Skip to Main Content
library logo

Ask us!

Applied Research in Environmental Science - ENVI 201 - Kelly & Stander

Scholarship is a Conversation

A literature review summarizes and evaluates published research on a specific topic, sometimes within a specific time period. It shows how the current research study is part of and contributes to a larger conversation that scholars are having on the topic.

  • draws connections or shows relationships between different studies
  • offers conclusions on the current thinking in the field
  • demonstrates how the authors' research builds upon previous research, often explaining how their study adds new knowledge to the field
  • uses in-text citations that point to the References list for full citations to the previous research
  • may be included as part of the article's Introduction

 

Sample paragraph from a literature review:

Drones are now extensively used in conservation biology, with considerable emphasis on wildlife (Christie, Gilbert, Brown, Hatfield, & Hanson, 2016; Fust & Loos, 2020). For plants, much of the work has involved mapping cover of invasive species (Dash, Watt, Paul, Morgenroth, & Hartley, 2019) or vegetation mapping more generally (e.g., Cunliffe, Brazier, & Anderson, 2016; Zweig, Burgess, Percival, & Kitchens, 2015). In a recent review, Cerrejón, Valeria, Marchand, Caners, and Fenton (2021)) discussed the current state of research on use of drone imagery for rare plant detection. A few published papers have used drone imagery for plant census (e.g., Leduc & Knudby, 2018; Ouyang et al., 2020; Strumia, Buonanno, Aronne, Santo, & Santangelo, 2020; Van Auken & Taylor, 2017), but reports of its use for studies at a finer scale in natural systems are scarce. The few examples we found involved tracking seedling or sapling fate over short time scales in semi-natural settings (Buters, Belton, & Cross, 2019; Feduck, McDermid, & Castilla, 2018).