorporated (e.g., self-criticism about one’s own thoughts), and each student’s role in the advancement of his/her field. Lectures or workshops about LRs themselves are useful because they describe the purposes of the LR and how it fits into the whole picture of a student’s work. These activities may explain what type of discussion an LR must involve, the importance of defining the correct scope, the reasons to include a particular resource, and the main role of critical reading.

Some pedagogic services that promote a continuous improvement in study and academic skills are equally important. Examples include workshops about time management, the accomplishment of personal objectives, active learning, and foreign languages for nonnative speakers. Additionally, opportunities to converse with other students promotes an awareness of others’ experiences and difficulties. Ultimately, the supervisor’s role in providing feedback and setting deadlines is crucial in developing students’ abilities and in strengthening students’ writing quality ( 12 ).

HOW SHOULD A LITERATURE REVIEW BE DEVELOPED?

A consensus on the appropriate method for elaborating an LR is not available, but four main steps are generally accepted: defining the main topic, searching the literature, analyzing the results, and writing ( 6 ). We suggest a fifth step: reflecting on the information that has been written in previous publications ( Figure 2 ).

First step: Defining the main topic

Planning an LR is directly linked to the research main question of the thesis and occurs in parallel to students’ training in the three domains discussed above. The planning stage helps organize ideas, delimit the scope of the LR ( 11 ), and avoid the wasting of time in the process. Planning includes the following steps:

• Reflecting on the scope of the LR: postgraduate students will have assumptions about what material must be addressed and what information is not essential to an LR ( 13 , 18 ). Cooper’s Taxonomy of Literature Reviews 2 systematizes the writing process through six characteristics and nonmutually exclusive categories. The focus refers to the reviewer’s most important points of interest, while the goals concern what students want to achieve with the LR. The perspective assumes answers to the student’s own view of the LR and how he/she presents a particular issue. The coverage defines how comprehensive the student is in presenting the literature, and the organization determines the sequence of arguments. The audience is defined as the group for whom the LR is written.
• Designating sections and subsections: Headings and subheadings should be specific, explanatory and have a coherent sequence throughout the text ( 4 ). They simulate an inverted pyramid, with an increasing level of reflection and depth of argument.
• Identifying keywords: The relevant keywords for each LR section should be listed to guide the literature search. This list should mirror what Hart (1998) ( 3 ) advocates as subject vocabulary . The keywords will also be useful when the student is writing the LR since they guide the reader through the text.
• Delineating the time interval and language of documents to be retrieved in the second step. The most recently published documents should be considered, but relevant texts published before a predefined cutoff year can be included if they are classic documents in that field. Extra care should be employed when translating documents.

Second step: Searching the literature

The ability to gather adequate information from the literature must be addressed in postgraduate programs. Librarian support is important, particularly for accessing difficult texts. This step comprises the following components:

• Searching the literature itself: This process consists of defining which databases (electronic or dissertation/thesis repositories), official documents, and books will be searched and then actively conducting the search. Information literacy skills have a central role in this stage. While searching electronic databases, controlled vocabulary (e.g., Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH, for the PubMed database) or specific standardized syntax rules may need to be applied.

In addition, two other approaches are suggested. First, a review of the reference list of each document might be useful for identifying relevant publications to be included and important opinions to be assessed. This step is also relevant for referencing the original studies and leading authors in that field. Moreover, students can directly contact the experts on a particular topic to consult with them regarding their experience or use them as a source of additional unpublished documents.

Before submitting a dissertation/thesis, the electronic search strategy should be repeated. This process will ensure that the most recently published papers will be considered in the LR.

• Selecting documents for inclusion: Generally, the most recent literature will be included in the form of published peer-reviewed papers. Assess books and unpublished material, such as conference abstracts, academic texts and government reports, are also important to assess since the gray literature also offers valuable information. However, since these materials are not peer-reviewed, we recommend that they are carefully added to the LR.

This task is an important exercise in time management. First, students should read the title and abstract to understand whether that document suits their purposes, addresses the research question, and helps develop the topic of interest. Then, they should scan the full text, determine how it is structured, group it with similar documents, and verify whether other arguments might be considered ( 5 ).

Third step: Analyzing the results

Critical reading and thinking skills are important in this step. This step consists of the following components:

• Reading documents: The student may read various texts in depth according to LR sections and subsections ( defining the main topic ), which is not a passive activity ( 1 ). Some questions should be asked to practice critical analysis skills, as listed below. Is the research question evident and articulated with previous knowledge? What are the authors’ research goals and theoretical orientations, and how do they interact? Are the authors’ claims related to other scholars’ research? Do the authors consider different perspectives? Was the research project designed and conducted properly? Are the results and discussion plausible, and are they consistent with the research objectives and methodology? What are the strengths and limitations of this work? How do the authors support their findings? How does this work contribute to the current research topic? ( 1 , 19 )
• Taking notes: Students who systematically take notes on each document are more readily able to establish similarities or differences with other documents and to highlight personal observations. This approach reinforces the student’s ideas about the next step and helps develop his/her own academic voice ( 1 , 13 ). Voice recognition software ( 16 ), mind maps ( 5 ), flowcharts, tables, spreadsheets, personal comments on the referenced texts, and note-taking apps are all available tools for managing these observations, and the student him/herself should use the tool that best improves his/her learning. Additionally, when a student is considering submitting an LR to a peer-reviewed journal, notes should be taken on the activities performed in all five steps to ensure that they are able to be replicated.

Fourth step: Writing

The recognition of when a student is able and ready to write after a sufficient period of reading and thinking is likely a difficult task. Some students can produce a review in a single long work session. However, as discussed above, writing is not a linear process, and students do not need to write LRs according to a specific sequence of sections. Writing an LR is a time-consuming task, and some scholars believe that a period of at least six months is sufficient ( 6 ). An LR, and academic writing in general, expresses the writer’s proper thoughts, conclusions about others’ work ( 6 , 10 , 13 , 16 ), and decisions about methods to progress in the chosen field of knowledge. Thus, each student is expected to present a different learning and writing trajectory.

In this step, writing methods should be considered; then, editing, citing and correct referencing should complete this stage, at least temporarily. Freewriting techniques may be a good starting point for brainstorming ideas and improving the understanding of the information that has been read ( 1 ). Students should consider the following parameters when creating an agenda for writing the LR: two-hour writing blocks (at minimum), with prespecified tasks that are possible to complete in one section; short (minutes) and long breaks (days or weeks) to allow sufficient time for mental rest and reflection; and short- and long-term goals to motivate the writing itself ( 20 ). With increasing experience, this scheme can vary widely, and it is not a straightforward rule. Importantly, each discipline has a different way of writing ( 1 ), and each department has its own preferred styles for citations and references.

Fifth step: Reflecting on the writing

In this step, the postgraduate student should ask him/herself the same questions as in the analyzing the results step, which can take more time than anticipated. Ambiguities, repeated ideas, and a lack of coherence may not be noted when the student is immersed in the writing task for long periods. The whole effort will likely be a work in progress, and continuous refinements in the written material will occur once the writing process has begun.

LITERATURE REVIEW CHECKLIST

In contrast to review papers, the LR of a dissertation/thesis should not be a standalone piece or work. Instead, it should present the student as a scholar and should maintain the interest of the audience in how that dissertation/thesis will provide solutions for the current gaps in a particular field.

A checklist for evaluating an LR is convenient for students’ continuous academic development and research transparency: it clearly states the desired achievements for the LR of a dissertation/thesis. Here, we present an LR checklist developed from an LR scoring rubric ( 11 ). For a critical analysis of an LR, we maintain the five categories but offer twelve criteria that are not scaled ( Figure 3 ). The criteria all have the same importance and are not mutually exclusive.

First category: Coverage

1. justified criteria exist for the inclusion and exclusion of literature in the review.

This criterion builds on the main topic and areas covered by the LR ( 18 ). While experts may be confident in retrieving and selecting literature, postgraduate students must convince their audience about the adequacy of their search strategy and their reasons for intentionally selecting what material to cover ( 11 ). References from different fields of knowledge provide distinct perspective, but narrowing the scope of coverage may be important in areas with a large body of existing knowledge.

Second category: Synthesis

2. a critical examination of the state of the field exists.

A critical examination is an assessment of distinct aspects in the field ( 1 ) along with a constructive argument. It is not a negative critique but an expression of the student’s understanding of how other scholars have added to the topic ( 1 ), and the student should analyze and contextualize contradictory statements. A writer’s personal bias (beliefs or political involvement) have been shown to influence the structure and writing of a document; therefore, the cultural and paradigmatic background guide how the theories are revised and presented ( 13 ). However, an honest judgment is important when considering different perspectives.

3. The topic or problem is clearly placed in the context of the broader scholarly literature

The broader scholarly literature should be related to the chosen main topic for the LR ( how to develop the literature review section). The LR can cover the literature from one or more disciplines, depending on its scope, but it should always offer a new perspective. In addition, students should be careful in citing and referencing previous publications. As a rule, original studies and primary references should generally be included. Systematic and narrative reviews present summarized data, and it may be important to cite them, particularly for issues that should be understood but do not require a detailed description. Similarly, quotations highlight the exact statement from another publication. However, excessive referencing may disclose lower levels of analysis and synthesis by the student.

4. The LR is critically placed in the historical context of the field

Situating the LR in its historical context shows the level of comfort of the student in addressing a particular topic. Instead of only presenting statements and theories in a temporal approach, which occasionally follows a linear timeline, the LR should authentically characterize the student’s academic work in the state-of-art techniques in their particular field of knowledge. Thus, the LR should reinforce why the dissertation/thesis represents original work in the chosen research field.

5. Ambiguities in definitions are considered and resolved

Distinct theories on the same topic may exist in different disciplines, and one discipline may consider multiple concepts to explain one topic. These misunderstandings should be addressed and contemplated. The LR should not synthesize all theories or concepts at the same time. Although this approach might demonstrate in-depth reading on a particular topic, it can reveal a student’s inability to comprehend and synthesize his/her research problem.

6. Important variables and phenomena relevant to the topic are articulated

The LR is a unique opportunity to articulate ideas and arguments and to purpose new relationships between them ( 10 , 11 ). More importantly, a sound LR will outline to the audience how these important variables and phenomena will be addressed in the current academic work. Indeed, the LR should build a bidirectional link with the remaining sections and ground the connections between all of the sections ( Figure 1 ).

7. A synthesized new perspective on the literature has been established

The LR is a ‘creative inquiry’ ( 13 ) in which the student elaborates his/her own discourse, builds on previous knowledge in the field, and describes his/her own perspective while interpreting others’ work ( 13 , 17 ). Thus, students should articulate the current knowledge, not accept the results at face value ( 11 , 13 , 17 ), and improve their own cognitive abilities ( 12 ).

Third category: Methodology

8. the main methodologies and research techniques that have been used in the field are identified and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed.

The LR is expected to distinguish the research that has been completed from investigations that remain to be performed, address the benefits and limitations of the main methods applied to date, and consider the strategies for addressing the expected limitations described above. While placing his/her research within the methodological context of a particular topic, the LR will justify the methodology of the study and substantiate the student’s interpretations.

9. Ideas and theories in the field are related to research methodologies

The audience expects the writer to analyze and synthesize methodological approaches in the field. The findings should be explained according to the strengths and limitations of previous research methods, and students must avoid interpretations that are not supported by the analyzed literature. This criterion translates to the student’s comprehension of the applicability and types of answers provided by different research methodologies, even those using a quantitative or qualitative research approach.

Fourth category: Significance

10. the scholarly significance of the research problem is rationalized.

The LR is an introductory section of a dissertation/thesis and will present the postgraduate student as a scholar in a particular field ( 11 ). Therefore, the LR should discuss how the research problem is currently addressed in the discipline being investigated or in different disciplines, depending on the scope of the LR. The LR explains the academic paradigms in the topic of interest ( 13 ) and methods to advance the field from these starting points. However, an excess number of personal citations—whether referencing the student’s research or studies by his/her research team—may reflect a narrow literature search and a lack of comprehensive synthesis of ideas and arguments.

11. The practical significance of the research problem is rationalized

The practical significance indicates a student’s comprehensive understanding of research terminology (e.g., risk versus associated factor), methodology (e.g., efficacy versus effectiveness) and plausible interpretations in the context of the field. Notably, the academic argument about a topic may not always reflect the debate in real life terms. For example, using a quantitative approach in epidemiology, statistically significant differences between groups do not explain all of the factors involved in a particular problem ( 21 ). Therefore, excessive faith in p -values may reflect lower levels of critical evaluation of the context and implications of a research problem by the student.

Fifth category: Rhetoric

12. the lr was written with a coherent, clear structure that supported the review.

This category strictly relates to the language domain: the text should be coherent and presented in a logical sequence, regardless of which organizational ( 18 ) approach is chosen. The beginning of each section/subsection should state what themes will be addressed, paragraphs should be carefully linked to each other ( 10 ), and the first sentence of each paragraph should generally summarize the content. Additionally, the student’s statements are clear, sound, and linked to other scholars’ works, and precise and concise language that follows standardized writing conventions (e.g., in terms of active/passive voice and verb tenses) is used. Attention to grammar, such as orthography and punctuation, indicates prudence and supports a robust dissertation/thesis. Ultimately, all of these strategies provide fluency and consistency for the text.

Although the scoring rubric was initially proposed for postgraduate programs in education research, we are convinced that this checklist is a valuable tool for all academic areas. It enables the monitoring of students’ learning curves and a concentrated effort on any criteria that are not yet achieved. For institutions, the checklist is a guide to support supervisors’ feedback, improve students’ writing skills, and highlight the learning goals of each program. These criteria do not form a linear sequence, but ideally, all twelve achievements should be perceived in the LR.

CONCLUSIONS

A single correct method to classify, evaluate and guide the elaboration of an LR has not been established. In this essay, we have suggested directions for planning, structuring and critically evaluating an LR. The planning of the scope of an LR and approaches to complete it is a valuable effort, and the five steps represent a rational starting point. An institutional environment devoted to active learning will support students in continuously reflecting on LRs, which will form a dialogue between the writer and the current literature in a particular field ( 13 ).

The completion of an LR is a challenging and necessary process for understanding one’s own field of expertise. Knowledge is always transitory, but our responsibility as scholars is to provide a critical contribution to our field, allowing others to think through our work. Good researchers are grounded in sophisticated LRs, which reveal a writer’s training and long-lasting academic skills. We recommend using the LR checklist as a tool for strengthening the skills necessary for critical academic writing.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Leite DFB has initially conceived the idea and has written the first draft of this review. Padilha MAS and Cecatti JG have supervised data interpretation and critically reviewed the manuscript. All authors have read the draft and agreed with this submission. Authors are responsible for all aspects of this academic piece.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to all of the professors of the ‘Getting Started with Graduate Research and Generic Skills’ module at University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, for suggesting and supporting this article. Funding: DFBL has granted scholarship from Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES) to take part of her Ph.D. studies in Ireland (process number 88881.134512/2016-01). There is no participation from sponsors on authors’ decision to write or to submit this manuscript.

No potential conflict of interest was reported.

1 The questions posed in systematic reviews usually follow the ‘PICOS’ acronym: Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, Study design.

2 In 1988, Cooper proposed a taxonomy that aims to facilitate students’ and institutions’ understanding of literature reviews. Six characteristics with specific categories are briefly described: Focus: research outcomes, research methodologies, theories, or practices and applications; Goals: integration (generalization, conflict resolution, and linguistic bridge-building), criticism, or identification of central issues; Perspective: neutral representation or espousal of a position; Coverage: exhaustive, exhaustive with selective citations, representative, central or pivotal; Organization: historical, conceptual, or methodological; and Audience: specialized scholars, general scholars, practitioners or policymakers, or the general public.

• Peterborough

How to Write Academic Reviews

• What is a review?
• Common problems with academic reviews
• Getting started: approaches to reading and notetaking
• Understanding and analyzing the work
• Organizing and writing the review

What Is a Review?

A scholarly review describes, analyzes, and evaluates an article, book, film, or performance (through this guide we will use the term “work” to refer to the text or piece to be reviewed).  A review also shows how a work fits into its disciplines and explains the value or contribution of the work to the field.

Reviews play an important role in scholarship. They give scholars the opportunity to respond to one another’s research, ideas and interpretations. They also provide an up-to-date view of a discipline. We recommend you seek out reviews in current scholarly journals to become familiar with recent scholarship on a topic and to understand the forms review writing takes in your discipline. Published scholarly reviews are helpful models for beginner review-writers. However, we remind you that you are to write your own assessment of the work, not rely on the assessment from a review you found in a journal or on a blog.

As a review-writer, your objective is to:

• understand a work on its own terms (analyze it)
• bring your own knowledge to bear on a work (respond to it)
• critique the work while considering validity, truth, and slant (evaluate it)
• place the work in context (compare it to other works).

Common Problems with Academic Reviews

A review is not a research paper.

Rather than a research paper on the subject of the work,an academic review is an evaluation about the work’s message, strengths, and value. For example, a review of Finis Dunaway’s Seeing Green would not include your own research about media coverage of the environmental movement; instead, your review would assess Dunaway’s argument and its significance to the field.

A review is not a summary

It is important to synthesize the contents and significance of the work you review, but the main purpose of a review is to evaluate, critically analyze, or comment on the text. Keep your summary of the work brief, and make specific references to its message and evidence in your assessment of the work.

A review is not an off-the-cuff, unfair personal response

An effective review must be fair and accurate. It is important to see what is actually in front of you when your first reaction to the tone, argument, or subject of what you are reviewing is extremely negative or positive.

You will present your personal views on the work, but they must be explained and supported with evidence. Rather than writing, “I thought the book was interesting,” you can explain why the book was interesting and how it might offer new insights or important ideas. Further, you can expand on a statement such as “The movie was boring,” by explaining how it failed to interest you and pointing toward specific disappointing moments.

Getting Started: Approaches to Reading and Notetaking

Pre-reading.

Pre-reading helps a reader to see a book as a whole. Often, the acknowledgments, preface, and table of contents of a book offer insights about the book’s purpose and direction. Take time before you begin chapter one to read the introduction and conclusion, examine chapter titles, and to explore the index or references pages.

Read more about strategies for critical and efficient reading

Reverse outline

A reverse outline helps a reader analyze the content and argument of a work of non-fiction. Read each section of a text carefully and write down two things: 1) the main point or idea, and 2) its function in the text. In other words, write down what each section says and what it does. This will help you to see how the author develops their argument and uses evidence for support.

Double-entry notebook

In its simplest form, the double-entry notebook separates a page into two columns. In one column, you make observations about the work. In the other, you note your responses to the work. This notetaking method has two advantages. It forces you to make both sorts of notes — notes about the work and notes about your reaction to the work — and it helps you to distinguish between the two.

Whatever method of notetaking you choose, do take notes, even if these are scribbles in the margin. If you don’t, you might rely too heavily on the words, argument, or order of what you are reviewing when you come to write your review.                                              

Understand and Analyze the Work

It is extremely important to work toward seeing a clear and accurate picture of a work. One approach is to try to suspend your judgment for a while, focusing instead on describing or outlining a text. A student once described this as listening to the author’s voice rather than to their own.

Ask questions to support your understanding of the work.

Questions for Works of Non-Fiction

• What is the subject/topic of the work? What key ideas do you think you should describe in your review?
• What is the thesis, main theme, or main point?
• What major claims or conclusions does the author make? What issues does the work illuminate?
• What is the structure of the work? How does the author build their argument?
• What sources does the author consult? What evidence is used to support claims? Do these sources in any way “predetermine” certain conclusions?
• Is there any claim for which the evidence presented is insufficient or slight? Do any conclusions rest on evidence that may be atypical?
• How is the argument developed? How do the claims relate? What does the conclusion reveal?

Questions for Works of Fiction

• What is the main theme or message? What issues does the book illuminate?
• How does the work proceed? How does the author build their plot?
• What kind of language, descriptions, or sections of plot alert you to the themes and significance of the book?
• What does the conclusion reveal when compared with the beginning?

Read Critically

Being critical does not mean criticizing. It means asking questions and formulating answers. Critical reading is not reading with a “bad attitude.” Critical readers do not reject a text or take a negative approach to it; they inquire about a text, an author, themselves, and the context surrounding all three, and they attempt to understand how and why the author has made the particular choices they have.

Think about the Author

You can often tell a lot about an author by examining a text closely, but sometimes it helps to do a little extra research. Here are some questions about the author that would be useful to keep in mind when you are reading a text critically:

• Who is the author? What else has the author written?
• What does the author do? What experiences of the author’s might influence the writing of this book?
• What is the author’s main purpose or goal for the text? Why did they write it and what do they want to achieve?
• Does the author indicate what contribution the text makes to scholarship or literature? What does the author say about their point of view or method of approaching the subject? In other words, what position does the author take?

Think about Yourself

Because you are doing the interpreting and evaluating of a text, it is important to examine your own perspective, assumptions, and knowledge (positionality) in relation to the text. One way to do this is by writing a position statement that outlines your view of the subject of the work you are reviewing. What do you know, believe, or assume about this subject? What in your life might influence your approach to this text?

Here are some prompts that might help you generate a personal response to a book:

• I agree that ... because ...                    
• I disagree that ... because ...
• I don’t understand ...
• This reminds me of …
• I’m surprised by …                 

Another way to examine your thoughts in relation to a text is to note your initial response to the work. Consider your experience of the text – did you like it? Why or why not?

• What did I feel when I read this book? Why?
• How did I experience the style or tone of the author? How would I characterize each?
• What questions would I ask this author if I could?
• For me, what are the three best things about this book? The three worst things? Why?

Consider Context

A reviewer needs to examine the context of the book to arrive at a fair understanding and evaluation of its contents and importance. Context may include the scholarship to which this book responds or the author’s personal motive for writing. Or perhaps the context is simply contemporary society or today’s headlines. It is certainly important to consider how the work relates to the course that requires the review.

Here are some useful questions:

• What are the connections between this work and others on similar subjects? How does it relate to core concepts in my course or my discipline?
• What is the scholarly or social significance of this work? What contribution does it make to our understanding?
• What, of relevance, is missing from the work: certain kinds of evidence or methods of analysis/development? A particular theoretical approach? The experiences of certain groups?
• What other perspectives or conclusions are possible?

Once you have taken the time to thoroughly understand and analyze the work, you will have a clear perspective on its strengths and weaknesses and its value within the field. Take time to categorize your ideas and develop an outline; this will ensure your review is well organized and clear.

Organizing and Writing the Review

A review is organized around an assessment of the work or a focused message about its value to the field. Revisit your notes and consider your responses to your questions from critical reading to develop a clear statement that evaluates the work and provides an explanation for that evaluation.

For example:

X is an important work because it provides a new perspective on . . .

X’s argument is compelling because . . . ; however, it fails to address . . .

Although X claims to . . ., they make assumptions about . . . , which diminishes the impact . . .

This statement or evaluation is presented in the introduction. The body of the review works to support or explain your assessment; organize your key ideas or supporting arguments into paragraphs and use evidence from the book, article, or film to demonstrate how the work is (or is not) effective, compelling, provocative, novel, or informative.

As with all scholarly writing, a well-organized structure supports the clarity of your review. There is not a rigid formula for organization, but you may find the following guidelines to be helpful. Note that reviews do not typically include subheadings; the headings listed here serve to help you think about the main sections of your academic review.

Introduction

Introduce the work, the author (or director/producer), and the points you intend to make about this work. In addition, you should

• give relevant bibliographic information
• give the reader a clear idea of the nature, scope, and significance of the work
• indicate your evaluation of the work in a clear 1-2 sentence thesis statement

Provide background information to help your readers understand the importance of the work or the reasons for your appraisal. Background information could include:

• why the issue examined is of current interest
• other scholarship about this subject
• the author’s perspective, methodology, purpose
• the circumstances under which the book was created

Sample Introduction

Within educational research, much attention has been given to the importance of diversity and equity, and the literature is rife with studies detailing the best ways to create environments that are supportive of diverse students. In “Guidance Matters,” however, Carpenter and Diem (2015) examined these concepts in a less-studied source: policy documents related to leadership training.  Using discourse analysis, they explored the ways in which government policies concerning the training of educational administrators discussed issues of diversity and equity. While their innovative methods allowed them to reveal the ways in which current policy promotes superficial platitudes to diversity rather than a deep commitment to promoting social justice, their data analysis left many of their identified themes vague and their discussion did not provide a clear explanation of the applications of their findings.

What works in this sample introduction:

• The nature of the larger issue, how best to create diversity and equity within educational environments, is clearly laid out.
• The paragraph clearly introduces the authors and study being reviewed and succinctly explains how they have addressed the larger issue of equity and diversity in a unique way.
• The paragraph ends with a clear thesis that outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the work.

Summary of the Work

Keep the summary of the work short! A paragraph or two should be sufficient. Summarize its contents very briefly and focus on:

• the purpose of the work
• the main points of the work
• the ideas, themes, or arguments that you will evaluate or discuss in the review

Analysis and Evaluation

Analyze and explain the significance of the main points of the work. Evaluate the work, answering questions such as the following:

• Does the work do what its author claimed it would?
• Is the work valid and accurate?
• How does the work fit into scholarship in the field?
• What are your reasons for agreeing, disagreeing, liking, disliking, believing, disbelieving?

Note that this section will take up the bulk of your review and should be organized into paragraphs. Because this form of writing typically does not use subheadings, strong paragraphing, particularly the use of clear topic sentences, is essential. Read more on paragraphing.

Reviews are informed by your critical reading or viewing of a work; therefore you need to include specific evidence from the work to support your claims about its message and its impact. Your writing and  your assessment of the work will be most effective if you paraphrase or summarize the evidence you use, rather than relying on direct quotations. Be sure to follow the rules for citation in your discipline. Read more on paraphrasing and summarizing.

Sample Body Paragraph

One of the strengths of Carpenter and Diem’s  (2015) study was innovative use of  and nuanced explanation of discourse analysis. Critiquing much of the research on policy for its positivist promises of “value neutral and empirically objective” (p. 518) findings, Carpenter and Diem (2015) argued that discourse theory can provide an important lens through which to view policy and its relationship to educational outcomes.  By interrogating the “inscribed discourses of policy making” (p. 518), they showed how policy language constructs particular social meanings of concepts such as diversity and equity. Significantly, this analysis was not simply about the language used within documents; instead, Carpenter and Diem (2015) argued that the language used was directly related to reality. Their “study examine[d] how dominant discourses related to equity, and their concretization within guiding policy documents, may shape the ways in which states, local school districts, and educational leaders are asked to consider these issues in their everyday practice” (Carpenter & Diem, 2015, p. 519). Thus, through the use of discourse theory, Carpenter and Diem (2015) framed policy language, which some might consider abstract or distant from daily life, as directly connected to the experience of educational leaders.

What works in this sample body paragraph:

• The paragraph begins with a clear topic sentence that connects directly to a strength mentioned in the thesis of the review.
• The paragraph provides specific details and examples to support how and why their methods are innovative.
• The direct quotations used are short and properly integrated into the sentences.

The paragraph concludes by explaining the significance of the innovative methods to the larger work.

Conclusion and Recommendation

Give your overall assessment of the work. Explain the larger significance of your assessment. Consider who would benefit from engaging with this work.

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• Knowledge Base

Methodology

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

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.

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See an example

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.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

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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What is peer review?

Reviewers play a pivotal role in scholarly publishing. The peer review system exists to validate academic work, helps to improve the quality of published research, and increases networking possibilities within research communities. Despite criticisms, peer review is still the only widely accepted method for research validation and has continued successfully with relatively minor changes for some 350 years.

Elsevier relies on the peer review process to uphold the quality and validity of individual articles and the journals that publish them.

Peer review has been a formal part of scientific communication since the first scientific journals appeared more than 300 years ago. The Philosophical Transactions opens in new tab/window of the Royal Society is thought to be the first journal to formalize the peer review process opens in new tab/window under the editorship of Henry Oldenburg (1618- 1677).

Despite many criticisms about the integrity of peer review, the majority of the research community still believes peer review is the best form of scientific evaluation. This opinion was endorsed by the outcome of a survey Elsevier and Sense About Science conducted in 2009 opens in new tab/window and has since been further confirmed by other publisher and scholarly organization surveys. Furthermore, a  2015 survey by the Publishing Research Consortium opens in new tab/window , saw 82% of researchers agreeing that “without peer review there is no control in scientific communication.”

To learn more about peer review, visit Elsevier’s free e-learning platform  Researcher Academy opens in new tab/window and see our resources below.

The peer review process

Types of peer review.

Peer review comes in different flavours. Each model has its own advantages and disadvantages, and often one type of review will be preferred by a subject community. Before submitting or reviewing a paper, you must therefore check which type is employed by the journal so you are aware of the respective rules. In case of questions regarding the peer review model employed by the journal for which you have been invited to review, consult the journal’s homepage or contact the editorial office directly.  

Single anonymized review

In this type of review, the names of the reviewers are hidden from the author. This is the traditional method of reviewing and is the most common type by far. Points to consider regarding single anonymized review include:

Reviewer anonymity allows for impartial decisions, as the reviewers will not be influenced by potential criticism from the authors.

Authors may be concerned that reviewers in their field could delay publication, giving the reviewers a chance to publish first.

Reviewers may use their anonymity as justification for being unnecessarily critical or harsh when commenting on the authors’ work.

Double anonymized review

Both the reviewer and the author are anonymous in this model. Some advantages of this model are listed below.

Author anonymity limits reviewer bias, such as on author's gender, country of origin, academic status, or previous publication history.

Articles written by prestigious or renowned authors are considered based on the content of their papers, rather than their reputation.

But bear in mind that despite the above, reviewers can often identify the author through their writing style, subject matter, or self-citation – it is exceedingly difficult to guarantee total author anonymity. More information for authors can be found in our  double-anonymized peer review guidelines .

Triple anonymized review

With triple anonymized review, reviewers are anonymous to the author, and the author's identity is unknown to both the reviewers and the editor. Articles are anonymized at the submission stage and are handled in a way to minimize any potential bias towards the authors. However, it should be noted that: 

The complexities involved with anonymizing articles/authors to this level are considerable.

As with double anonymized review, there is still a possibility for the editor and/or reviewers to correctly identify the author(s) from their writing style, subject matter, citation patterns, or other methodologies.

Open review

Open peer review is an umbrella term for many different models aiming at greater transparency during and after the peer review process. The most common definition of open review is when both the reviewer and author are known to each other during the peer review process. Other types of open peer review consist of:

Publication of reviewers’ names on the article page 

Publication of peer review reports alongside the article, either signed or anonymous 

Publication of peer review reports (signed or anonymous) with authors’ and editors’ responses alongside the article 

Publication of the paper after pre-checks and opening a discussion forum to the community who can then comment (named or anonymous) on the article 

Many believe this is the best way to prevent malicious comments, stop plagiarism, prevent reviewers from following their own agenda, and encourage open, honest reviewing. Others see open review as a less honest process, in which politeness or fear of retribution may cause a reviewer to withhold or tone down criticism. For three years, five Elsevier journals experimented with publication of peer review reports (signed or anonymous) as articles alongside the accepted paper on ScienceDirect ( example opens in new tab/window ).

Read more about the experiment

More transparent peer review

Transparency is the key to trust in peer review and as such there is an increasing call towards more  transparency around the peer review process . In an effort to promote transparency in the peer review process, many Elsevier journals therefore publish the name of the handling editor of the published paper on ScienceDirect. Some journals also provide details about the number of reviewers who reviewed the article before acceptance. Furthermore, in order to provide updates and feedback to reviewers, most Elsevier journals inform reviewers about the editor’s decision and their peers’ recommendations. 

Article transfer service: sharing reviewer comments

Elsevier authors may be invited to  transfer  their article submission from one journal to another for free if their initial submission was not successful. 

As a referee, your review report (including all comments to the author and editor) will be transferred to the destination journal, along with the manuscript. The main benefit is that reviewers are not asked to review the same manuscript several times for different journals. 

Tools & resources

Elsevier researcher academy modules.

The certified peer reviewer course opens in new tab/window

Transparency in peer review opens in new tab/window

Reviewers’ Update articles

Peer review using today’s technology

Lifting the lid on publishing peer review reports: an interview with Bahar Mehmani and Flaminio Squazzoni

How face-to-face peer review can benefit authors and journals alike

Innovation in peer review: introducing “volunpeers”

Results masked review: peer review without publication bias

Interesting reads

"Is Peer Review in Crisis?" Perspectives in Publishing No 2, August 2004, by Adrian Mulligan opens in new tab/window

“The history of the peer-review process” Trends in Biotechnology, 2002, by Ray Spier opens in new tab/window

Publishing Research Consortium Peer review survey . 2015. Elsevier; 2015 

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
• Artificial intelligence (AI) tools
• Thompson Writing Studio This link opens in a new window
• Need to write a systematic review? This link opens in a new window

Guide Owner

Contact a Librarian

Ask a Librarian

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.

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:

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.

Writing the literature review: A practical guide

Available 3rd floor of Perkins

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

Available online!

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

Telling a research story: Writing a literature review

The literature review: Six steps to success

Systematic approaches to a successful literature review

Request from Duke Medical Center Library

Doing a systematic review: A student's guide

• Next: Types of reviews >>
• Last Updated: Aug 20, 2024 3:37 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.duke.edu/litreviews

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What is Academic Research?

After completing this module you will be able to:

• recognize why information exists, who creates it, and how information of all kinds can be valuable, even when it’s biased.
• understand what scholarly research is, how to find it, how the process of peer-review works, and how it gets published.
• identify types of databases and understand why databases are critical for academic research

How to use this module

This module is organized into a number of pages. To navigate, you can either:

• use the “Previous” and “Next” buttons at the bottom of each page (suggested)

• follow the links in the “Contents” menu on the left side of the page

Introduction to Academic Research Copyright © by matt0341; ampala; and heitz106. All Rights Reserved.

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Academic Research Home: What is Academic Research? Why is it Important?

• Find Academic Research
• What is Academic Research? Why is it Important?
• How to Read
• Tips and Tools
• How to Write Academic Research

What is Academic Research

Professors and others in academic fields often conduct research related to their studies. These researchers may be scientists, sociologists, educators, historians, English professors, etc. When conduct experiments or conduct a systemic analysis they then write an article with their findings.

This article is then submitted to a journal for review. This is called the peer review process (see below). Once approved, the article is published in the journal.

These articles are sometimes referred to as scholarly research, journal article, or peer reviewed article.

To be considered academic research, the article should include a discussion of the research methods, a detailed summary of the data, and an analysis of the data. Look for the following sections: (the section names may differ) Abstract, Methods, Data, Conclusion. More information about what these sections mean can be found on the " How to Read " page. 

This type of research is important because it provides new information for those in the field. These articles are often the primary source of information in the sciences. It also helps inform best practices or analyzes current systems.

Peer Review Process

The peer review process.

The peer review process describes the process in which academic research is approved for publication.

After conducting research, the researcher (or more often than not, researchers) write an article which discusses their guiding question or hypothesis, their methods to conduct the research, their findings, and their analysis of the findings.

The research then submits the article to a journal for publication. Before the article is published, a panel of peers in with that specific academic expertise critically reviews the article. They ensure that the research methods are based on sound methods, that the results match the method of research, and that the conclusions drawn by the research are valid. They then either approve the article for publication, request revisions, or deny the article for publication.

Research and Identiies

Is it credible?

Peer reviewed academic research is often considered one of the most credible reference source. The peer review process is rigorous, and misleading or false information or conclusions is often caught before publication.

HOWEVER, nothing is perfect. Mistakes are sometimes missed, and fraudulent data is occasionally published. Additionally, bias exists in any academic field, and that bias can affect all levels of the peer review process (the question being researched, their research methods, the conclusions, and the peer review response). So, as with any source, it is still important to read with a critical eye.

Other Types of Articles

Other articles in academic journals.

Academic journals typically publish this kind of peer-reviewed research, but they might also publish any of the following types of articles as well.

• Literature review - a review of previously published research on a subject
• Meta-analysis - an analysis of previously published research
• Book review
• Editorial or commentary
• Conference reports

These articles are often great as a source for your school research, but if your teacher requests an academic research article, it is important to make sure includes sections that discuss methods, data, and analysis.

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Academic research

On this page:.

• Introduction
• 1 What is this profile based on?
• 2 If you choose well, you can do valuable research
• 3.1 1. Public outreach
• 3.2 2. Apply your research to problems outside of academia
• 3.3 3. Influencing academia and research management
• 4.1 Keeping options open
• 4.2 Good backup options
• 5 The work can be very satisfying
• 6.1 Highly competitive and low chances of progression
• 6.2 Academic incentives aren’t always aligned with doing valuable research
• 6.3 Lower salaries
• 6.4 Long training time
• 6.5 Lower flexibility
• 7.1 What are the entry requirements?
• 7.2 What does it take to excel?
• 7.3 How to assess your personal fit at each stage of your career?
• 8.1 Which field should you go into?
• 8.2 How to establish your career early on
• 8.3 Maximising your impact later on
• 9 Conclusion
• 10 Think you have a good shot at becoming an academic researcher focused on a pressing problem?
• 11.1 Top recommendations
• 11.2 Further recommendations

Many people think that “ivory tower” intellectuals make little difference in the world. But some of the highest impact people in history have been researchers, and if you have good personal fit with academic research, we think it can be one of the highest-impact paths.

Alan Turing was an academic – a mathematician, the ultimate ‘ivory tower discipline’ – yet he developed code breaking machines that allowed the Allies to be far more effective against Nazi U-boats in WW2. Some historians estimate this enabled D-Day to happen a year earlier than it would have otherwise. 1 Since WW2 in Europe resulted in 5 million deaths per year, Turing’s work contributed substantially to saving about 5 million lives.

And, at the same time, he developed the fundamentals of modern computing.

In this article, we’ll cover why we think a career in academia has the potential to be very high impact in the right circumstances, how to figure out whether this option is for you, and how to maximise the impact you can have as an academic.

To work on some important fields of research that are hard to fund commercially, academia is the natural place to go. A single outstanding researcher can move a field forward and make a significant contribution to solving key global problems. Beyond research, academics also have other avenues for impact, such as by influencing government policy, the priorities within their field, and the culture of society at large.

On the other hand, entering academia is a lengthy process, involving 5-15 years of study and post-docs, or even more. Most people who make the attempt – already a talented bunch – are rejected or give up getting a permanent position. While it has many positives, it’s common for people to continue with academic research by default when they’d be better suited elsewhere, so we encourage you to be self-skeptical and consider other options before starting a PhD.

Raw intelligence, hard work and curiosity are the key indicators you may be able to beat the odds. Salaries are lower than elsewhere, though job satisfaction nevertheless seems high.

Choosing the right research questions is essential to maximise your expected social impact and we offer advice on how to do that, but PhD students often face a trade-off between working on the questions they think are most useful, and those which will best advance their career.

• • If you're a good fit, there's a large potential for social impact by working on pressing research questions
• • Prestigious platform for advocacy
• • Autonomy and job satisfaction
• • High competition for a limited number of positions
• • Lengthy training time
• • You often have to teach, and academic incentives remain imperfectly aligned with having social impact

Key facts on fit  

Explore different fields to find one you’re interested in which can be used to work on important problems. Get very good grades at the undergraduate level. Look for PhD submission dates and search for an academic supervisor working on valuable questions at a prestigious university. Work hard to publish in good journals during your PhD or during postdocs.

Recommended

If you are well suited to this career, it may be the best way for you to have a social impact.

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Based on a medium-depth investigation 

Table of Contents

What is this profile based on?

This profile is based on 10 interviews with successful academics (including in statistics, economics, computer science and biomedicine), as well as numerous more informal conversations with people pursuing academic careers (including some of our colleagues and trustees who have an academic background), and looking into the careers of some of history’s most impactful academics. We’ve also looked for other sources of advice on maximising your research, as well as research into what makes a successful academic career, statistics of progression within academia, and the distribution of research impact.

Note that in this profile, we cover academia in general. We’ve also started to write profiles on specific PhD programmes ( economics , computer science , machine learning , philosophy ) and subject areas ( biomedical , AI strategy , AI technical ). Refer to these for the subject-specific details.

So, let’s start – why can academia be high-impact?

If you choose well, you can do valuable research

In our article on research skills , we argue that:

• Research seems to have been extremely high-impact historically .
• There are good theoretical reasons to think that research will be high-impact .
• Research skills seem extremely useful to the problems we think are most pressing .
• And if you’re a good fit, you can have much more impact than the average researcher .

As a result, we think that research seems like a high-impact career choice in general.

But why go into academic research in particular?

Academia isn’t the only place where it’s possible to do research on important problems. Instead, you could do research in the private sector – as a biomedical researcher you could also work for a pharmaceutical company, or as a computer scientist you could do research at a big technology company like Google or Amazon, for example. As a social scientist, you could work for a think tank or as a researcher for government.

Academia has some advantages over research in industry or the public sector, as well as some disadvantages, as we’ll discuss below. It’s certainly not true that academia is always better than these alternatives – it will depend on your personal situation, opportunities, and priorities. However, we do think that in many cases it’s one of the best environments for doing valuable research.

One downside of academia is that it can be slow-moving: academics often report frustrations with the efficiency and speed of university administration, especially relative to the private sector. A second is that academics may have to spend a lot of time applying for grants to fund their research. A third commonly recognised challenge is that academics often have many other responsibilities beyond their research, such as teaching, which can take up a lot of time. A typical teaching load during term-time is 10-12 hours a week – though in reality it’s probably substantially more, as this doesn’t account for time spent preparing, marking, and supervising students. This seriously limits the amount of time you have to spend doing your own research.

However, it’s not clear the situation is necessarily any better in other research jobs. In industry or the public sector, researchers are likely to have more meetings and more short-term deadlines to meet, giving them less time to really explore questions deeply. Academia also gives you more time to focus on learning and research early in your career than any other job will. Graduate school gives you ~4-7 years (depending on your course and country) where you’re able to focus almost entirely on studying and learning to do research. It’s pretty impossible to get this in any other job, even if it’s research-focused – as there’s much more day-to-day pressure to deliver.

More generally, academia provides a huge amount of freedom to research what you choose. Nick Feamster, a computer science professor at Princeton who has worked at both universities and large industry labs, says of why he ultimately chose the academic path :

As a professor, you do not have quarterly deadlines to meet, monthly reports to file, or a boss you are regularly accountable for…. Freedom from the constraints of short-term deadlines and having to answer to others who are setting the agenda really presents the possibility of thinking about the “right” solution to a problem, rather than hacking together something that just works well enough to get the job done. In my opinion, this aspect of being a professor presents the greatest opportunity for adding value.

Academia is also the best place to do research that is unlikely to get commercial funding because the benefits are long-term or abstract. Academics often have a lot more freedom to pursue whatever research they think is most valuable (especially at later stages of an academic career) than you would get doing research in a commercial setting. “In most companies, research topics are largely chosen by the business and marketing departments… pressures to show immediate and positive results can also challenge the best ethical and professional practices”, says Jaime Teevan , a scientist at Microsoft Research.

The flipside of this is that it can be harder to get academic research applied in “the real world.” Explaining why he chose to leave Harvard and join Google, computer scientist Matt Welsh writes “Academics have a lot of freedom, but this comes at the cost of high overhead and a longer path from idea to application.” And Nick Feamster agrees: “I find that I spend a lot of time ‘evangelizing’ my ideas to industry to try to transfer them into practice… industrial researchers do not have this problem.” However, just because the impact of academic research is often less immediate or obvious than the impact of private or public sector research, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily less valuable.

Finally, academia attracts some of the world’s brightest minds, so you can find great collaborators to work with and learn from. 2 What’s more, in many fields there’s a perception that the most serious researchers work in academia, and this means being in academia is an important signal of ability, putting you in a better position to find collaborators.

Finally, as we’ll cover in the next section, having academic credentials also opens up lots of other ways to have an impact.

Research isn’t the only way academics can have a large impact

When we think of academic careers, research is what first comes to mind, but academics have many other pathways to impact which are less often considered. Academics can also influence public opinion, advise policy-makers, or manage teams of other researchers to help them be more productive.

If any of these routes might turn out to be a good fit for you, then it makes the path even more attractive. We’ll sketch out some of these other paths:

1. Public outreach

Peter Singer’s career began in an ordinary enough way for a promising young academic, studying philosophy at Oxford University. But he soon started moving in a different direction from his peers, by seriously trying to change the views and behaviour of the general public on important moral issues.

Singer’s first book, Animal Liberation , is one of the most widely-read books published by any philosopher. Many consider the book to have given birth to the animal liberation movement.

Singer has also argued strongly that we have a moral obligation to donate much more to those living in poverty. His writings on global poverty inspired the creation of the organisation Giving What We Can , whose 3,000 members have donated over $10 million to the most cost-effective charities, and pledged over $1 billion of future donations. 3

Early-career economist Max Roser made a website clearly presenting data on how the world is changing that now gets over a million visits a month and earned him introductions to politicians and philanthropists, as well as a large Twitter following.

Other academics venture far outside of their original fields of research. Noam Chomsky managed to convert an academic position focussed on linguistics into being one of the most prominent commentators on US foreign policy. 4

As we argue in the career guide , advocacy seems like a promising approach in general to have a large social impact. And academia seems to be an especially good position from which to advocate for important ideas. Successful academics have developed the expertise required to understand complex questions, and the credibility to have people listen to what they say.

This is especially true if you want to advocate for issues concerning extinction risks , because some of them are emerging from scientific and technological progress itself. We need experts in the relevant fields to shape public understanding — to prevent the risks and benefits from being overhyped, while helping people to understand genuine concerns with, and the real potential of, these technologies.

However, it’s important to be careful with public outreach – it wouldn’t be that difficult to do harm by spreading slightly the wrong idea, in slightly the wrong way, to slightly the wrong audience. For example, writing popular articles about threats from artificial intelligence might lead to widespread fear and alarm, which could be counterproductive.

This suggests that getting the biggest possible platform for your ideas might not be the best route to impactful outreach – sometimes targeting communication at smaller, more influential groups might be a better approach.

For instance, academic macroeconomists have a great deal to say about appropriate use of monetary or fiscal policy, and are regularly appointed to decision-making roles in central banks. But communicating their ideas to the general public is difficult and likely to result in misunderstanding. As a result macroeconomists more often write books and papers aimed at a limited audience with the goal of influencing politicians or bureaucrats within government or central banks themselves.

2. Apply your research to problems outside of academia

John Beddington was a successful academic biologist, but his biggest impact seems to have come through his service as a respected science advisor to the government.

Beddington was the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser from 2008 to 2013, and played a key role in helping the government to navigate the challenges of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, eruptions of the Icelandic volcanoes, and ash dieback disease in the UK. He also pushed to establish a network of “Chief Scientists” across all government departments.

Often the people in charge of making important decisions — about how to allocate funding, or what the appropriate policy response to a given challenge is — won’t necessarily have expertise in the most relevant fields. This means they need to call on external experts who do have this specialist knowledge, who can help them to make the best possible decisions.

These experts are very often academics, since academia is one of the best ways for people to develop the credentials needed to be taken seriously by policymakers.

And a need for guidance from academics isn’t limited to government – you could do a lot of good if you have the relevant expertise to advise NGOs like the Gates Foundation or World Bank, or tech companies that have a large influence like Google or Amazon.

Policymakers in many countries often seek the advice of experts in some relevant fields such as economics, data science and machine learning, and some areas of social science such as behavioural science. That demand means it’s not necessarily as hard to end up in a position of advising decision-makers as you might think.

For example, Prof Bruce Chapman was an academic economist at the Australian National University who consulted for the Australian Minister for Employment, Education and Training in 1987. While there he helped to devise a system of government-backed ‘income contingent’ student loans which enabled students to pay for more of the costs of higher education without taking on any significant financial risk. He had a large influence over the design of the policy, while the public advocacy was largely left to others. This approach to student loans was later copied by the UK, Thailand and Ethiopia, among others. 5

If you want to be Chief Scientist of a government department you’ll need to be a pretty senior and established researcher, but we know several people who have advised government early in their academic careers, even during a PhD, because they have valuable expertise and have been proactive about building connections and looking for opportunities.

For example, Miles Brundage , a PhD student in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University has been advising the UK government on developments in artificial intelligence .

If you’re also interested in working in the effective altruism community, then another reason in favour of going into academia is that the community seems constrained by a lack of specialist expertise on topics such as machine learning, biology, and economics . 6

Some academics also notice that insights from their field could be applied in the world more concretely; they might be used to build new products or companies that help solve important problems.

This could lead to them leaving academia to do these projects, but you might also be able to do this kind of work while continuing to do research. For example, leading AI researcher Yoshua Bengio cofounded Element AI with an established entrepreneur, in order to apply cutting-edge AI research to tackling important business challenges. Google was founded by researchers at Stanford trying to improve online search.

Other academics have gone on to found valuable non-profits based on their research. For example, GiveWell recommended charity the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative emerged from a group of academics at Imperial College London, such as expert in tropical parasitology Prof Alan Fenwick, who coined the term ‘neglected tropical diseases’ to draw attention to the problem. Similarly the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention emerged from academic researchers at the University of Edinburgh. You can learn about that history in our interview with one of its founders, Dr Leah Utyasheva. The credibility they gain from their work in academia appears very helpful in getting these projects off the ground.

Anyone with expertise can set up these kinds of non-profits – you don’t necessarily need to be an academic – but we think academia is a particularly good place to develop expertise for many people, as you get to work alongside some of the most knowledgeable people in an area, free from commercial pressure.

3. Influencing academia and research management

When Nick Bostrom was at university, he was expelled from the psychology department for trying to study too many subjects : he was taking classes from anthropology and literature all the way to science and psychology.

Bostrom’s highly interdisciplinary approach, and his tendency to take a step back and look at the “bigger picture”, has led him to ask questions almost no-one before him had, such as whether we might face a genuine threat of extinction in the next century, or how technology might lead to drastic changes in the human condition.

Ten years ago, he founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, an academic research department which he still runs full-time. Rather than just conduct his own research, he’s recruited and managed other researchers working on important topics, who would have struggled to find a place to do this work otherwise, or might not even have considered doing so.

Other academics have had a huge impact on a field by suggesting improvements to the methods used in a field. Psychologist Brian Nosek and statistician Andrew Gelman are two examples of academics who have led the push for more rigorous methods and openness in social science, which could vastly improve the quality of research in future.

The recent “replication crisis” in social science has found that many of the most widely accepted findings do not hold up under scrutiny – in many cases, repeating the original experiments does not yield the same result. This suggests that a huge amount of resources have been wasted on research using poor methods – fixing this could massively boost the reliability of all future work in the entire field.

Another way to have a large impact as an academic, then, is to influence the direction of other researchers’ work, and the trajectory of a field as a whole – maybe even establishing entirely new fields.

Influencing the direction of others’ research often follows from having amazing ideas yourself. But it’s also possible to increase the output of other researchers or a field in more subtle, less glamorous ways, if you’re more entrepreneurial.

We’ve written before about how jobs in research management can be incredibly valuable: if you can help a whole team of researchers to be a little more productive by doing the neglected work of management, then you can have more impact than you would alone. We recently made the case in more detail in our article on operations management .

Projects like keeping track of and prioritising research within a department, fundraising, managing researchers to enable them to be as productive as possible, and recruiting new, talented researchers, are really important but often neglected within academia.

The skill set needed to do this kind of work effectively is also relatively rare: you need to have a thorough understanding of the relevant research, but also administrative and management skills. Many great researchers are uninterested in management and do as little of it as they can, so if you have this rare combination of skills and a willingness to focus more on the management side, you could be very valuable to a department.

Research management jobs can be part of an academic career – working as head of a department, for example – but sometimes they’re a separate job, such as being a project manager in a research group. This latter case could also be a good option if you decide that research isn’t quite the right path for you.

A related path is academic journal editing. Journal editors determine which articles are published, and therefore which are considered credible and newsworthy. Editors therefore shape the public conversation both inside and outside of academia — e.g. by determining which studies science journalists write about, and to some extent, how the findings are presented. Editors are often senior academics, but some journals are run by people for whom editing is their main career. For example, Editor-in-Chief Magdalena Skipper of the journal Nature went full-time into an academic editorial career after her postdoctoral work.

For many of these kinds of roles you need a PhD, and even where you don’t it helps to have experience in the kind of research you’re working with. But you also don’t need to be a leading professor. For example, after finishing his PhD in genomics, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh decided he could likely have a much greater impact doing project management at the Future of Humanity Institute, which he believed was doing really valuable work.

Seán is now executive director at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge, an organisation which almost certainly wouldn’t exist without him.

The career paths we have discussed above are competitive, and success is not guaranteed. It’s natural to doubt whether you’ll be able to do or enable high-impact research, be in a position to advise policymakers, and so on. This leads us to:

If you’re in doubt, it’s often worth staying in academia

Keeping options open.

If you haven’t yet done a PhD and are unsure whether an academic career is right for you, then it may be worth spending a year or two exploring other options. It’s not unusual for people to start a PhD in their mid-to-late twenties, and this shouldn’t hinder your career prospects much.

But if you already have a PhD and are uncertain about whether to continue in academia, it’s probably better to lean towards staying (especially if you don’t have clear alternative options.)

Spend a couple of years focused on building up a good publication record and applying for academic jobs, and then reassess based on your success and what other options are available to you.

Almost everyone in academia advises against taking a break once you’ve done your PhD, because it’s generally harder to enter or re-enter academia later. Postdoc and permanent positions are highly competitive and will go to those with the best track record and strongest publications. If you take a career break, your publication record may not be strong enough to get a good position, and it gives the impression you’re not serious about pursuing research. It’s also generally easier to transition from academia to other industries than the reverse, as many jobs look positively upon academic experience, but academia tends to place little value on non-academic experience.

Good backup options

Moreover, even if you leave academia later, you’ll probably have good back-up options, especially if you’ve chosen certain fields and leave before your early 30s. The table below shows some good backup options if you’re coming from different academic backgrounds:

We cover specific exit options in our profiles on individual PhDs .

The work can be very satisfying

Academic research can be very satisfying if you’re a good fit and find the right position: there’s probably no other job that gives you the same degree of autonomy to do intellectually satisfying work, and you’ll be surrounded by other smart and curious people.

However, the amount of freedom you have to research what you think is most important will vary depending on the specific field and department, and is likely to be lower earlier in your career, when there’s more pressure to work on whatever is most likely to get you published.

One study on job satisfaction in academia suggests that satisfaction is higher among full professors than more junior faculty members, which is consistent with this. 7

One downside of academia to be aware of is that sometimes it can be quite solitary. Especially during a PhD, if you’re not working on projects with other people regularly, you’ll be working on your own quite a lot. However, this varies a lot by field – in the humanities and some social sciences highly collaborative research groups are less common, whereas lab sciences are generally a lot more collaborative.

This means you’ll need to be happy working fairly independently, and be able to manage and motivate yourself to a large degree. However, you’ll at least be based in a university with lots of smart and interesting young people – so even if the work is solitary, there are likely to be good social opportunities.

Overall, having a large degree of autonomy seems to be a good thing – at least for people who enjoy research, and want the freedom to pursue their own ideas – and so is another point in favour of academic careers.

Having a very engaged and supportive supervisor (so not necessarily the most busy and senior academic in the field!) can make a big difference, as can talking to other PhD students and postdocs regularly to share ideas. (For AI research specifically, our job board curates a list of potential PhD supervisors working on AI alignment .)

You’ll also want to make sure you’re working on questions you feel very intrinsically motivated to answer, since you’ll have to drive yourself to keep making progress with much less external pressure than most jobs.

What are the main downsides?

Highly competitive and low chances of progression.

As we mentioned earlier, academia is highly competitive:

• A study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in 2010, less than 15% of new PhDs in science, engineering, and health-related fields found tenure-track positions within 3 years after graduation. For PhDs in the life sciences, the figure was a grim 7.6%.
• The NSF estimated that, in 2010, only 11% of PhDs in the biological sciences held tenure-track positions 3 to 5 years after graduation, down from 55% in 1973. 8
• One way to measure how competitive an academic field is to look at its “reproduction rate”: what is the mean number of new PhD students a typical faculty member will graduate during his or her career? This gives us an estimate of how many PhD graduates there are per faculty position. One study found that there is roughly one tenure‐track position in the US for every 6.3 PhD graduates in the biomedical sciences. 9
• Another looking at engineering finds that “a professor in the US graduates 7.8 new PhDs during his/her whole career on average … This implies that [barring growth in academic positions], only 12.8% of PhD graduates can attain academic positions.” 10
• The situation seems similar in other countries. For instance, in the UK, for example, only 3.5% of people with a science PhD make it to permanent research positions in academia and just 0.45% of STEM PhD holders in the UK become tenured professors (though note that the title “professor” is awarded much less often in the UK as in the US, as it is reserved for senior academic staff). Only around 20% end up in any sort of research roles. 11

However, these figures vary a lot by institution – a 2015 study of 19,000 faculty members in business, computer science and history found that 25% of institutions produced 71-86% of all tenure-track faculty depending on the field. 12 This means that if you’re able to do your PhD at one of the most elite universities, your chances of getting tenure will be substantially higher than 15%. (If we assume that all these universities produce the same number of PhD graduates, and that 15% on average get academic roles, then around 47% of graduates from the top 25% of universities would be successful but only 4% from the remaining universities. If the top 25% of institutions graduate twice as many students as the rest, then the figures move to 29% and 5%. This suggests your chances are 2-3x higher than the overall average at top institutions.)

Over the last 20 years, it has also become increasingly common to do one or more “postdocs” – temporary non-tenure-track research positions, normally lasting 1-3 years each – before getting a faculty appointment. According to the National Research Council’s report, “Bridges to Independence”, the share of recent PhDs in postdoc positions rose from 13 to 34 percent between 1972 and 2003. 13 Scientists doing postdocs in the US spend an average of 3 years in this holding pattern and only about 17% ultimately land tenure‐track positions. 14 A typical postdoctoral research associate salary is $45-55,000.

This seems to be a result of the fact that the number of PhD graduates has dramatically increased – in 1994, 7,800 people received doctorates in the life sciences in the US, whereas by 2014 there were 11,335 – while the number of tenure track and tenured professorship positions has stayed constant.

All of this comes after a large fraction of people who start PhDs fail to complete them. Between 41 and 78% of people who start PhDs have finished them after ten years, depending on their discipline. Computer and Information Science has among the lowest completion rates at (41%), Economics is in the middle (52%) and life sciences fairly high (63%). 15 Though note completion rates are better among the most prestigious institutions.

Competitiveness also means that you might not have that much flexibility to decide where you live and work, or even what research you do. It’s common to have to move to a different university at each different stage of your academic career, which might not suit some people, especially if they need to bring their families with them.

Academic incentives aren’t always aligned with doing valuable research

One of the biggest problems in academia is the “publish or perish” mindset. As we showed in the section above, academia is extremely competitive. Progression is mainly decided based on your publications, which means there are powerful incentives to publish many papers, to do so in the most prestigious journals, and to be as highly cited as possible.

These incentives make it hard to do the most valuable research within academia. The research that gets you lots of publications isn’t necessarily the research that’s most valuable. The research that’s most likely to get published often depends on what’s popular in the field at the time, or research that suggests novel, exciting results.

In psychology, for example, the pressure to publish exciting and novel results appears to have led to a slip in the standards of research methods, which has now become clear as many of the most popular findings fail replication. 16 If you need to publish regularly, this also pushes towards producing lots of small, incremental findings, rather than deeper work that might result in more valuable breakthroughs.

If you think that the most valuable research questions are far higher impact than average, then having to work on other questions might significantly reduce the impact of this path.

However, we still think academia has a lot of advantages for doing high-impact research – as we discussed earlier, you’ll generally have more freedom than doing research for a company, and academia attracts some of the smartest people.

How easy it is to do valuable research can vary a lot by the field and lab/research group you’re working with. One way to make this easier is to explicitly try and work with academics and groups who you think have a track record of working on important topics in the past, or who are clearly in the middle of trying to solve an important problem. If you can go and work in an AI group that has been producing cutting-edge, well-respected research over the last few years, a biomedical research lab who have a track record of producing effective disease treatments, or a public policy group who regularly engage with and advise government, for example, the incentives you face on a day-to-day basis are much more likely to align with doing valuable work. Some positions might carry fewer teaching responsibilities, and if you can get to a tenure-track position relatively quickly, you’ll have much more time and autonomy.

That said, if you can’t find a PhD opportunity with a research group working on an important problem, you may want to reconsider. We discuss this issue under How to establish your career early on .

Lower salaries

Academia has lower salaries than industry in general – for example, being an academic in a quantitative field is much less well paid than being a data scientist or programmer which requires similar skills. A Nature Jobs salary and career survey found “a big disparity in industry versus academic salaries”, with average industry salaries exceeding average academic salaries by 50% in Asia and by 40% in Europe and North America (though note that many academics get far more annual leave and flexibility than those in corporate jobs). 17

These averages vary significantly by academic field – with disciplines such as computer science, economics, and law paying higher salaries than average. Professors in those fields can earn as much as you might by your 30s in software engineering or even some parts of finance. 18 However, people capable of becoming computer science professors can often earn far more than average in industry, and rise up the ranks more quickly. All considered, most academics have the impression that they could have earned significantly more in the commercial sector.

Long training time

Training for an academic career takes a long time – at least 3 years for a PhD, and closer to 5-7 years in the US (though you generally get much more training in the US, which prepares you better for the academic job market.) Because of the competitive nature of academia we discussed earlier, getting from a PhD to an academic position can also take a long time – in biomedical research, for example, the age of first independent faculty appointments has risen from 34 in 1979 to 38 in 2003. 19

Since these are some of your most potentially productive years, the opportunity cost of doing a PhD and then postdocs is pretty high if you don’t end up following an academic career.

Furthermore, many of the problems we recommend focusing on are urgent, and work on them today is more useful than work on them in the future. Delaying your directly valuable work by 7 years, is itself a cost.

For this reason we generally recommend people think thoroughly about whether to do a PhD before committing to one, and ideally spend some time exploring other options first, rather than just doing one as a default. We cover how to do that later.

Lower flexibility

Establishing yourself as a specialist in a specific academic discipline may make it harder for you to be flexible and change the cause area you work on later in your career, though this varies from field to field. Mathematicians and social scientists, for example, often have lots of flexibility to apply their expertise to different problems, whereas biologists are often more focused on a narrow area.

What’s more, since relevant expertise is so important in many of the top problem areas, we think it’s often worth giving up this flexibility in order to gain specialist expertise if you pick a promising field. This is especially true if you’re coordinating with a community – if everyone specialises in something, the community learns more and some of those bets are sure to pay off.

How to assess your personal fit

As we’ve discussed, research seems to be an area where the most successful people have far more impact than the rest. This means that personal fit is an even more important factor than normal in deciding whether to enter this path.

What are the entry requirements?

To get started down this path, you’ll need:

• A strong undergraduate degree (at least a 2.1 in the UK, though most people recommend a first, or a GPA of 3.5 or higher) in a relevant field.
• Many PhD programs require a Master’s degree first (especially in Europe), depending on the field and your background.
• For US PhDs you’ll have to take the GRE, a standardised test required by most graduate schools, measuring verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical thinking. This blog post has data on the average GRE scores of applicants in different fields , which gives an idea of the kinds of scores you should be aiming for.

What does it take to excel?

Track record.

The best predictor of success in academia, as in many fields, will be your existing track record. If you have managed to publish respectable papers before or during your PhD, especially as first author, that is a great indicator that you could succeed in academia. Similarly, your ranking in your classes or the competitiveness of the graduate school you got into are leading indicators.

Within biomedical research, researchers built a statistical model that predicts chances of becoming a principal investigator based on factors including publication record, gender, and university rank.

Below we will focus on other factors whose predictive value is not so obvious, and which don’t require you to already have pursued a PhD.

How important is intelligence?

In general, high IQ seems to provide a significant advantage in doing scientific research . A study of 64 eminent scientists (physicists, biologists, and social psychologists) by Harvard psychologist Anne Roe found that their median scores on tests of verbal, spatial and mathematical reasoning corresponded to IQ scores well above the median IQ of PhD scientists (though some have contested this, as we discuss below). 20 If IQ were irrelevant beyond a threshold, we’d expect this group of successful scientists to have average scores similar to the average population of scientists which are already very high. Another line of support for this comes from the fact that intelligence is correlated with job performance more generally 21 , and the correlation is stronger for more complex jobs 22 . Since research is among the most complex careers, this suggests intelligence will be strongly predictive of success in research. 23

Beyond this, more specific abilities – in verbal, quantitative, and spatial reasoning – seem to be important predictors of which fields a person is most likely to succeed in . A more recent longitudinal study of “mathematically precocious youth” over 35 years found that ability level (as measured by SAT scores aged 13) contributed significantly to academic accomplishments (securing a doctorate, tenure-track position, patents or noteworthy publications), but that ability tilt (the difference between math and verbal SAT scores) was highly predictive of the kind of domain these achievements occurred in. Subjects who reached high levels of achievement in the humanities were more likely to score high on the verbal SAT relative to the math SAT, and the reverse for those whose achievements were in the sciences. 24

Results from the same 35-year study of talented youth found that spatial reasoning ability (the ability to match objects seen from different perspectives, judge what cross-section will result when an object is cut in different ways, etc.) is predictive of academic success in addition to verbal & quantitative reasoning . A 2013 analysis found that verbal & quantitative reasoning jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance in the number of patents & peer-reviewed publications a subject had, and that spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%. 25 David Lubinski, one of the study’s co-directors, suggests that spatial reasoning “may be the largest known untapped source of human potential… no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it’s generally overlooked in school-based assessments.” 26

However, this doesn’t mean that you need to have an IQ or test scores in the top 0.01% in order to have a chance of contributing valuable research. In A Question of Intelligence , Daniel Seligman reports that the correlation between IQ and elementary school grades is 0.65. 27 This is a high correlation, but far from perfect – meaning how hard you work and other personality factors are also likely to be important, as we’ll discuss below. Seligman points out that if becoming a tenured professor is a one in a thousand level accomplishment, then we’d expect the average tenured professor to have an IQ of around 150 if the correlation between IQ and academic success were perfect. But if the correlation is 0.65, then we should expect the average tenured professor to have an IQ around 133, with quite a bit of variability around that.

There’s also reasonable variability by field – high intelligence, and high verbal/quantitative/spatial reasoning ability will be more important in some areas than others. Here are the average GRE scores of applicants to the following PhD courses:

• Physics (1899)
• Mathematics (1877)
• Computer Science (1862)
• Economics (1857)
• Chemical Engin. (1845)
• Material Science (1840)
• Electrical Engin. (1821)
• Mechanical Engin. (1814)
• Philosophy (1803)
• Chemistry (1779)
• Earth Sciences (1761)
• Industrial Engin. (1745)
• Civil Engin. (1744)
• Biology (1734)
• English Lang. / Lit. (1702)
• Religion / Theology (1701)
• Political Science (1697)
• History (1695)
• Art History (1681)
• Anthro. / Archaeol. (1675)
• Architecture (1652)
• Business (1639)
• Sociology (1613)
• Psychology (1583)
• Medicine (1582)
• Communication (1549)
• Education (1514)
• Public Administrat. (1460)

We worry about the reliability of this data, which is purportedly from 2002, and would like to find a better source, but so far it is the only one we have found.

We can also get a sense of how important IQ is in a field by looking at the age of peak performance in that field. Since IQ declines sharply with age, fields where researchers make their biggest breakthroughs early in their careers are likely to rely more on intelligence — in physics and pure mathematics, the age of peak output is around 30, for example, suggesting intelligence is highly important for contributions in these fields. In medicine and history, by contrast, the age of peak output is closer to 50 — suggesting that accumulated knowledge and effort play a much larger role in making contributions to these fields. Psychology falls somewhere in between. 28

So while intelligence is important, and will certainly increase your chances of being able to contribute valuable research, it varies by field, and you don’t have to be a genius to contribute. While IQ does predict academic success on average, the correlations are weak enough that there are lots of exceptions, and measures of IQ aren’t perfect. 29 This means you shouldn’t necessarily give up on research if you don’t get an off-the-charts IQ score, especially if you have other strengths or can find important but neglected areas of research.

How much difference does hard work make?

K. Anders Ericsson, a leading researcher studying expert performance, argues against the view that some people are “naturals” in an area, able to attain mastery with ease. His research suggests that the highest-performing people have all done a huge amount of focused practice, usually with top mentors: “even children considered to have innate gifts need to attain their superior performance gradually, by engaging in extended amounts of designed deliberate practice over many years.” 30

This suggests that success in academic research may depend to a large degree on your ability to work in focused ways over long periods of time, with good feedback — which may in turn depend on your interest in and motivation to sustain work in an area, and your ability to find others to learn from.

However, the importance of more innate factors like intelligence/talent versus deliberate practice is still debated. One meta-analysis of studies of deliberate practice challenges whether Ericsson’s findings – which mostly look at performance in clearly-defined, predictable areas such as games and music – generalise to less-predictable domains such as science and education (where presumably it’s harder to get the high-quality feedback needed for fast improvement.) 31

More generally, Ericsson’s research strongly suggests that world class performance in a domain requires 10 to 30 years of focused practice. But it may be that even this is not sufficient for just anyone to achieve excellence – you may still need to start out with certain genetic predispositions. Simonton, the psychologist who studies scientific productivity we mentioned earlier, suggests that “scientific achievement is not a matter of either talent or training but rather a matter of talent operating in the context of training.” To say that some people are genetically predisposed to be more likely to successful scientists is not to say they are born with some diffuse “gift” for science. Rather, there may be a number of important composite factors – both intellectual and personality characteristics – which are at least partially genetically determined, and which contribute significantly to scientific achievement. 32

What about other personality factors?

There’s reason to think that personality factors contribute substantially to academic success in addition to intelligence and deliberate practice.

This makes sense if we consider Shockley’s point that we mentioned earlier: being a successful scientist requires combining multiple distinct skills, including the ability to think of a good problem, the ability to work hard on it, the ability to write well, and the ability to respond well to feedback and persist in making changes. Different personality variables are likely to contribute to these different abilities – creativity and openness might help you to think of a good problem and look for unusual solutions, whereas conscientiousness will help you to persist in working on a problem when it’s no longer exciting.

There’s some evidence on how personality factors influence academic and research performance to back this up. 33 A meta-analysis of studies on predictors of academic performance found that “conscientiousness added as much to the prediction of tertiary academic performance as did intelligence”. 34 The same paper also reports weaker effects of agreeableness and openness to experience on academic performance.

Other research suggests that intellectual curiosity may be an important determinant of academic achievement (a position we’ve found echoed by almost everyone we’ve spoken to in the field). Another meta-analysis of studies of academic achievement looked at the predictive power of the personality construct Typical Intellectual Engagement (TIE) – a measure of enjoyment of intellectually demanding activities – alongside intelligence and effort. They found that intelligence accounted for the greatest variance in academic achievement, but that the combined effects of TIE and effort equalled those effects of intelligence. 35

There’s also some moderate evidence that creativity is important for doing successful research, and in some cases high levels of creativity can compensate for lower levels of intelligence 36 .

Finally, we expect that advancement in fields which require managing teams of young researchers and applying for grant funding will benefit from strong social skills.

How to assess your personal fit at each stage of your career?

You have a few key opportunities to assess whether an academic career is for you:

• Something you can do at any stage is practice research and research-based writing. A relatively easy way to get started is by trying your hand at writing ‘ fact posts ‘.

During your undergraduate studies, aim to complete at least one summer research project. This will help with graduate school applications, while also giving you a taste of what research is like — it’s pretty different from studying a subject at undergraduate.

After you graduate, if you’re highly confident that academia is your top option (say 80%+ confidence), then aim to continue directly into graduate studies. If you’re unsure (say 40%+), then the 1-2 years between undergraduate and graduate study are a good time to experiment with other options you’re interested in. We recommend experimenting now rather than after your PhD because, as we explained earlier, it’s hard to take any break from academia after your PhD. This could also be a good time to consider a research assistant position or pre-doctoral fellowship, which can allow you to work in a research lab and test your fit for academia while also sometimes allowing you to take classes at your host institution, without committing to a PhD.

At that point, if you still think academia is for you, then apply to graduate studies. Again, if you can get into a top 20 school in your subject, that’s some indication of potential. For graduate schools in the US, you have to take the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations), and your scores in this also provide some indication of potential – a meta-analysis found that GRE test scores predict grade point averages in graduate school, faculty ratings, citation scores, and later career research productivity. 37

During your studies, you might be able to experiment with some internships on the side, to keep learning about alternative options. For example, as a graduate student you might be able to get internships in government, think tanks, or industry, depending on your field.

Near the end of your PhD, you face a key decision-point: will you continue? This is a good opportunity to re-assess your fit. If you think there’s a reasonable chance academia is your top option (say over 50%), then it’s worth continuing to keep your options open. You can also apply to postdoc positions to see what you get. If you’re able to get a postdoc in a good department/group without a large teaching load, it’s usually worth taking. In our individual profiles on specific fields, we discuss specific signals of potential at this point — but the conventional advice is that you (i) have some reasonably good publications (ii) have an offer to do a postdoc at a top research centre.

The next reassessment point is when you start applying for permanent positions. See what you get, and if in doubt, continue with academia.

However, it’s also worth mentioning that many people find it difficult or scary to leave academia – even if they don’t enjoy it anymore, or no longer think what they’re doing is valuable. People on the academic track are not taught about, nor encouraged to value, options that compete with academia. One thing that might help with this is to think in advance what your “exit” conditions are – under what conditions you’ll decide to leave academia and try something else (e.g. if you struggle to get a postdoc position in a top group/university a couple of years after your PhD), and commit to reassessing your options at each new career stage (after a PhD, after your first postdoc, when you’re going up for tenure-track positions.) If you’re going to leave academia and transition to another area, it’ll probably be easier to do so before your mid thirties (as a very rough guideline).

As well as your fit for academia in general, you’ll also want to think about your personal fit for specific areas of research, which you might be able to test by:

• Doing research projects or working as a research assistant (especially if you’re an undergraduate);
• Finding out what the prerequisites/normal backgrounds of people who go into this field are, and comparing your skills and experience to them;
• Reading key research papers, trying to contribute to discussions with other researchers, and getting feedback on your ideas;
• Talking to professors or other successful researchers in a field and asking what they look for.

Maximising your impact within academia

Which field should you go into.

When choosing the best field to focus on, we recommend considering your personal fit, the impact of the field, and your back-up options.

Read more about choosing a research field .

How to establish your career early on

At the beginning of your career, most of the academics we spoke to recommended focusing on developing expertise and building up a good track record of publications. A good publication record will be essential for you to get the best academic jobs and funding later on, which in turn will give you the freedom to pursue whatever research questions you think are most important.

One study of the predictors of long-term academic success found that “by far the best predictor of long-term publication success is your early publication record.”

Learning and building up a good track record doesn’t have to be completely at odds with doing valuable research, though. The best people to learn from are likely to be those who you think are doing good work on important questions.

And while building up a good publication record is important, it would also be a mistake to publish in areas completely divorced from the kind of research you want to do long-term, as then you risk getting pigeonholed in the wrong area, and won’t necessarily be building the right expertise. If you want to have a big impact through your research in the long-run, it seems important to spend at least some time early in your career on projects you think could be extremely valuable.

Maximising your impact later on

1. maximising the impact of your research.

Richard Hamming, the mathematician we mentioned earlier, famously went around asking his colleagues, “what do you think are the most important problems in your field?” When they responded with a few specific ideas, he followed up with, “And why aren’t you working on them?”

This may not have made him many friends, but it demonstrated how many academics simply don’t ask themselves this question, and don’t actually spend a great deal of time thinking about how they can do important research.

In a famous speech on ‘why so few scientists make significant contributions’ Hamming reported his observation that: “the average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which they believe will not be important.”

This raises an important point – in order to do important research, you need to spend a reasonable amount of time thinking about what questions are important.

As we mentioned previously, even within a field that seems highly relevant to important problems, some research questions will be much more valuable than others.

Many people seem to “fall into” research areas due to circumstantial reasons: they inherited a PhD topic from their supervisor, and then looked for research positions in related areas. This leads to crowding and ‘path dependence’ in what topics are addressed by academics.

There can also be a tendency in academia to focus on very narrow areas. That makes it easier to explain what your specific area of expertise is, but it also leads to a lack of big picture thinking.

How can you ensure you focus on important questions throughout your academic career? When thinking about how to choose research questions within a field, you can use the same framework we use to think about cause areas: looking for questions that are important, tractable, and uncrowded. For example, if you’re a biomedical researcher you might try to identify diseases that affect a lot of people, which not many researchers focus on, but where it seems like more research could yield effective treatments.

Here are some rules of thumb, based on the advice we heard in our interviews with top scientists, which may help you to identify high impact research questions:

• Look for research questions that seem important but are short on talent. Ask why people aren’t working on these questions – is it because they’re intractable (good reason!) or because there aren’t good incentives to work on it, it’s not fashionable or doesn’t fit neatly into an academic field? (bad reasons!) Sometimes small findings and unglamorous innovations can make a big difference – not all valuable research is paradigm-shifting. See examples of research questions we think could be promising from a longtermist perspective .

Work on really giant problems that are in the process of being solved – even if there’s a lot of attention on a problem, if it’s big enough additional effort could make a big difference, and if there’s a track record of valuable progress that’s promising. For example, global health research gets quite a bit of attention, but an extra researcher could still do really valuable work on developing treatments and vaccines, especially if focused on more neglected areas. Focusing on big problems that seem tractable, and then looking for neglected areas within those areas could be a good approach.

Bring new skills, perspectives or technology to an important area – for example, Daniel Kahneman brought findings from psychology to economics and ended up winning a Nobel Prize. This might also allow you to work on questions that don’t fit neatly in an academic field, that others might miss. Learning maths, statistics, and how to work with data seems likely to be useful in all fields, and might give you an edge or do work others can’t if you’re in a field that’s not typically quantitative.

Ask other experts in the field what they think the most important questions are (like Hamming) – academics who have a lot of experience in a field might be better able to spot important, neglected areas. However, the opposite could also sometimes be the case – if a professor has built their career working in a niche area, then they may well have a bias towards thinking that area is disproportionately important. If you can find more experienced researchers who seem to have thought hard about the most important questions in their field, learning from them could be really helpful.

Some of the researchers we spoke to also emphasised the value of developing the skill of identifying which research questions are important, and regularly trying to get feedback on whether your research is going in the direction you’d hoped. Anders Sandberg , a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, told us that “being able to evaluate what you’re working on, having some kind of importance check, and setting your priorities straight is really important.” He even said he’d rather take a pill that gave him this skill than an intelligence enhancing pill.

2. Maximising your impact in academia beyond research

As we’ve covered, you might be able to have as much or even more impact in ways that go beyond your own research – by doing advocacy, applying your research outside of academia, advising policymakers, and managing or influencing other researchers.

Your opportunity to make a difference via these different routes will depend a lot on your personal strengths, preferences, and the specific opportunities in your field.

Perhaps the best way to maximise your impact in academia beyond research is to stay open to all these possible paths early on, and spend time exploring different opportunities early in your career to learn where you can have the most impact.

For example, during a PhD or postdoc, keep an eye out for opportunities to communicate your research for a popular audience, and see whether you enjoy and are good at communicating complex ideas simply.

You might do this by looking for popular science publications that look for contributions from academics, or finding opportunities to give talks (which isn’t too difficult in academia – even talking about your research to a wider academic audience at conferences could be good practice.)

If you notice that other academics in your field or department seem to be applying their research beyond academia – advising companies or government, or involved in building products – then talk to them about how they got into this area.

Some companies and parts of government also offer internships specifically for PhD students, which could be a great way to explore the potential to apply research from your field outside of academia. For example, the main research councils in the UK run a “policy internship scheme” for students whose PhD research they fund.

Even if you think you might be able to have a large impact through outreach or applying your research, you’ll still probably want to focus on excelling as a researcher, and developing a good publication record, early in your career. This is because being successful in advocacy, as a governmental advisor or other similar paths, requires you to both have genuine expertise and strong credentials.

If you decide that you definitely want to focus on outreach over research – a “public intellectual”-type path, then you may want to focus on getting an academic position that gives you plenty of time and freedom as soon as possible.

It is not a great surprise that many of history’s most influential figures – like Adam Smith, Stephen Hawking, Rosalind Franklin and Jonas Salk – have worked in academia.

On the other hand, most people who set out to become academics will not make it, as the impediments to reaching a position in which you have discretion over what you study are substantial.

But for those who have the intelligence, conscientiousness and curiosity to succeed, working in academia provides an unusual opportunity to work on the problems they think are most pressing in the world – at least so long as they can find grants to fund them and journals to publish in.

Those who are interested can learn more about specific PhD options and find interviews with academics discussing how the path has worked out for them in the Learn more section.

Think you have a good shot at becoming an academic researcher focused on a pressing problem?

We’ve helped dozens of people decide if this is the right path for them, and if so how to go about it. We can offer introductions and funding opportunities, or answer specific questions you might have. If you think you have what it takes, apply for our free coaching service.

Apply for coaching

Top recommendations

• You and Your Research — a famous talk by Richard Hamming
• Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline
• What we’ve heard is the best book on becoming a professor: Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia by Jason Brennan

Further recommendations

Articles and resources.

• Why you should consider applying for grad school right now
• Effective Thesis — an organisation that works with students (from undergraduates to PhDs) who want to change the world with their research
• Economics PhD
• Computer Science PhD
• Biomedical research
• Philosophy PhD
• Machine Learning PhD

80,000 Hours podcasts related to academic careers

• Tackling the ethics of infinity, being clueless about the effects of our actions, and having moral empathy for intellectual adversaries, with philosopher Dr Amanda Askell
• Dr Owen Cotton-Barratt on why scientists should need insurance, PhD strategy & what if AI progresses fast
• Prof Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
• Rachel Glennerster on how “market shaping” could help solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems
• Prof Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating effective altruism decades ago & how to make a much happier world
• Dr Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals
• Speeding up social science 10-fold, how to do research that’s actually useful, & why plenty of startups cause harm
• Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
• Luisa and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun
• Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more
• Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects

Notes and references

• Alan Turing: The codebreaker who saved ‘millions of lives’ , BBC News, 19 June 2012. ↩
• See figures 7-12: Hauser, Robert Mason. Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the sources of occupational success. Madison, Wis, USA: Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin, 2002. ↩
• Full disclosure: Giving What We Can is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism, which also serves as the parent charity of 80,000 Hours. Without Peter Singer, there’s a good chance 80,000 Hours would not exist, either! ↩
• “Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Results”. October 15, 2005. ↩
• Wikipedia contributors. “Bruce Chapman (Australian economist).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Oct. 2017. Web. 25 Jul. 2018. ↩
• A recent survey of leaders in the EA community asked what skills they wanted to see more in the community as a whole – and found that specialist expertise in subjects such as machine learning and biology were perceived to be of medium importance (though not as important as more generalist skills such as management and policy expertise.) ↩
• Hesli, Vicki L., and Jae Mook Lee. “Job satisfaction in academia: Why are some faculty members happier than others?.” PS: Political Science & Politics 46.2 (2013): 339-354. ↩
• Julie Gould. The elephant in the lab. NatureJobs Blog 2015. ↩
• Ghaffarzadegan, N., Hawley, J., Larson, R., & Xue, Y. (2015). A Note on PhD Population Growth in Biomedical Sciences . Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 23(3), 402–405. http://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2324 ↩
• Larson, Richard C., Navid Ghaffarzadegan, and Yi Xue. “Too many PhD graduates or too few academic job openings: the basic reproductive number R0 in academia.” Systems research and behavioral science 31.6 (2014): 745-750. ↩
• Taylor, Martin, Ben Martin, and James Wilsdon. The scientific century: securing our future prosperity. The Royal Society, 2010. ↩
• Clauset, A., Arbesman, S., Larremore, D.B. (2015). Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks . Science Advances, 1, 1 ↩
• Bonetta, L. (2009) “ The Evolving Postdoctoral Experience “. Science Magazine ↩
• Andalib, Maryam A., Navid Ghaffarzadegan, and Richard C. Larson. “The Postdoc Queue: A Labour Force in Waiting.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science (2016). ↩
• Ph.D. Completion and Attrition: Analysis of Baseline Program Data from the Ph.D. Completion Project. Downloadable here. ↩
• “Ten Famous Psychology Findings That It’s Been Difficult To Replicate” by Christian Jarrett, September 16, 2016. Archived link, retrieved 1-Oct-2018 ↩
• Russo, G. (2010). For love and money . Nature 465, 1104-1107 ↩
• “Study Finds Continued Large Gaps in Faculty Salaries, Based on Discipline.” Esports Quickly Expanding in Colleges, Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, Archived link, retrieved 9-Nov-2018 ↩
• “According to the National Research Council’s report “ Bridges to Independence ,” the age of first independent faculty appointments for Ph.D.s has been rising steadily from 34 in 1979 to 38 in 2003″, Bonetta, L. (2009) “ The Evolving Postdoctoral Experience “. Science Magazine ↩

See Roe, A. (1952) The Making of a Scientist . ↩

• Hunter, John E. “Cognitive ability, cognitive aptitudes, job knowledge, and job performance.” Journal of vocational behavior 29.3 (1986): 340-362. ↩
• Hunter, John E, Frank L Schmidt, and Michael K Judiesch. “Individual differences in output variability as a function of job complexity.” Journal of Applied Psychology 75.1 (1990): 28. ↩
• “Although GMA predicts performance in all jobs the more complex the job is13, the stronger the relationship between GMA and performance.14 And the more complex the job, the more variation there is between top performers and bottom performers.15 So if you have one of the highest levels of GMA in a highly complex job, you’ll have a high output compared to the average performer.” Intelligence matters more than you think for career success. ↩
• Park, G., Lubinski, D., and Benbow, C. (2007). Contrasting Intellectual Patterns Predict Creativity in the Arts and Sciences: Tracking Intellectually Precocious Youth Over 25 Years. Psychological Science, 18, 11, pp. 948-952 ↩
• Lubinski, D., Benbow, C., Kell, H. (2014). Life Paths and Accomplishments of Mathematically Precocious Males and Females Four Decades Later . Psychological Science, 25, 12, pp.2217-2232 ↩
• Clynes, T. (2016) How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children . Nature 537, 152-155 ↩
• This is the best place to understand the true relationship between IQ and academic performance rather than later in the education system, because at later stages lower-IQ people have already dropped out, so other factors beyond IQ will account for more of the variance. ↩
• “At one extreme, some fields are characterized by relatively early peaks, usually around the early 30s or even late 20s in chronological units, with somewhat steep descents thereafter, so that the output rate becomes less than one quarter the maximum. This agewise pattern apparently holds for such endeavors as lyric poetry, pure mathematics, and theoretical physics, for example. At the contrary extreme, the typical trends in other endeavors may display a leisurely rise to a comparatively late peak, in the late 40s or even 50s chronologically, with a minimal if not largely absent drop-off afterward. This more elongated curve holds for such domains as novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine, and general scholarship, for instance.” From Simonton, Dean K. “Age and outstanding achievement: What do we know after a century of research?.” Psychological Bulletin 104.2 (1988): 251. ↩
• “On a population level, we see that the average doctor is 30 IQ points higher than the average janitor, that college professors are overwhelmingly high-IQ, and we think yeah, this is about what we would hope for from a statistic measuring intelligence. But on an individual level, we see that below-average IQ people sometimes become scientists, professors, engineers, and almost anything else you could hope for.” Against Individual IQ Worries , SlateStarCodex. ↩
• Ericsson, K.A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance . The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance 38, 685-705 ↩
• “We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.” Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions A Meta-Analysis . Psychological Science 25(8), 1608-1618 ↩
• “Rather than define talent as a mysterious phenomenon that operates independent of domain-specific expertise, talent is best conceived as a process that openly involves that expertise. In different terms, scientific achievement is not a matter of either talent or training but rather a matter of talent operating in the context of that training… A person is certainly not born with a diffuse ‘gift’ for science. Instead, the natural endowment most likely consists of a weighted composite of numerous and highly specific intellectual and personality characteristics.” Simonton, D.K. (2008). Scientific Talent, Training, and Performance: Intellect, Personality, and Genetic Endowment . Review of General Psychology 12(1), 28-46 ↩
• Chamorro‐Premuzic, Tomas, and Adrian Furnham. “Personality traits and academic examination performance.” European journal of Personality 17.3 (2003): 237-250. ↩
• Poropat, Arthur E. “A meta-analysis of the five-factor model of personality and academic performance.” Psychological bulletin 135.2 (2009): 322. ↩
• Von Stumm, S., Hell, B., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2011). The hungry mind: Intellectual curiosity is the third pillar of academic performance . Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 574-588. ↩
• “There are no significant differences in academic achievement between the High IQ – Low Creative and Low IQ – High Creative groups. This supports the findings reported by Getzels and Jackson (1962), Torrance (1959) and Yamamoto (1964a) of equivalent academic achievement among the highly intelligent and highly creative groups.” Palaniappan, A. K. (2007, July). Academic achievement of groups formed based on creativity and intelligence . In The 13th International Conference on Thinking Norrköping; Sweden June 17-21; 2007 (No. 021, pp. 145-151). Linköping University Electronic Press. ↩
• Kuncel, N., Hezlett, S., Ones, D. (2001). A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of the Predictive Validity of the Graduate Record Examinations: Implications for Graduate School Selection and Performance . Psychological Bulletin, 127, 1, 162-181 ↩