academic literature review introduction

How to write a literature review introduction (+ examples)

The introduction to a literature review serves as your reader’s guide through your academic work and thought process. Explore the significance of literature review introductions in review papers, academic papers, essays, theses, and dissertations. We delve into the purpose and necessity of these introductions, explore the essential components of literature review introductions, and provide step-by-step guidance on how to craft your own, along with examples.

Why you need an introduction for a literature review

In academic writing , the introduction for a literature review is an indispensable component. Effective academic writing requires proper paragraph structuring to guide your reader through your argumentation. This includes providing an introduction to your literature review.

It is imperative to remember that you should never start sharing your findings abruptly. Even if there isn’t a dedicated introduction section .

Instead, you should always offer some form of introduction to orient the reader and clarify what they can expect.

When you need an introduction for a literature review

There are three main scenarios in which you need an introduction for a literature review:

What to include in a literature review introduction

It is crucial to customize the content and depth of your literature review introduction according to the specific format of your academic work.

In practical terms, this implies, for instance, that the introduction in an academic literature review paper, especially one derived from a systematic literature review , is quite comprehensive. Particularly compared to the rather brief one or two introductory sentences that are often found at the beginning of a literature review section in a standard academic paper. The introduction to the literature review chapter in a thesis or dissertation again adheres to different standards.

Academic literature review paper

The introduction of an academic literature review paper, which does not rely on empirical data, often necessitates a more extensive introduction than the brief literature review introductions typically found in empirical papers. It should encompass:

Regular literature review section in an academic article or essay

In a standard 8000-word journal article, the literature review section typically spans between 750 and 1250 words. The first few sentences or the first paragraph within this section often serve as an introduction. It should encompass:

Introduction to a literature review chapter in thesis or dissertation

The literature review typically constitutes a distinct chapter within a thesis or dissertation. Often, it is Chapter 2 of a thesis or dissertation.

Some students choose to incorporate a brief introductory section at the beginning of each chapter, including the literature review chapter. Alternatively, others opt to seamlessly integrate the introduction into the initial sentences of the literature review itself. Both approaches are acceptable, provided that you incorporate the following elements:

By addressing these elements, your introduction will empower your literature review to play a pivotal role in your thesis or dissertation research. It will accomplish this by integrating your research into the broader academic literature and providing a solid theoretical foundation for your work.

Examples of literature review introductions

Example 1: an effective introduction for an academic literature review paper.

To begin, let’s delve into the introduction of an academic literature review paper. We will examine the paper “How does culture influence innovation? A systematic literature review”, which was published in 2018 in the journal Management Decision.

Example 2: An effective introduction to a literature review section in an academic paper

The second example represents a typical academic paper, encompassing not only a literature review section but also empirical data, a case study, and other elements. We will closely examine the introduction to the literature review section in the paper “The environmentalism of the subalterns: a case study of environmental activism in Eastern Kurdistan/Rojhelat”, which was published in 2021 in the journal Local Environment.

Thus, the author successfully introduces the literature review, from which point onward it dives into the main concept (‘subalternity’) of the research, and reviews the literature on socio-economic justice and environmental degradation.

Examples 3-5: Effective introductions to literature review chapters

Numerous universities offer online repositories where you can access theses and dissertations from previous years, serving as valuable sources of reference. Many of these repositories, however, may require you to log in through your university account. Nevertheless, a few open-access repositories are accessible to anyone, such as the one by the University of Manchester . It’s important to note though that copyright restrictions apply to these resources, just as they would with published papers.

Master’s thesis literature review introduction

Phd thesis literature review chapter introduction, phd thesis literature review introduction.

The last example is the doctoral thesis Metacognitive strategies and beliefs: Child correlates and early experiences Chan, K. Y. M. (Author). 31 Dec 2020 . The author clearly conducted a systematic literature review, commencing the review section with a discussion of the methodology and approach employed in locating and analyzing the selected records.

Steps to write your own literature review introduction

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• UConn Library
• Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide
• Introduction

Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide — Introduction

• Getting Started
• How to Pick a Topic
• Strategies to Find Sources
• Evaluating Sources & Lit. Reviews
• Tips for Writing Literature Reviews
• Writing Literature Review: Useful Sites
• Citation Resources
• Other Academic Writings

What are Literature Reviews?

So, what is a literature review? "A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries." Taylor, D.  The literature review: A few tips on conducting it . University of Toronto Health Sciences Writing Centre.

Goals of Literature Reviews

What are the goals of creating a Literature Review?  A literature could be written to accomplish different aims:

• To develop a theory or evaluate an existing theory
• To summarize the historical or existing state of a research topic
• Identify a problem in a field of research 

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1997). Writing narrative literature reviews .  Review of General Psychology , 1 (3), 311-320.

What kinds of sources require a Literature Review?

• A research paper assigned in a course
• A thesis or dissertation
• A grant proposal
• An article intended for publication in a journal

All these instances require you to collect what has been written about your research topic so that you can demonstrate how your own research sheds new light on the topic.

Types of Literature Reviews

What kinds of literature reviews are written?

Narrative review: The purpose of this type of review is to describe the current state of the research on a specific topic/research and to offer a critical analysis of the literature reviewed. Studies are grouped by research/theoretical categories, and themes and trends, strengths and weakness, and gaps are identified. The review ends with a conclusion section which summarizes the findings regarding the state of the research of the specific study, the gaps identify and if applicable, explains how the author's research will address gaps identify in the review and expand the knowledge on the topic reviewed.

• Example : Predictors and Outcomes of U.S. Quality Maternity Leave: A Review and Conceptual Framework:  10.1177/08948453211037398  

Systematic review : "The authors of a systematic review use a specific procedure to search the research literature, select the studies to include in their review, and critically evaluate the studies they find." (p. 139). Nelson, L. K. (2013). Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders . Plural Publishing.

• Example : The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review:  10.1057/s41599-022-01270-w

Meta-analysis : "Meta-analysis is a method of reviewing research findings in a quantitative fashion by transforming the data from individual studies into what is called an effect size and then pooling and analyzing this information. The basic goal in meta-analysis is to explain why different outcomes have occurred in different studies." (p. 197). Roberts, M. C., & Ilardi, S. S. (2003). Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology . Blackwell Publishing.

• Example : Employment Instability and Fertility in Europe: A Meta-Analysis:  10.1215/00703370-9164737

Meta-synthesis : "Qualitative meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative study that uses as data the findings from other qualitative studies linked by the same or related topic." (p.312). Zimmer, L. (2006). Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts .  Journal of Advanced Nursing , 53 (3), 311-318.

• Example : Women’s perspectives on career successes and barriers: A qualitative meta-synthesis:  10.1177/05390184221113735

Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences

• UConn Health subject guide on systematic reviews Explanation of the different review types used in health sciences literature as well as tools to help you find the right review type
• << Previous: Getting Started
• Next: How to Pick a Topic >>
• Last Updated: Sep 21, 2022 2:16 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.uconn.edu/literaturereview

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• 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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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.

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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Writing a Literature Review

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A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

• An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
• A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
• Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
• 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 sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

• Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
• Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

• Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
• Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
• Qualitative versus quantitative research
• Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
• Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

• It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
• Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
• Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
• Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

What is a Literature Review? How to Write It (with Examples)

A literature review is a critical analysis and synthesis of existing research on a particular topic. It provides an overview of the current state of knowledge, identifies gaps, and highlights key findings in the literature. 1 The purpose of a literature review is to situate your own research within the context of existing scholarship, demonstrating your understanding of the topic and showing how your work contributes to the ongoing conversation in the field. Learning how to write a literature review is a critical tool for successful research. Your ability to summarize and synthesize prior research pertaining to a certain topic demonstrates your grasp on the topic of study, and assists in the learning process. 

Table of Contents

• What is the purpose of literature review? 
• a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction: 
• b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes: 
• c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs: 
• d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts: 

How to write a good literature review 

• Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question: 
• Decide on the Scope of Your Review: 
• Select Databases for Searches: 
• Conduct Searches and Keep Track: 
• Review the Literature: 
• Organize and Write Your Literature Review: 
• How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal? 
• Frequently asked questions 

What is a literature review?

A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with the existing literature, establishes the context for their own research, and contributes to scholarly conversations on the topic. One of the purposes of a literature review is also to help researchers avoid duplicating previous work and ensure that their research is informed by and builds upon the existing body of knowledge.

What is the purpose of literature review?

A literature review serves several important purposes within academic and research contexts. Here are some key objectives and functions of a literature review: 2  

1. Contextualizing the Research Problem: The literature review provides a background and context for the research problem under investigation. It helps to situate the study within the existing body of knowledge. 

2. Identifying Gaps in Knowledge: By identifying gaps, contradictions, or areas requiring further research, the researcher can shape the research question and justify the significance of the study. This is crucial for ensuring that the new research contributes something novel to the field. 

Find academic papers related to your research topic faster. Try Research on Paperpal  

3. Understanding Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks: Literature reviews help researchers gain an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in previous studies. This aids in the development of a theoretical framework for the current research. 

4. Providing Methodological Insights: Another purpose of literature reviews is that it allows researchers to learn about the methodologies employed in previous studies. This can help in choosing appropriate research methods for the current study and avoiding pitfalls that others may have encountered. 

5. Establishing Credibility: A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with existing scholarship, establishing their credibility and expertise in the field. It also helps in building a solid foundation for the new research. 

6. Informing Hypotheses or Research Questions: The literature review guides the formulation of hypotheses or research questions by highlighting relevant findings and areas of uncertainty in existing literature. 

Literature review example

Let’s delve deeper with a literature review example: Let’s say your literature review is about the impact of climate change on biodiversity. You might format your literature review into sections such as the effects of climate change on habitat loss and species extinction, phenological changes, and marine biodiversity. Each section would then summarize and analyze relevant studies in those areas, highlighting key findings and identifying gaps in the research. The review would conclude by emphasizing the need for further research on specific aspects of the relationship between climate change and biodiversity. The following literature review template provides a glimpse into the recommended literature review structure and content, demonstrating how research findings are organized around specific themes within a broader topic. 

Literature Review on Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity:

Climate change is a global phenomenon with far-reaching consequences, including significant impacts on biodiversity. This literature review synthesizes key findings from various studies: 

a. Habitat Loss and Species Extinction:

Climate change-induced alterations in temperature and precipitation patterns contribute to habitat loss, affecting numerous species (Thomas et al., 2004). The review discusses how these changes increase the risk of extinction, particularly for species with specific habitat requirements. 

b. Range Shifts and Phenological Changes:

Observations of range shifts and changes in the timing of biological events (phenology) are documented in response to changing climatic conditions (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003). These shifts affect ecosystems and may lead to mismatches between species and their resources. 

c. Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs:

The review explores the impact of climate change on marine biodiversity, emphasizing ocean acidification’s threat to coral reefs (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007). Changes in pH levels negatively affect coral calcification, disrupting the delicate balance of marine ecosystems. 

d. Adaptive Strategies and Conservation Efforts:

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the literature review discusses various adaptive strategies adopted by species and conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change on biodiversity (Hannah et al., 2007). It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for effective conservation planning. 

Strengthen your literature review with factual insights. Try Research on Paperpal for free!    

Writing a literature review involves summarizing and synthesizing existing research on a particular topic. A good literature review format should include the following elements. 

Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your literature review, providing context and introducing the main focus of your review. 

• Opening Statement: Begin with a general statement about the broader topic and its significance in the field. 
• Scope and Purpose: Clearly define the scope of your literature review. Explain the specific research question or objective you aim to address. 
• Organizational Framework: Briefly outline the structure of your literature review, indicating how you will categorize and discuss the existing research. 
• Significance of the Study: Highlight why your literature review is important and how it contributes to the understanding of the chosen topic. 
• Thesis Statement: Conclude the introduction with a concise thesis statement that outlines the main argument or perspective you will develop in the body of the literature review. 

Body: The body of the literature review is where you provide a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, grouping studies based on themes, methodologies, or other relevant criteria. 

• Organize by Theme or Concept: Group studies that share common themes, concepts, or methodologies. Discuss each theme or concept in detail, summarizing key findings and identifying gaps or areas of disagreement. 
• Critical Analysis: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each study. Discuss the methodologies used, the quality of evidence, and the overall contribution of each work to the understanding of the topic. 
• Synthesis of Findings: Synthesize the information from different studies to highlight trends, patterns, or areas of consensus in the literature. 
• Identification of Gaps: Discuss any gaps or limitations in the existing research and explain how your review contributes to filling these gaps. 
• Transition between Sections: Provide smooth transitions between different themes or concepts to maintain the flow of your literature review. 

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Conclusion: The conclusion of your literature review should summarize the main findings, highlight the contributions of the review, and suggest avenues for future research. 

• Summary of Key Findings: Recap the main findings from the literature and restate how they contribute to your research question or objective. 
• Contributions to the Field: Discuss the overall contribution of your literature review to the existing knowledge in the field. 
• Implications and Applications: Explore the practical implications of the findings and suggest how they might impact future research or practice. 
• Recommendations for Future Research: Identify areas that require further investigation and propose potential directions for future research in the field. 
• Final Thoughts: Conclude with a final reflection on the importance of your literature review and its relevance to the broader academic community. 

Conducting a literature review

Conducting a literature review is an essential step in research that involves reviewing and analyzing existing literature on a specific topic. It’s important to know how to do a literature review effectively, so here are the steps to follow: 1  

Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question:

• Select a topic that is relevant to your field of study. 
• Clearly define your research question or objective. Determine what specific aspect of the topic do you want to explore? 

Decide on the Scope of Your Review:

• Determine the timeframe for your literature review. Are you focusing on recent developments, or do you want a historical overview? 
• Consider the geographical scope. Is your review global, or are you focusing on a specific region? 
• Define the inclusion and exclusion criteria. What types of sources will you include? Are there specific types of studies or publications you will exclude? 

Select Databases for Searches:

• Identify relevant databases for your field. Examples include PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. 
• Consider searching in library catalogs, institutional repositories, and specialized databases related to your topic. 

Conduct Searches and Keep Track:

• Develop a systematic search strategy using keywords, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and other search techniques. 
• Record and document your search strategy for transparency and replicability. 
• Keep track of the articles, including publication details, abstracts, and links. Use citation management tools like EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley to organize your references. 

Review the Literature:

• Evaluate the relevance and quality of each source. Consider the methodology, sample size, and results of studies. 
• Organize the literature by themes or key concepts. Identify patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing research. 
• Summarize key findings and arguments from each source. Compare and contrast different perspectives. 
• Identify areas where there is a consensus in the literature and where there are conflicting opinions. 
• Provide critical analysis and synthesis of the literature. What are the strengths and weaknesses of existing research? 

Organize and Write Your Literature Review:

• Literature review outline should be based on themes, chronological order, or methodological approaches. 
• Write a clear and coherent narrative that synthesizes the information gathered. 
• Use proper citations for each source and ensure consistency in your citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). 
• Conclude your literature review by summarizing key findings, identifying gaps, and suggesting areas for future research. 

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Here’s how to use the Research feature:  

• Ask a question: Get started with a new document on paperpal.com. Click on the “Research” feature and type your question in plain English. Paperpal will scour over 250 million research articles, including conference papers and preprints, to provide you with accurate insights and citations. 
• Review and Save: Paperpal summarizes the information, while citing sources and listing relevant reads. You can quickly scan the results to identify relevant references and save these directly to your built-in citations library for later access. 
• Cite with Confidence: Paperpal makes it easy to incorporate relevant citations and references into your writing, ensuring your arguments are well-supported by credible sources. This translates to a polished, well-researched literature review. 

The literature review sample and detailed advice on writing and conducting a review will help you produce a well-structured report. But remember that a good literature review is an ongoing process, and it may be necessary to revisit and update it as your research progresses. By combining effortless research with an easy citation process, Paperpal Research streamlines the literature review process and empowers you to write faster and with more confidence. Try Paperpal Research now and see for yourself.  

Frequently asked questions

A literature review is a critical and comprehensive analysis of existing literature (published and unpublished works) on a specific topic or research question and provides a synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a particular field. A well-conducted literature review is crucial for researchers to build upon existing knowledge, avoid duplication of efforts, and contribute to the advancement of their field. It also helps researchers situate their work within a broader context and facilitates the development of a sound theoretical and conceptual framework for their studies.

Literature review is a crucial component of research writing, providing a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. The aim is to keep professionals up to date by providing an understanding of ongoing developments within a specific field, including research methods, and experimental techniques used in that field, and present that knowledge in the form of a written report. Also, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the scholar in his or her field.  

Before writing a literature review, it’s essential to undertake several preparatory steps to ensure that your review is well-researched, organized, and focused. This includes choosing a topic of general interest to you and doing exploratory research on that topic, writing an annotated bibliography, and noting major points, especially those that relate to the position you have taken on the topic. 

Literature reviews and academic research papers are essential components of scholarly work but serve different purposes within the academic realm. 3 A literature review aims to provide a foundation for understanding the current state of research on a particular topic, identify gaps or controversies, and lay the groundwork for future research. Therefore, it draws heavily from existing academic sources, including books, journal articles, and other scholarly publications. In contrast, an academic research paper aims to present new knowledge, contribute to the academic discourse, and advance the understanding of a specific research question. Therefore, it involves a mix of existing literature (in the introduction and literature review sections) and original data or findings obtained through research methods. 

Literature reviews are essential components of academic and research papers, and various strategies can be employed to conduct them effectively. If you want to know how to write a literature review for a research paper, here are four common approaches that are often used by researchers.  Chronological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the chronological order of publication. It helps to trace the development of a topic over time, showing how ideas, theories, and research have evolved.  Thematic Review: Thematic reviews focus on identifying and analyzing themes or topics that cut across different studies. Instead of organizing the literature chronologically, it is grouped by key themes or concepts, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of various aspects of the topic.  Methodological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the research methods employed in different studies. It helps to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies and allows the reader to evaluate the reliability and validity of the research findings.  Theoretical Review: A theoretical review examines the literature based on the theoretical frameworks used in different studies. This approach helps to identify the key theories that have been applied to the topic and assess their contributions to the understanding of the subject.  It’s important to note that these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and a literature review may combine elements of more than one approach. The choice of strategy depends on the research question, the nature of the literature available, and the goals of the review. Additionally, other strategies, such as integrative reviews or systematic reviews, may be employed depending on the specific requirements of the research.

The literature review format can vary depending on the specific publication guidelines. However, there are some common elements and structures that are often followed. Here is a general guideline for the format of a literature review:  Introduction:   Provide an overview of the topic.  Define the scope and purpose of the literature review.  State the research question or objective.  Body:   Organize the literature by themes, concepts, or chronology.  Critically analyze and evaluate each source.  Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the studies.  Highlight any methodological limitations or biases.  Identify patterns, connections, or contradictions in the existing research.  Conclusion:   Summarize the key points discussed in the literature review.  Highlight the research gap.  Address the research question or objective stated in the introduction.  Highlight the contributions of the review and suggest directions for future research.

Both annotated bibliographies and literature reviews involve the examination of scholarly sources. While annotated bibliographies focus on individual sources with brief annotations, literature reviews provide a more in-depth, integrated, and comprehensive analysis of existing literature on a specific topic. The key differences are as follows: 

References 

• Denney, A. S., & Tewksbury, R. (2013). How to write a literature review.  Journal of criminal justice education ,  24 (2), 218-234. 
• Pan, M. L. (2016).  Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches . Taylor & Francis. 
• Cantero, C. (2019). How to write a literature review.  San José State University Writing Center . 

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• What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

Published on 22 February 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 7 June 2022.

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.

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 summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

Why write 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, frequently asked questions about literature reviews, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a dissertation or thesis, you will 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 scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.

The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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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 objectives and questions .

If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. 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 if 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 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 use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:

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.

To identify the most important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.

You probably won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic – you’ll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.

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?
• How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
• 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 find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.

The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).

Remember that you can use our template to summarise and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using!

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’s important to keep track of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full reference 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.

You can use our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations.

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To begin organising your literature review’s argument and structure, you need to 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 organising the body of a literature review. You should have a rough idea of your strategy before you start writing.

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 summarising sources in order.

Try to analyse 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 organise 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.

If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic (“many recent studies have focused on the problem of x”) or highlight a gap in the literature (“while there has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration”).

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, make sure to follow these tips:

• Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
• Analyse and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations, 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 transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.

In the conclusion, you should summarise the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasise their significance.

If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This can lead directly into your methodology section.

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 dissertation , thesis, research paper , or proposal .

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarise 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  dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

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Introduction

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•  VIDEO -- This video is a great overview of the entire process.  (2020; North Carolina State University Libraries) --The transcript is included --This is for everyone; ignore the mention of "graduate students" --9.5 minutes, and every second is important  
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How To Structure Your Literature Review

3 options to help structure your chapter.

By: Amy Rommelspacher (PhD) | Reviewer: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | November 2020 (Updated May 2023)

Writing the literature review chapter can seem pretty daunting when you’re piecing together your dissertation or thesis. As  we’ve discussed before , a good literature review needs to achieve a few very important objectives – it should:

• Demonstrate your knowledge of the research topic
• Identify the gaps in the literature and show how your research links to these
• Provide the foundation for your conceptual framework (if you have one)
• Inform your own  methodology and research design

To achieve this, your literature review needs a well-thought-out structure . Get the structure of your literature review chapter wrong and you’ll struggle to achieve these objectives. Don’t worry though – in this post, we’ll look at how to structure your literature review for maximum impact (and marks!).

But wait – is this the right time?

Deciding on the structure of your literature review should come towards the end of the literature review process – after you have collected and digested the literature, but before you start writing the chapter. 

In other words, you need to first develop a rich understanding of the literature before you even attempt to map out a structure. There’s no use trying to develop a structure before you’ve fully wrapped your head around the existing research.

Equally importantly, you need to have a structure in place before you start writing , or your literature review will most likely end up a rambling, disjointed mess. 

Importantly, don’t feel that once you’ve defined a structure you can’t iterate on it. It’s perfectly natural to adjust as you engage in the writing process. As we’ve discussed before , writing is a way of developing your thinking, so it’s quite common for your thinking to change – and therefore, for your chapter structure to change – as you write. 

Need a helping hand?

Like any other chapter in your thesis or dissertation, your literature review needs to have a clear, logical structure. At a minimum, it should have three essential components – an  introduction , a  body   and a  conclusion . 

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

1: The Introduction Section

Just like any good introduction, the introduction section of your literature review should introduce the purpose and layout (organisation) of the chapter. In other words, your introduction needs to give the reader a taste of what’s to come, and how you’re going to lay that out. Essentially, you should provide the reader with a high-level roadmap of your chapter to give them a taste of the journey that lies ahead.

Here’s an example of the layout visualised in a literature review introduction:

Your introduction should also outline your topic (including any tricky terminology or jargon) and provide an explanation of the scope of your literature review – in other words, what you  will   and  won’t   be covering (the delimitations ). This helps ringfence your review and achieve a clear focus . The clearer and narrower your focus, the deeper you can dive into the topic (which is typically where the magic lies). 

Depending on the nature of your project, you could also present your stance or point of view at this stage. In other words, after grappling with the literature you’ll have an opinion about what the trends and concerns are in the field as well as what’s lacking. The introduction section can then present these ideas so that it is clear to examiners that you’re aware of how your research connects with existing knowledge .

2: The Body Section

The body of your literature review is the centre of your work. This is where you’ll present, analyse, evaluate and synthesise the existing research. In other words, this is where you’re going to earn (or lose) the most marks. Therefore, it’s important to carefully think about how you will organise your discussion to present it in a clear way. 

The body of your literature review should do just as the description of this chapter suggests. It should “review” the literature – in other words, identify, analyse, and synthesise it. So, when thinking about structuring your literature review, you need to think about which structural approach will provide the best “review” for your specific type of research and objectives (we’ll get to this shortly).

There are (broadly speaking)  three options  for organising your literature review.

Option 1: Chronological (according to date)

Organising the literature chronologically is one of the simplest ways to structure your literature review. You start with what was published first and work your way through the literature until you reach the work published most recently. Pretty straightforward.

The benefit of this option is that it makes it easy to discuss the developments and debates in the field as they emerged over time. Organising your literature chronologically also allows you to highlight how specific articles or pieces of work might have changed the course of the field – in other words, which research has had the most impact . Therefore, this approach is very useful when your research is aimed at understanding how the topic has unfolded over time and is often used by scholars in the field of history. That said, this approach can be utilised by anyone that wants to explore change over time .

For example , if a student of politics is investigating how the understanding of democracy has evolved over time, they could use the chronological approach to provide a narrative that demonstrates how this understanding has changed through the ages.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help you structure your literature review chronologically.

• What is the earliest literature published relating to this topic?
• How has the field changed over time? Why?
• What are the most recent discoveries/theories?

In some ways, chronology plays a part whichever way you decide to structure your literature review, because you will always, to a certain extent, be analysing how the literature has developed. However, with the chronological approach, the emphasis is very firmly on how the discussion has evolved over time , as opposed to how all the literature links together (which we’ll discuss next ).

Option 2: Thematic (grouped by theme)

The thematic approach to structuring a literature review means organising your literature by theme or category – for example, by independent variables (i.e. factors that have an impact on a specific outcome).

As you’ve been collecting and synthesising literature , you’ll likely have started seeing some themes or patterns emerging. You can then use these themes or patterns as a structure for your body discussion. The thematic approach is the most common approach and is useful for structuring literature reviews in most fields.

For example, if you were researching which factors contributed towards people trusting an organisation, you might find themes such as consumers’ perceptions of an organisation’s competence, benevolence and integrity. Structuring your literature review thematically would mean structuring your literature review’s body section to discuss each of these themes, one section at a time.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when structuring your literature review by themes:

• Are there any patterns that have come to light in the literature?
• What are the central themes and categories used by the researchers?
• Do I have enough evidence of these themes?

PS – you can see an example of a thematically structured literature review in our literature review sample walkthrough video here.

Option 3: Methodological

The methodological option is a way of structuring your literature review by the research methodologies used . In other words, organising your discussion based on the angle from which each piece of research was approached – for example, qualitative , quantitative or mixed  methodologies.

Structuring your literature review by methodology can be useful if you are drawing research from a variety of disciplines and are critiquing different methodologies. The point of this approach is to question  how  existing research has been conducted, as opposed to  what  the conclusions and/or findings the research were.

For example, a sociologist might centre their research around critiquing specific fieldwork practices. Their literature review will then be a summary of the fieldwork methodologies used by different studies.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself when structuring your literature review according to methodology:

• Which methodologies have been utilised in this field?
• Which methodology is the most popular (and why)?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the various methodologies?
• How can the existing methodologies inform my own methodology?

3: The Conclusion Section

Once you’ve completed the body section of your literature review using one of the structural approaches we discussed above, you’ll need to “wrap up” your literature review and pull all the pieces together to set the direction for the rest of your dissertation or thesis.

The conclusion is where you’ll present the key findings of your literature review. In this section, you should emphasise the research that is especially important to your research questions and highlight the gaps that exist in the literature. Based on this, you need to make it clear what you will add to the literature – in other words, justify your own research by showing how it will help fill one or more of the gaps you just identified.

Last but not least, if it’s your intention to develop a conceptual framework for your dissertation or thesis, the conclusion section is a good place to present this.

Example: Thematically Structured Review

In the video below, we unpack a literature review chapter so that you can see an example of a thematically structure review in practice.

Let’s Recap

In this article, we’ve  discussed how to structure your literature review for maximum impact. Here’s a quick recap of what  you need to keep in mind when deciding on your literature review structure:

• Just like other chapters, your literature review needs a clear introduction , body and conclusion .
• The introduction section should provide an overview of what you will discuss in your literature review.
• The body section of your literature review can be organised by chronology , theme or methodology . The right structural approach depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your research.
• The conclusion section should draw together the key findings of your literature review and link them to your research questions.

If you’re ready to get started, be sure to download our free literature review template to fast-track your chapter outline.

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling short course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

28 Comments

Great work. This is exactly what I was looking for and helps a lot together with your previous post on literature review. One last thing is missing: a link to a great literature chapter of an journal article (maybe with comments of the different sections in this review chapter). Do you know any great literature review chapters?

I agree with you Marin… A great piece

I agree with Marin. This would be quite helpful if you annotate a nicely structured literature from previously published research articles.

Awesome article for my research.

I thank you immensely for this wonderful guide

It is indeed thought and supportive work for the futurist researcher and students

Very educative and good time to get guide. Thank you

Great work, very insightful. Thank you.

Thanks for this wonderful presentation. My question is that do I put all the variables into a single conceptual framework or each hypothesis will have it own conceptual framework?

Thank you very much, very helpful

This is very educative and precise . Thank you very much for dropping this kind of write up .

Pheeww, so damn helpful, thank you for this informative piece.

I’m doing a research project topic ; stool analysis for parasitic worm (enteric) worm, how do I structure it, thanks.

comprehensive explanation. Help us by pasting the URL of some good “literature review” for better understanding.

great piece. thanks for the awesome explanation. it is really worth sharing. I have a little question, if anyone can help me out, which of the options in the body of literature can be best fit if you are writing an architectural thesis that deals with design?

I am doing a research on nanofluids how can l structure it?

Beautifully clear.nThank you!

Lucid! Thankyou!

Brilliant work, well understood, many thanks

I like how this was so clear with simple language 😊😊 thank you so much 😊 for these information 😊

Insightful. I was struggling to come up with a sensible literature review but this has been really helpful. Thank you!

You have given thought-provoking information about the review of the literature.

Thank you. It has made my own research better and to impart your work to students I teach

I learnt a lot from this teaching. It’s a great piece.

I am doing research on EFL teacher motivation for his/her job. How Can I structure it? Is there any detailed template, additional to this?

You are so cool! I do not think I’ve read through something like this before. So nice to find somebody with some genuine thoughts on this issue. Seriously.. thank you for starting this up. This site is one thing that is required on the internet, someone with a little originality!

I’m asked to do conceptual, theoretical and empirical literature, and i just don’t know how to structure it

Asking questions are actually fastidious thing if you are not understanding anything fully, but this article presents good understanding yet.

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YSN Doctoral Programs: Steps in Conducting a Literature Review

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What is a literature review?

A literature review is an integrated analysis -- not just a summary-- of scholarly writings and other relevant evidence related directly to your research question.  That is, it represents a synthesis of the evidence that provides background information on your topic and shows a association between the evidence and your research question.

A literature review may be a stand alone work or the introduction to a larger research paper, depending on the assignment.  Rely heavily on the guidelines your instructor has given you.

Why is it important?

A literature review is important because it:

• Explains the background of research on a topic.
• Demonstrates why a topic is significant to a subject area.
• Discovers relationships between research studies/ideas.
• Identifies major themes, concepts, and researchers on a topic.
• Identifies critical gaps and points of disagreement.
• Discusses further research questions that logically come out of the previous studies.

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1. Choose a topic. Define your research question.

Your literature review should be guided by your central research question.  The literature represents background and research developments related to a specific research question, interpreted and analyzed by you in a synthesized way.

• Make sure your research question is not too broad or too narrow.  Is it manageable?
• Begin writing down terms that are related to your question. These will be useful for searches later.
• If you have the opportunity, discuss your topic with your professor and your class mates.

2. Decide on the scope of your review

How many studies do you need to look at? How comprehensive should it be? How many years should it cover? 

• This may depend on your assignment.  How many sources does the assignment require?

3. Select the databases you will use to conduct your searches.

Make a list of the databases you will search. 

Where to find databases:

• use the tabs on this guide
• Find other databases in the Nursing Information Resources web page
• More on the Medical Library web page
• ... and more on the Yale University Library web page

4. Conduct your searches to find the evidence. Keep track of your searches.

• Use the key words in your question, as well as synonyms for those words, as terms in your search. Use the database tutorials for help.
• Save the searches in the databases. This saves time when you want to redo, or modify, the searches. It is also helpful to use as a guide is the searches are not finding any useful results.
• Review the abstracts of research studies carefully. This will save you time.
• Use the bibliographies and references of research studies you find to locate others.
• Check with your professor, or a subject expert in the field, if you are missing any key works in the field.
• Ask your librarian for help at any time.
• Use a citation manager, such as EndNote as the repository for your citations. See the EndNote tutorials for help.

Review the literature

Some questions to help you analyze the research:

• What was the research question of the study you are reviewing? What were the authors trying to discover?
• Was the research funded by a source that could influence the findings?
• What were the research methodologies? Analyze its literature review, the samples and variables used, the results, and the conclusions.
• Does the research seem to be complete? Could it have been conducted more soundly? What further questions does it raise?
• If there are conflicting studies, why do you think that is?
• How are the authors viewed in the field? Has this study been cited? If so, how has it been analyzed?

Tips: 

• Review the abstracts carefully.  
• Keep careful notes so that you may track your thought processes during the research process.
• Create a matrix of the studies for easy analysis, and synthesis, across all of the studies.
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• Writing well

How to write a literature review

• Starting well
• How to write an annotated bibliography
• How to write a case study response
• How to write a critique
• How to write an empirical article
• How to write an essay
• How to write a reflective task
• How to write a report
• Finishing well

Structure of a literature review

Determine your purpose.

Work out what you need to address in the literature review. What are you being asked to do in your literature review? What are you searching the literature to discover? Check your assignment question and your criteria sheet to know what to focus on.

Do an extensive search of the literature

Find out what has been written on the topic.

What kind of literature?

Select appropriate source material: Use a variety of academic or scholarly sources that are relevant, current and authoritative. An extensive review of relevant material will include — books, journal articles, reports, government documents, conference proceedings and web resources. The Library would be the best place to search for your sources.

How many resources?

The number of sources that you will be required to review will depend on what the literature review is for and how advanced you are in your studies. It could be from five sources at first year undergraduate level to more than fifty for a thesis. Your lecturer will advise you on these details.

Note the bibliographical details of your sources

Keep a note of the publication title, date, authors’ names, page numbers and publishers. These details will save you time later.

Read the literature

• Critically read each source, look for the arguments presented rather than for facts.
• Take notes as you read and start to organise your review around themes and ideas.
• Consider using a table, matrix or concept map to identify how the different sources relate to each other.

Analyse the literature you have found

In order for your writing to reflect strong critical analysis, you need to evaluate the sources. For each source you are reviewing ask yourself these questions:

• What are the key terms and concepts?
• How relevant is this article to my specific topic?
• What are the major relationships, trends and patterns?
• How has the author structured the arguments?
• How authoritative and credible is this source?
• What are the differences and similarities between the sources?
• Are there any gaps in the literature that require further study?

Write the review

• Start by writing your thesis statement. This is an important introductory sentence that will tell your reader what the topic is and the overall perspective or argument you will be presenting.
• Like essays, a literature review must have an introduction, a body and a conclusion.

Introduction

Your introduction should give an outline of:

• why you are writing a review, and why the topic is important
• the scope of the review — what aspects of the topic will be discussed
• the criteria used for your literature selection (e.g. type of sources used, date range)
• the organisational pattern of the review.

Body paragraphs

Each body paragraph should deal with a different theme that is relevant to your topic. You will need to synthesise several of your reviewed readings into each paragraph, so that there is a clear connection between the various sources. You will need to critically analyse each source for how they contribute to the themes you are researching.

The body could include paragraphs on:

• historical background
• methodologies
• previous studies on the topic
• mainstream versus alternative viewpoints
• principal questions being asked
• general conclusions that are being drawn.

Your conclusion should give a summary of:

• the main agreements and disagreements in the literature
• any gaps or areas for further research
• your overall perspective on the topic.
• outlined the purpose and scope?
• identified appropriate and credible (academic/scholarly) literature?
• recorded the bibliographical details of the sources?
• analysed and critiqued your readings?
• identified gaps in the literature and research?
• explored methodologies / theories / hypotheses / models?
• discussed the varying viewpoints?
• written an introduction, body and conclusion?
• checked punctuation and spelling?

Further information

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Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Marco pautasso.

1 Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), CNRS, Montpellier, France

2 Centre for Biodiversity Synthesis and Analysis (CESAB), FRB, Aix-en-Provence, France

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1] . For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2] . Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3] . Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read [4] . For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [5] .

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6] . However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7] . In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8] . The topic must at least be:

• interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
• an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
• a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9] , but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

• keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10] ),
• keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
• use a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
• define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the review to help define its scope), and
• do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a literature review ( Figure 1 ), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33] .

• discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
• trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
• incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules apply:

• be thorough,
• use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
• look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11] , but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12] . A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13] , [14] . When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15] .

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice to keep it focused 16 , 17 . Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [18] . If you are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19] . After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

• the major achievements in the reviewed field,
• the main areas of debate, and
• the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20] .

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21] . This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22] .

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers, and rightly so [23] . As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24] .

Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25] ? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies (“sleeping beauties” [26] )). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27] – [32] . I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to M. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, M. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Funding Statement

This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

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Literature review

A general guide on how to conduct and write a literature review.

Please check course or programme information and materials provided by teaching staff, including your project supervisor, for subject-specific guidance.

What is a literature review?

A literature review is a piece of academic writing demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the academic literature on a specific topic placed in context.  A literature review also includes a critical evaluation of the material; this is why it is called a literature review rather than a literature report. It is a process of reviewing the literature, as well as a form of writing.

To illustrate the difference between reporting and reviewing, think about television or film review articles.  These articles include content such as a brief synopsis or the key points of the film or programme plus the critic’s own evaluation.  Similarly the two main objectives of a literature review are firstly the content covering existing research, theories and evidence, and secondly your own critical evaluation and discussion of this content. 

Usually a literature review forms a section or part of a dissertation, research project or long essay.  However, it can also be set and assessed as a standalone piece of work.

What is the purpose of a literature review?

…your task is to build an argument, not a library. Rudestam, K.E. and Newton, R.R. (1992) Surviving your dissertation: A comprehensive guide to content and process. California: Sage, p49.

In a larger piece of written work, such as a dissertation or project, a literature review is usually one of the first tasks carried out after deciding on a topic.  Reading combined with critical analysis can help to refine a topic and frame research questions.  Conducting a literature review establishes your familiarity with and understanding of current research in a particular field before carrying out a new investigation. After doing a literature review, you should know what research has already been done and be able to identify what is unknown within your topic.

When doing and writing a literature review, it is good practice to:

• summarise and analyse previous research and theories;
• identify areas of controversy and contested claims;
• highlight any gaps that may exist in research to date.

Conducting a literature review

Focusing on different aspects of your literature review can be useful to help plan, develop, refine and write it.  You can use and adapt the prompt questions in our worksheet below at different points in the process of researching and writing your review.  These are suggestions to get you thinking and writing.

Developing and refining your literature review (pdf)

Developing and refining your literature review (Word)

Developing and refining your literature review (Word rtf)

Writing a literature review has a lot in common with other assignment tasks.  There is advice on our other pages about thinking critically, reading strategies and academic writing.  Our literature review top tips suggest some specific things you can do to help you submit a successful review.

Literature review top tips (pdf)

Literature review top tips (Word rtf)

Our reading page includes strategies and advice on using books and articles and a notes record sheet grid you can use.

Reading at university

The Academic writing page suggests ways to organise and structure information from a range of sources and how you can develop your argument as you read and write.

Academic writing

The Critical thinking page has advice on how to be a more critical researcher and a form you can use to help you think and break down the stages of developing your argument.

Critical thinking

As with other forms of academic writing, your literature review needs to demonstrate good academic practice by following the Code of Student Conduct and acknowledging the work of others through citing and referencing your sources.  

Good academic practice

As with any writing task, you will need to review, edit and rewrite sections of your literature review.  The Editing and proofreading page includes tips on how to do this and strategies for standing back and thinking about your structure and checking the flow of your argument.

Editing and proofreading

Guidance on literature searching from the University Library

The Academic Support Librarians have developed LibSmart I and II, Learn courses to help you develop and enhance your digital research skills and capabilities; from getting started with the Library to managing data for your dissertation.

Searching using the library’s DiscoverEd tool: DiscoverEd

Finding resources in your subject: Subject guides

The Academic Support Librarians also provide one-to-one appointments to help you develop your research strategies.

1 to 1 support for literature searching and systematic reviews

Advice to help you optimise use of Google Scholar, Google Books and Google for your research and study: Using Google

Managing and curating your references

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Published study guides

There are a number of scholarship skills books and guides available which can help with writing a literature review.  Our Resource List of study skills guides includes sections on Referencing, Dissertation and project writing and Literature reviews.

Study skills guides

This article was published on 2024-02-26

ON YOUR 1ST ORDER

How To Write A Literature Review Introduction: A Quick Guide

By Laura Brown on 5th July 2023

When it comes to writing an introduction to a literature review, there are a few key steps to keep in mind. Start by clearly stating the purpose and scope of your review. Then, provide a brief overview of the main themes or concepts you will address. It’s important to engage your readers from the start with a compelling opening paragraph that hooks their interest. Lastly, establish the background and context of your research and outline the objectives of your review. So, these components can be summarised as,

• Background and context
• Objective and purpose
• Scope and inclusion/exclusion criteria
• Research questions or hypotheses
• Organisation and structure
• Signposting
• Methodology (optional)

Now, if you’re a student or researcher diving into the world of literature reviews, you’ve come to the right place. Crafting an effective introduction is crucial to engage your readers and set the stage for your review. In this guide, we will walk you through ten essential steps to help you create a captivating introduction with perfection. From understanding the purpose and scope to presenting the background and context, we’ve got you covered. So, let’s embark on this journey together and unlock the secrets on how to write a good introduction for a literature review that grabs attention.

Step 1: Clarify The Purpose And Scope Of Your Literature Review

Before diving into writing, it’s essential to gain a clear understanding of its purpose and scope and be aware of how to start it. Begin with defining the overarching goal of your review. Are you aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of existing primary and secondary research on a specific topic? Or perhaps you’re focusing on a particular aspect or gap in the literature?

Additionally, determine the scope of your review by identifying the timeframe, geographical area, or specific disciplines you will cover. Clearly defining the purpose and scope will not only help you stay focused, but also ensure that your introduction sets the right expectations for your readers.

Step 2: Identify The Main Themes Or Concepts You’ll Address

To create a good literature review introduction structure, it’s crucial to identify and articulate the main themes or concepts that will be the focus of your review. Take some time to analyse the body of literature you have gathered and identify recurring ideas, theories, or key areas of discussion.

These themes or concepts will serve as the foundation for organising your review and guiding your readers through the subsequent sections. By clearly identifying and introducing these main themes or concepts in your introduction, you provide readers with a roadmap of what to expect and demonstrate your understanding of the existing knowledge within your field.

Step 3: Conduct A Comprehensive Search For Relevant Academic Sources

To ensure the credibility and depth of your literature review, embark on a thorough search for relevant academic sources. Utilise scholarly databases, online libraries, and search engines to locate articles, books, conference papers, and other reputable sources related to your research topic.

Cast a wide net to gather a comprehensive collection of materials that provide diverse perspectives and insights. Pay attention to keywords, use advanced search techniques, and explore bibliographies of relevant sources to uncover hidden gems. Conducting a comprehensive literature search will let you lay the groundwork for a well-informed and robust review.

Step 4: Evaluate And Select The Most Appropriate Sources.

Once you have accumulated a substantial number of potential sources, it’s essential to critically evaluate their quality, credibility, and relevance. Assess the authority of the authors, the reputation of the publishing journals or organisations, and the rigour of the research methodologies employed.

Scrutinise the relevance of each source to your research objectives and discard any that do not align with your focus. You should aim for a balanced mix of seminal works and recent publications to ensure the inclusion of both foundational knowledge and the latest advancements in your field.

Step 5: Organise Your Sources Based On Identified Themes Or Concepts

Now that you have a curated selection of relevant sources, it’s time to organise them based on the main themes or concepts you have identified. For this, look for common threads, recurring ideas, or distinct categories within the literature. Furthermore, create a system, such as using digital tools or physical note cards, to sort and categorise your sources accordingly.

Consider how each source contributes to each theme or concept, and make strategic decisions about their placement. By taking these steps, as suggested by Literature Review Writing Service , you can lay the groundwork for a coherent and cohesive literature review that flows seamlessly from one theme to another.

Step 6: Develop An Outline For Your Introduction

With a clear understanding of your literature review’s purpose, themes, organised sources and sufficient understanding of how to introduce a literature review , it’s time to develop an outline for your introduction. Firstly, consider the key points and sub-points you want to address. For this, begin with a concise overview of the main themes or concepts you will cover, followed by a logical progression of the sub-points that support and introduce each theme.

This outline will serve as a roadmap, ensuring that you can do it in a well-structured and coherent manner, effectively guiding your readers through the upcoming sections.

Step 7: Craft An Engaging Opening Paragraph

The opening paragraph plays a crucial role in capturing your reader’s attention and setting the tone for the rest of the review. It will take two simple steps to come up with a solid introduction.

• Start with a thought-provoking question, a captivating anecdote, or a surprising statistic related to your research topic.
• Provide a clear and concise overview of the purpose of your literature review, highlighting its significance and relevance to the field.

By creating an opening paragraph that piques curiosity and conveys the purpose, you set the stage for a captivating literature review. Still, if you find it difficult, you can ask Crowd Writer for literature review introduction examples.

Step 8: Provide Relevant Background Information And Context

After hooking your readers, it’s important to provide them with the necessary background information and context to understand the topic and its significance. This step involves introducing key concepts, theories, or historical developments that are relevant to your literature review.

In the 8th step on how to write an introduction for a literature review, briefly explain any terminology or jargon that may be unfamiliar to your readers. Additionally, highlight the gap or problem in the existing literature that your review aims to address.

Step 9: Clearly State The Objectives Of Your Literature Review

In this step, it’s important to explicitly state the objectives of your literature review. Clearly articulate what you aim to achieve through your review. You should identify gaps in the existing literature, synthesise and analyse the findings of previous studies, or propose new research directions.

State these objectives in a concise and focused manner. By doing so, you will be able to provide a roadmap for your readers and set expectations for the insights and outcomes they can expect from your literature review.

Step 10: Provide A Brief Preview Of The Main Sections

As you conclude your introduction, offer a brief preview of the main sections or themes that you will cover in your literature review. This serves as a roadmap for readers, giving them an overview of the content they can expect in the subsequent sections.

Provide a concise summary of the main points or sub-points you will explore, highlighting the significance of each section and how they contribute to your overall review. By providing this preview on the structure of a literature review , you create anticipation and guide readers through the logical flow of your literature review, ensuring they understand the structure and organisation of your work.

Dos & Don’ts Of Literature Review Introduction

Summing Up The Blog

Crafting a compelling and effective introduction for your literature review requires careful planning and attention to detail. By following the above-mentioned steps outlined in this guide, you can create an introduction that engages your readers, provides context and background information, and clearly communicates the objectives and structure of your review.

Remember, whenever you write a literature review introduction, first come up with an outline and have your research complete before you begin to write. By implementing these steps, you can set the stage for a successful literature review that captivates your audience and lays the foundation for a comprehensive exploration of your chosen topic.

Laura Brown, a senior content writer who writes actionable blogs at Crowd Writer.

• Library Catalogue

Academic writing: What is a literature review?

A review of the literature in a discipline is not the same as an annotated bibliography of sources, though an annotated bibliography can be a type of literature review. The purpose of a lit review is not only to tell your reader the state of scholarship about a given topic, but also to organize and evaluate the major points, parts, or arguments of each source. From the University of Toronto Writing Centre’s Tips on Conducting the Literature Review :

"A literature review is a piece of discursive prose , not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It's usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. You are not trying to list all the material published, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question."

A lit review may serve as a stand-alone piece or article. For example, see this published  Stand-Alone Literature Review  (content note: this literature review focuses on the topic of abuse against women with disabilities). However, more often a lit review is part of a larger research publication. For example, see this published research article that includes a Literature Review  (content note: this article discusses depression among college students). 

What should a literature review include?

Introduction:   Explain why this research topic is important. Outline what direction your review will take: i.e., what aspects of the topic you’re focusing on.

Body :  Present your summaries and evaluations of the sources in a clear, logical, and coherent manner. Some options for organizing your review include chronological, order of importance, two sides of a controversial problem, differences in perspective or viewpoint. Your review must “read” like a coherent paper, not a list.

Note: Most literature reviews describe only the main findings, relevant methodological issues, and/or major conclusions of other research.

Ensure your final list of references includes all sources you’ve discussed, and use the citation style required in your discipline.

Don’t provide a lot of detail about the procedures used in your sources. Don’t mention every study conducted on the topic. Include only the ones that are most relevant for the purpose and scope of your review.

Plan and organize your literature review

• Define your central problem, issue, or focus (create a research question or thesis statement)
• Consider audience expectations. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
• summarize the “gist” or main ideas of the source
• comment on the source’s usefulness, relevance, methodology, and/or findings in the context of your question or issue
• Do not use a “list-like” approach in drafting your lit review. Rather, organize your information logically to address your research question, thesis, or central issue. For more, see the Writeonline.ca guide to Literature Reviews and the Monash University Learn HQ mini-module on Literature Reviews (including sections on the process of writing a literature review, structuring a literature review, and the language of literature reviews). 

Revise your literature review, keeping in mind these tips for effective writing

• Pay attention to sentence structure
• Use the active and passive voices appropriately
• Reduce or omit wordy, redundant phrases
• Proofread for common punctuation and expression errors

For more about literature reviews, including definitions, protocols and guidelines, search strategies, and managing citations, see the Library's Literature reviews for graduate students .

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Pedicled falciform ligament flap use as an alternative surgical technique in peptic ulcer perforation repair: a case report and review of literature

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Pratiksha Paudel, Srikant Agrawal, Bidur Khatiwada, Prahasan Rai, Sijan Karki, Pedicled falciform ligament flap use as an alternative surgical technique in peptic ulcer perforation repair: a case report and review of literature, Journal of Surgical Case Reports , Volume 2024, Issue 8, August 2024, rjae502, https://doi.org/10.1093/jscr/rjae502

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Peptic ulcer disease (PUD) affects ~4 million people globally. Peptic ulcer perforation (PUP) is a serious complication of PUD associated with high mortality and morbidity. Hence, a high index of clinical suspicion is crucial in diagnosing such cases. Here, we present a case of a 19-year-old male who presented with 4 days of severe abdominal pain, fever, and vomiting. On examination, signs of acute abdomen were evident, and an erect chest X-ray confirmed free air under the diaphragm. The patient underwent an emergency midline laparotomy, during which 1000 ml of purulent fluid was evacuated. A perforation measuring 8 × 8 mm 2 was repaired using the falciform ligament due to the unavailability of adequate healthy omentum. His postoperative recovery was uneventful. This case report underscores the importance of considering the falciform ligament as a viable and effective alternative for the closure of PUP when the omentum is unavailable.

Peptic ulcer perforation (PUP) is a life-threatening complication of peptic ulcer disease (PUD), with a mortality rate ranging from 10 to 40% [ 1 , 2 ]. The hallmark of PUP is the classic triad of sudden onset abdominal pain, tachycardia, and abdominal rigidity. The presence of free air under the diaphragm on an erect chest X-ray strongly suggests a diagnosis of PUP [ 1 , 2 ]. The treatment of choice for PUP remains surgery, with the most commonly preferred approach being simple closure of the perforation using an omental patch [ 3 ]. In cases where the omentum is unavailable, a PUP can be closed using a falciform ligament pedicle flap [ 4 ]. In this case report, we utilized the falciform ligament as an alternative technique for effective patch closure of a PUP.

A 19-year-old thin male without known medical conditions presented to our emergency room with a 4-day history of increasingly severe abdominal pain with 3 days of fever, and repeated episodes of vomiting. He had no history of previous abdominal surgery, per-rectal bleeding, or any similar episodes. He is a smoker and consumes alcohol. He was normotensive (BP: 120/80 mmHg) and febrile (temperature: 101 F) with tachycardia (pulse: 111 bpm). On physical examination, his abdomen was distended with generalized tenderness, rebound tenderness, guarding, and rigidity. His total leukocyte count was 26 260/cu. mm, but all other hematological and biochemical parameters were normal. An erect chest X-ray revealed free air under the diaphragm ( Fig. 1 ). An abdominal ultrasound showed moderate ascites with internal septations and moving debris.

Erect chest X-ray showing free air under the diaphragm.

A clinical diagnosis of hollow viscus perforation was made. The patient was resuscitated with intravenous fluids and antibiotics before undergoing emergent exploratory laparotomy via midline incision. After draining 1000 ml of purulent fluid, an 8 × 8 mm 2 perforation was observed in the anterior wall of the first part of the duodenum. There were inter-bowel adhesions with flakes, and the omentum appeared thin, translucent, and short, extending only ~2–3 cm beyond the greater curvature of the stomach.

Due to inadequate healthy omentum for graft purposes, the falciform ligament was freed from the anterior abdominal wall and its free end was utilized as a graft to repair the perforation site with polyglactin 3–0 sutures ( Fig. 2 ). Confirmation of no leakage was done by pushing air from nasogastric (NG) tube. The wound was closed after thorough peritoneal lavage with a drain placed in Morrison’s pouch. His postoperative course was uneventful. NG tube and abdominal drain were removed on the third and seventh postoperative day, respectively. He was discharged with triple therapy and 1 month of proton pump inhibitor. At a follow-up in the Outpatient department after a month, he was doing well with no complications.

Falciform ligament used as a graft to repair the perforation site using polyglactin 3-0 sutures.

PUD arises from an imbalance between stomach acid-pepsin levels and mucosal defenses [ 1 ]. Annually, PUD affects ~4 million people worldwide. Major complications include bleeding, perforation, penetration, and obstruction, occurring in ~10–20% of cases [ 2 , 5 ]. Perforation, seen in 2–14% of cases of PUD, is a surgical emergency with a mortality rate of 10–40% [ 2 ]. The primary risk factors of PUP are Helicobacter pylori infection and NSAID use. Additional risks include stress, smoking, corticosteroid use, and a history of PUP [ 1 ]. Here, we present a case of a 19-year-old boy with a history of smoking and alcohol consumption.

PUP usually presents with sudden onset abdominal pain, tachycardia, and abdominal rigidity. Other manifestations include tachycardia, cool extremities, abdominal rigidity with right lower quadrant tenderness, pyrexia, and hypotension, often leading to acute circulatory collapse [ 1 ]. Early detection of PUP relies on a high degree of clinical suspicion. Our patient presented with worsening abdominal pain for 4 days, accompanied by fever and multiple episodes of vomiting. On examination, he was febrile with tachycardia and exhibited features of peritonitis.

An upright chest or abdominal X-ray is the initial imaging choice for suspected PUP and detection of free air under the diaphragm is highly suggestive and often confirms the diagnosis [ 2 ]. If X-ray results are inconclusive, an abdominal computed tomography scan is recommended for its superior sensitivity in detecting intra-abdominal free air. In our case, the erect chest X-ray of our symptomatic patient revealed free air under the diaphragm confirming the diagnosis of PUP.

Initiating prompt treatment is crucial to reduce the mortality and morbidity associated with PUP. Emergency surgical repair is the treatment modality of choice for PUP. Small ulcers are treated with laparoscopy, whereas large pyloric perforations often require open surgery [ 6 ]. The most commonly used techniques include primary closure with interrupted sutures, closure with interrupted sutures covered by a pedicled omentum, and plugging the perforation with a free omental plug (Graham patch) [ 7 ].

However, an alternative method is necessary in cases when the omentum may not be technically feasible for use or maybe absent sometimes due to previous abdominal surgeries. In such cases, the falciform ligament should be used as it is an easy and efficient alternative technique in the management of PUP [ 6 ]. The use of a falciform ligament patch as an alternative method for the management of perforated PUP was first reported by Fry et al. in 1987 [ 6 , 8 ]. The falciform ligament is a broad, sickle-shaped fold of the peritoneum that extends from the umbilicus rostrally over the anterior superior hepatic surface [ 9 ]. It is well-vascularized, similar to the hypervascular omentum, making it suitable for use as a flap. It lies across the duodenum and can be sutured to an ulcer without tension or mobilization enhancing strength and nourishment [ 6 ]. Preoperative shock, open surgery, and prolonged operating time are major risk factors for higher postoperative risks, including suture leaks, intra-abdominal abscesses, and increased reoperation rates [ 6 , 10 ]. Our patient underwent emergency midline laparotomy with evacuation of purulent fluid and pedicled falciform ligament was used to successfully repair the perforation site as the omentum was technically unusable. His perioperative and postoperative recovery was uncomplicated.

In conclusion, when omentum cannot be utilized as a graft for PUP repair, a falciform ligament patch can be used as a feasible and effective alternative surgical technique. This case highlights the importance of prompt diagnosis and selection of appropriate alternative surgical techniques in achieving successful patient outcomes in similar clinical scenarios. Nonetheless, comparative studies are further needed for the validation of the outcomes with a larger sample size.

None declared.

Chung KT , Shelat VG . Perforated peptic ulcer - an update . World J Gastrointest Surg 2017 ; 9 : 1 – 12 . https://doi.org/10.4240/wjgs.v9.i1.1 .

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Di Saverio S , Bassi M , Smerieri N , et al.  Diagnosis and treatment of perforated or bleeding peptic ulcers: 2013 WSES position paper . World J Emerg Surg 2014 ; 9 : 45 . https://doi.org/10.1186/1749-7922-9-45 .

Taş İ , Ülger BV , Önder A , et al.  Risk factors influencing morbidity and mortality in perforated peptic ulcer disease . Ulus Cerrahi Derg 2014 ; 31 : 20 – 5 . https://doi.org/10.5152/UCD.2014.2705 .

Ahmadinejad M , Haji ML . Novel approach for peptic ulcer perforation surgery . Clin Case Rep 2020 ; 8 : 1937 – 9 . https://doi.org/10.1002/ccr3.3030 .

Milosavljevic T , Kostić-Milosavljević M , Jovanović I , et al.  Complications of peptic ulcer disease . Dig Dis 2011 ; 29 : 491 – 3 . https://doi.org/10.1159/000331517 .

Son TQ , Hoc TH , Huong TT , et al.  Outcomes of surgical management of peptic ulcer perforation using the falciform ligament: a cross-sectional study at a single centre in Vietnam . Ann Med Surg (Lond) 2021 ; 67 : 102477 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amsu.2021.102477 .

Coco D , Leanza S . A review on treatment of perforated peptic ulcer by minimally invasive techniques . Maedica (Bucur) 2022 ; 17 : 692 – 8 . https://doi.org/10.26574/maedica.2022.17.3.692 .

Elgazar A , Awad AK , Elseidy SA . Falciform ligament use in perforated duodenal ulcer repair: a case report and literature review . J Surg Case Rep 2020 ; 2020 :rjaa243. https://doi.org/10.1093/jscr/rjaa243 .

Boshnaq M , Thakrar A , Martini I , et al.  Utilisation of the falciform ligament pedicle flap as an alternative approach for the repair of a perforated gastric ulcer . BMJ Case Rep 2016 ; 2016 :bcr2015213025. https://doi.org/10.1136/bcr-2015-213025 .

Kim JM , Jeong SH , Lee YJ , et al.  Analysis of risk factors for postoperative morbidity in perforated peptic ulcer . J Gastric Cancer 2012 ; 12 : 26 – 35 . https://doi.org/10.5230/jgc.2012.12.1.26 .

• abdominal pain
• peptic ulcer
• peptic ulcer perforation
• chest x-ray
• surgical procedures, operative
• falciform ligament

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• Published: 08 August 2024

Research progress and intellectual structure of design for digital equity (DDE): A bibliometric analysis based on citespace

• Baoyi Zhang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4479-7587 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  1019 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies
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Digital equity is imperative for realizing the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG9 and SDG10. Recent empirical studies indicate that Design for Digital Equity (DDE) is an effective strategy for achieving digital equity. However, before this review, the overall academic landscape of DDE remained obscure, marked by substantial knowledge gaps. This review employs a rigorous bibliometric methodology to analyze 1705 DDE-related publications, aiming to delineate DDE’s research progress and intellectual structure and identify research opportunities. The retrieval strategy was formulated based on the PICo framework, with the process adhering to the PRISMA systematic review framework to ensure transparency and replicability of the research method. CiteSpace was utilized to visually present the analysis results, including co-occurrences of countries, institutions, authors, keywords, emerging trends, clustering, timeline analyses, and dual-map overlays of publications. The results reveal eight significant DDE clusters closely related to user-centered design, assistive technology, digital health, mobile devices, evidence-based practices, and independent living. A comprehensive intellectual structure of DDE was constructed based on the literature and research findings. The current research interest in DDE lies in evidence-based co-design practices, design issues in digital mental health, acceptance and humanization of digital technologies, digital design for visually impaired students, and intergenerational relationships. Future research opportunities are identified in DDE’s emotional, cultural, and fashion aspects; acceptance of multimodal, tangible, and natural interaction technologies; needs and preferences of marginalized groups in developing countries and among minority populations; and broader interdisciplinary research. This study unveils the multi-dimensional and inclusive nature of methodological, technological, and user issues in DDE research. These insights offer valuable guidance for policy-making, educational strategies, and the development of inclusive digital technologies, charting a clear direction for future research.

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Introduction.

Digital equity has emerged as a critical factor in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure) and SDG10 (Reduced Inequalities) (United Nations, 2021 ; UNSD 2023 ), amidst the rapid evolution of digital technologies. In our increasingly digitalized society, these technologies amplify and transform existing social inequalities while offering numerous benefits, leading to more significant disparities in access and utilization (Grybauskas et al., 2022 ). This situation highlights the critical need for strategies that promote equitable digital participation, ensuring alignment with the overarching objectives of the SDGs. Digital equity, a multi-faceted issue, involves aspects such as the influence of cultural values on digital access (Yuen et al., 2017 ), the challenges and opportunities of technology in higher education (Willems et al., 2019 ), and the vital role of government policies in shaping digital divides (King & Gonzales, 2023 ), and the impact on healthcare access and delivery (Lawson et al., 2023 ). Equally important are the socioeconomic factors that intersect with digital equity (Singh, 2017 ) and the pressing need for accessible digital technologies for disabled individuals (Park et al., 2019 ). These issues are observed globally, necessitating diverse and inclusive strategies.

Design thinking, in addressing issues of social equality and accessibility, plays an essential role in accessibility (Persson et al., 2015 ; Dragicevic et al., 2023a ); in other words, it serves as a crucial strategy for reducing social inequality. Indeed, design strategies focused on social equality, also known as Equity-Centered Design (Oliveri et al., 2020 ; Bazzano et al., 2023 ), are diverse, including universal design (Mace ( 1985 )), Barrier-free design (Cooper et al., 1991 ), inclusive design (John Clarkson, Coleman ( 2015 )), and Design for All (Bendixen & Benktzon, 2015 ). Stanford d.school has further developed the Equity-Centered Design Framework based on its design thinking model (Stanford d.school, 2016 ) to foster empathy and self-awareness among designers in promoting equality. Equity-centered approaches are also a hot topic in academia, especially in areas like education (Firestone et al., 2023 ) and healthcare (Rodriguez et al., 2023 ). While these design approaches may have distinct features and positions due to their developmental stages, national and cultural contexts, and the issues they address, Equity-Centered Design consistently plays a vital role in achieving the goal of creating accessible environments and products, making them accessible and usable by individuals with various abilities or backgrounds (Persson et al., 2015 ).

Equity-centered design initially encompassed various non-digital products, but with the rapid advancement of digitalization, it has become increasingly critical to ensure that digital technologies are accessible and equitable for all users. This can be referred to as Design for Digital Equity (DDE). However, the current landscape reveals a significant gap in comprehensive research focused on Design for Digital Equity (DDE). This gap highlights the need for more focused research and development in this area, where bibliometrics can play a significant role. Through systematic reviews and visualizations, bibliometric analysis can provide insights into this field’s intellectual structure, informing and guiding future research directions in digital equity and design.

Bibliometrics, a term first coined by Pritchard in 1969 (Broadus, 1987 ), has evolved into an indispensable quantitative tool for analyzing scholarly publications across many research fields. This method, rooted in the statistical analysis of written communication, has significantly enhanced our understanding of academic trends and patterns. Its application spans environmental studies (Wang et al., 2021 ), economics (Qin et al., 2021 ), big data (Ahmad et al., 2020 ), energy (Xiao et al., 2021 ), medical research (Ismail & Saqr, 2022 ) and technology acceptance (Wang et al., 2022 ). By distilling complex publication data into comprehensible trends and patterns, bibliometrics has become a key instrument in shaping our understanding of the academic landscape and guiding future research directions.

In bibliometrics, commonly used tools such as CiteSpace (Chen, 2006 ), VOSviewer (Van Eck, Waltman ( 2010 )), and HistCite (Garfield, 2009 ) are integral for advancing co-citation analysis and data visualization. Among these, CiteSpace, developed by Professor Chen (Chen, 2006 ), is a Java-based tool pivotal in advancing co-citation analysis for data visualization and analysis. Renowned for its integration of burst detection, betweenness centrality, and heterogeneous network analysis, it is essential in identifying research frontiers and tracking trends across various domains. Chen demonstrates the versatility of CiteSpace in various fields, ranging from regenerative medicine to scientific literature, showcasing its proficiency in extracting complex insights from data sets (Chen, 2006 ). Its structured methodology, encompassing time slicing, thresholding, and more, facilitates comprehensive analysis of co-citations and keywords. This enhances not only the analytical capabilities of CiteSpace but also helps researchers comprehend trends within specific domains. (Chen et al. 2012 ; Ping et al. 2017 ). Therefore, CiteSpace is a precious tool in academic research, particularly for disciplines that require in-depth analysis of evolving trends and patterns.

After acknowledging the significance of DDE in the rapidly evolving digital environment, it becomes imperative to explore the academic contours of this field to bridge knowledge gaps, a critical prerequisite for addressing social inequalities within digital technology development. We aim to scrutinize DDE’s research progress and intellectual structure, analyzing a broad spectrum of literature with the aid of bibliometric and CiteSpace methodologies. Accordingly, four research questions (RQs) have been identified to guide this investigation. The detailed research questions are as follows:

RQ1: What are the trends in publications in the DDE field from 1995 to 2023?

RQ2: Who are the main contributors, and what are the collaboration patterns in DDE research?

RQ3: What are the current research hotspots in DDE?

RQ4: What is the intellectual structure and future trajectory of DDE?

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: The Methods section explains our bibliometric approach and data collection for DDE research. The Results section details our findings on publication trends and collaborative networks, addressing RQ1 and RQ2. The Discussion section delves into RQ3 and RQ4, exploring research hotspots and the intellectual structure of DDE. The Conclusion section summarizes our study’s key insights.

In this article, the systematic review of DDE follows the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines (PRISMA 2023 ), which are evidence-based reporting guidelines for systematic review reports (Moher et al., 2010 ). PRISMA was developed to enhance the quality of systematic reviews and enhance the clarity and transparency of research findings (Liberati et al., 2009 ). To achieve this goal, the research workflow in this study incorporates an online tool based on the R package from PRISMA 2020. This tool enables researchers to rapidly generate flowcharts that adhere to the latest updates in the PRISMA statement, ensuring transparency and reproducibility in the research process. This workflow comprises three major stages: Identification, Screening, and Inclusion, as illustrated in Fig. 1 .

PRISMA flowchart for the DDE systematic review.

Additionally, to obtain high-quality data sources, the Web of Science (referred to as WOS), provided by Clarivate Analytics, was chosen. WOS is typically considered the optimal data source for bibliometric research (van Leeuwen, 2006 ). The WOS Core Collection comprises over 21,000 peer-reviewed publications spanning 254 subject categories and 1.9 billion cited references, with the earliest records traceable back to 1900 (Clarivate, 2023 ). To thoroughly explore the research on DDE, this review utilized all databases within the WOS Core Collection as the source for data retrieval.

Search strategy

Developing a rational and effective search strategy is crucial for systematic reviews (Cooper et al., 2018 ), typically necessitating a structured framework to guide the process (Sayers, 2008 ). This approach ensures comprehensive and relevant literature coverage. To comprehensively and accurately assess the current state and development of “Design for Digital Equity,” this paper employs the PICo (participants, phenomena of interest, and context) model as its search strategy, a framework typically used for identifying research questions in systematic reviews (Stern et al., 2014 ). While the PICo framework is predominantly utilized within clinical settings for systematic reviews, its structured approach to formulating research questions and search strategies is equally applicable across many disciplines beyond the clinical environment. This adaptability makes it a suitable choice for exploring the multi-faceted aspects of digital equity in a non-clinical context (Nishikawa-Pacher, 2022 ).

This review, structured around the PICo framework, sets three key concepts (search term groups): Participants (P): any potential digital users; Phenomena of Interest (I): equity-centered design; Context (Co): digital equity. To explore the development and trends of DDE comprehensively, various forms of search terms are included in each PICo element. The determination of search terms is a two-stage process. In the first stage, core terms of critical concepts like equity-centered design, digital equity, and Design for Digital Equity, along with their synonyms, different spellings, and acronyms, are included in the list of candidate search terms. Wildcards (*) are used to expand the search range to ensure the inclusion of all variants and derivatives of critical terms, thus enhancing the thoroughness and depth of the search. However, studies have indicated the challenge of identifying semantically unrelated terms relevant to the research (Chen, 2018 ). To address this issue, the second phase of developing the search strategy involves reading domain-specific literature reviews using these core terms. This literature-based discovery (LBD) approach can identify hidden, previously unknown relationships, finding significant connections between different kinds of literature (Kastrin & Hristovski, 2021 ). The candidate word list is then reviewed, refined, or expanded by domain experts. Finally, a search string (Table 1 ) is constructed with all search terms under each search term group linked by the Boolean OR (this term or that term), and the Boolean links each group AND (this group of terms and that group of terms).

Inclusion criteria

Following the PRISMA process (Fig. 1 ), literature in the identification phase was filtered using automated tools based on publication data attributes such as titles, subjects, and full texts or specific criteria like publication names, publication time ranges, and types of publication sources. Given the necessity for a systematic and extensive exploration of DDE research, this review employed an advanced search using “ALL” instead of “topic” or “Title” in the search string to ensure a broader inclusion of results. No limitations were set on other attributes of the literature. The literature search was conducted on December 5, 2023, resulting in 1747 publications exported in Excel for further screening.

During the literature screening phase, the authors reviewed titles and abstracts, excluding 11 publications unrelated to DDE research. Three papers were inaccessible in the full-text acquisition phase. The remaining 1729 publications were then subjected to full-text review based on the following inclusion and exclusion criteria. Eventually, 1705 papers meeting the criteria were imported into CiteSpace for analysis.

Papers were included in this review if they met the following criteria:

They encompassed all three elements of PICo: stakeholders or target users of DDE, design relevance, and digitalization aspects.

They had transparent research methodologies, whether empirical or review studies employing qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods.

They were written in English.

Papers were excluded if they:

Focused solely on digital technology, unrelated to design, human, and social factors.

Contained terms with identical acronyms but different meanings, e.g., ICT stands for Inflammation of connective tissue in medicine.

Were unrelated to topics of social equality.

Were in languages other than English.

Data analysis

To comprehensively address Research Question 1: “What are the publication trends in the DDE field from 1995 to 2023?” this study utilized CiteSpace to generate annual trend line graphs for descriptive analysis. This analysis revealed the annual development trends within the DDE research field and identified vital research nodes and significant breakthroughs by analyzing the citation frequency of literature across different years. Utilizing the burst detection feature in CiteSpace, key research papers and themes were further identified, marking periods of significant increases in research activity. For Research Question 2: “Who are the main contributors to DDE research, and what are their collaboration patterns?” nodes for countries, institutions, cited authors, cited publications, and keywords were set up in CiteSpace for network analysis. Our complex network diagrams illustrate the collaboration relationships between different researchers and institutions, where the size of the nodes indicates the number of publications by each entity, and the thickness and color of the lines represent the strength and frequency of collaborations.

Additionally, critical scholars and publications that act as bridges within the DDE research network were identified through centrality analysis. In the keyword analysis, the focus was on co-occurrence, trend development, and clustering. Current research hotspots were revealed using the LSI algorithm in CiteSpace for cluster analysis, demonstrating how these hotspots have evolved over time through timeline techniques. A dual-map overlay analysis was used to reveal citation relationships between different disciplines, showcasing the interdisciplinary nature of DDE research. In the visual displays of CiteSpace, the visual attributes of nodes and links were meticulously designed to express the complex logical relationships within the data intuitively. The size of nodes typically reflects the publication volume or citation frequency of entities such as authors, institutions, countries, or keywords, with larger nodes indicating highly active or influential research focal points. The change in node color often represents the progress of research over time, with gradients from dark to light colors indicating the evolution from historical to current research. Whether solid or dashed, the outline of nodes differentiates mainstream research areas from marginal or emerging fields. The thickness and color of the lines reflect the strength of collaborations or frequency of citations, aiding in the identification of close collaborations or frequent citations. These design elements not only enhance the information hierarchy of the diagrams but also improve the usability and accuracy for users exploring and analyzing the data, effectively supporting researchers in understanding the structure and dynamics of the academic field. The subsequent research results section provides detailed descriptions for each visual element.

The first section of the Results primarily addresses RQ1: “What are the trends in publications in the DDE field from 1995 to 2023?” The subsequent sections collectively address RQ2: “Who are the main contributors, and what are the collaboration patterns in DDE research?”

Analysis of Publication Trends

Figure 2 , extracted from the WOS citation analysis report, delineates the progression of annual scholarly publications within the Design for Digital Equity field. This trend analysis resonates with de Solla Price’s model of scientific growth (Price 1963 ), beginning with a slow and steady phase before transitioning into a period of more rapid expansion. Notably, a pronounced spike in publications was observed following 2020, characterized by the global COVID-19 pandemic. This uptick indicates an acute scholarly response to the pandemic, likely propelled by the heightened need for digital equity solutions as the world adapted to unprecedented reliance on digital technologies for communication, work, and education amidst widespread lockdowns and social distancing measures. The graph presents a clear visualization of this scholarly reaction, with the peak in 2021 marking the zenith of research output, followed by a slight retraction, which may suggest a period of consolidation or a pivot towards new research frontiers in the post-pandemic era.

Trends in Scholarly Publications on Design for Digital Equity (1997–2023).

Visual analysis by countries or regions

Table 2 presents an illustrative overview of the diverse global contributions to research on “Design for Digital Equity,” including a breakdown of the number of publications, centrality, and the initial year of engagement for each participating country. The United States stands preeminent with 366 publications, affirming its central role in the domain since the mid-1990s. Despite fewer publications, the United Kingdom boasts the highest centrality, signaling its research as notably influential within the academic network since the late 1990s. Since China entered the DDE research arena in 2011, its publications have had explosive growth, reflecting rapid ascension and integration into the field. Furthermore, the extensive volume of publications from Canada and the notable centrality of Spain underscores their substantial and influential research endeavors. The table also recognizes the contributions from countries such as Germany, Italy, and Australia, each infusing unique strengths and perspectives into the evolution of DDE research.

Figure 3 , crafted within CiteSpace, delineates the collaborative contours of global research in Design for Digital Equity (DDE). Literature data are input with ‘country’ as the node type and annual segmentation for time slicing, employing the ‘Cosine’ algorithm to gauge the strength of links and the ‘g-index’ ( K  = 25) for selection criteria. The visualization employs a color gradient to denote the years of publication, with the proximity of nodes and the thickness of the interconnecting links articulating the intensity and frequency of collaborative efforts among nations. For instance, the close-knit ties between the United States, Germany, and France underscore a robust tripartite research collaboration within the DDE domain. The size of the nodes corresponds directly to the proportion of DDE publications contributed by each country. Larger nodes, such as those representing the USA and Germany, suggest more publications, indicating significant research activity and influence within the field. Purple nodes, such as those representing England and Canada, signal a strong centrality within the network, suggesting these countries contribute significantly and play a pivotal role in disseminating research findings throughout the network. The intertwining links of varying thickness reveal the nuanced interplay of collaboration: dense webs around European countries, for instance, underscore a rich tradition of continental cooperation, while transatlantic links point to ongoing exchanges between North American and European researchers. Moreover, the appearance of vibrant links extending toward Asian countries such as China and South Korea reflects the expanding scope of DDE research to encompass a truly global perspective, integrating diverse methodologies and insights as the research community tackles the universal challenges of digital equity.

Collaborative networks between countries and regions in DDE research.

Visual analysis by institutions

Table 3 presents a quantified synopsis of institutional research productivity and centrality within the Design for Digital Equity field. The University of Toronto emerges as the most prolific contributor, with 64 publications and a centrality score of 0.06, indicating a significant impact on the field since 2008. The University System of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology, each with 27 and 25 publications, respectively, registering a centrality of 0.01 since 2006, denoting their sustained scholarly activity over time. The Oslo Metropolitan University, with 23 publications and a centrality of 0.02 since 2016, and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, with 17 publications since 2009, highlight the diverse international engagement in DDE research. The table also notes the early contributions of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education, with 17 publications since 2004, although its centrality remains at 0.01. Institutions such as Laval University, Monash University, and the Polytechnic University of Milan show emergent centrality in the field, with recent increases in scholarly output, as indicated by their respective publication counts of 13, 12, and 12 since 2019, 2020, and 2018. This data evidences a dynamic and growing research domain characterized by historical depth and contemporary expansion.

Figure 4 displays a network map highlighting the collaborative landscape among institutions in the field of DDE. The University of Toronto commands a central node with a substantial size, indicating its leading volume of research output. The University of Alberta and CNR exhibit nodes colored to represent earlier works in the field, establishing their roles as foundational contributors. Inter-institutional links, albeit pleasing, are observable, suggesting research collaborations. Nodes such as the University of London and the Polytechnic University of Milan, while smaller, are nonetheless integral, denoting their active engagement in DDE research. The color coding of nodes corresponds to publication years, with warmer colors indicating more recent research, providing a temporal dimension to the map. This network visualization is an empirical tool to assess the scope and scale of institutional contributions and collaborations in DDE research.

Network Map of Institutional Collaboration in DDE.

Analysis by publications

Table 4 delineates the pivotal academic publications contributing to the field, as evidenced by citation count, centrality, and publication year, offering a longitudinal perspective of influence and relevance. ‘Lecture Notes in Computer Science’ leads the discourse with 354 citations and the highest centrality of 0.10 since 2004, indicating its foundational and central role over nearly two decades. This is followed by the ‘Journal of Medical Internet Research,’ with 216 citations since 2013 and centrality of 0.05, evidencing a robust impact in a shorter timeframe. The relationship between citation count and centrality reveals a pattern of influential cores within the field. Publications with higher citation counts generally exhibit greater centrality, suggesting that they are reference points within the academic network and instrumental in shaping the digital equity narrative. The thematic diversity of the publications—from technology-focused to health-oriented publications like ‘Computers in Human Behavior’ and ‘Disability and Rehabilitation’—reflects the interdisciplinary nature of research in digital equity, encompassing a range of issues from technological access to health disparities. ‘CoDesign,’ despite its lower position with 101 citations since 2016 and centrality of 0.01, represents the burgeoning interest in participatory design practices within the field. Its presence underscores the evolving recognition of collaborative design processes as essential to achieving digital equity, particularly in the later years where user-centered design principles are increasingly deemed critical for inclusivity in digital environments.

Visual analysis by authors

Table 5 enumerates the most influential authors in the domain of DDE research, ranked by citation count and centrality within the academic network from the year of their first cited work. The table is led by Braun V., with a citation count of 103 and a centrality of 0.13 since 2015, indicating a strong influence in the recent scholarly conversation on DDE. Close behind, the World Health Organization (WHO), with 97 citations and a centrality of 0.10 since 2012, and Nielsen J., with an impressive centrality of 0.32 and 89 citations since 1999, denote long-standing and significant contributions to the field. The high centrality scores, remarkably Nielsen’s, suggest these authors’ works are central nodes in the network of citations, acting as crucial reference points for subsequent research. Further down the list, authors such as Davis F.D. and Venkatesh V. are notable for their scholarly impact, with citation counts of 74 and 59, respectively, and corresponding centrality measures that reflect their substantial roles in shaping DDE discourse. The table also recognizes the contributions of authoritative entities like the United Nations and the World Health Organization, reflecting digital equity research’s global and policy-oriented dimensions. The presence of ISO in the table, with a citation count of 25 since 2015, underscores the importance of standardization in the digital equity landscape. The diversity in authors and entities—from individual researchers to global organizations—highlights the multi-faceted nature of research in DDE, encompassing technical, social, and policy-related studies.

Figure 5 illustrates the collaborative network between cited authors in the DDE study. The left side of the network map is characterized by authors with cooler-colored nodes, indicating earlier contributions to digital equity research. Among these, Wright Ronald stands out with a significantly large node and a purple outline, highlighting his seminal role and the exceptional citation burst in his work. Cool colors suggest these authors laid the groundwork for subsequent research, with their foundational ideas and theories continuing to be pivotal in the field. Transitioning across the network to the right, a gradual shift to warmer node colors is observed, representing more recent contributions to the field. Here, the nodes increase in size, notably for authors such as Braun V. and the WHO, indicating a high volume of publications and a more contemporary impact on the field. The links between these recent large nodes and the earlier contributors, such as Wright Ronald, illustrate a scholarly lineage and intellectual progression within the research community. The authors with purple outlines on the right side of the map indicate recent citation bursts, signifying that their work has quickly become influential in the academic discourse of digital equity research. These bursts are likely a response to the evolution of digital technologies and the emerging challenges of equality within the digital space.

Collaborative networks of globally cited authors in DDE research.

Visual analysis by keywords

The concurrent keywords reflect the research hotspots in the field of DDE. Table 6 presents the top 30 keywords with the highest frequency and centrality, while Fig. 6 shows the co-occurrence network of these keywords. Within the purview of Fig. 6 , the visualization elucidates the developmental trajectory of pivotal terms in the digital equity research domain. The nodes corresponding to ‘universal design,’ ‘assistive technology,’ and ‘user-centered design’ are characterized by lighter centers within their larger structures, signifying an established presence and a maturation over time within scholarly research. The robust, blue-hued link connecting ‘universal design’ and ‘assistive technology’ underscores these foundational concepts’ strong and historical interrelation. The nodes encircled by purple outlines, such as ‘universal design,’ ‘inclusive design,’ and ‘participatory design,’ denote a high degree of centrality. This indicates their role as critical junctions within the research network, reflecting a widespread citation across diverse studies and underscoring their integral position within the thematic constellation of the field. Of particular note are the nodes with red cores, such as ‘design for all,’ ‘digital health,’ ‘visual impairment,’ ‘mobile phone,’ and ‘digital divide.’ These nodes signal emergent focal points of research, indicating recent academic interest and citation frequency surges. Such bursts are emblematic of the field’s dynamic nature, pointing to evolving hotspots of scholarly investigation. For instance, the red core of ‘digital health’ suggests an intensifying dialogue around integrating digital technology in health-related contexts, a pertinent issue in modern discourse.

Keyword co-occurrence networks in the DDE domain.

Building upon the highlighted red-core nodes denoting keyword bursts in Figs. 6 , 7 , “Top 17 Keywords with the Strongest Citation Bursts in DDE,” offers a quantified analysis of such emergent trends. This figure tabulates the keywords that have experienced the most significant surges in academic citations within the field of DDE from 1997 to 2023. Keywords such as ‘design for all’ and ‘universal design’ anchor the list, showcasing their foundational bursts starting from 1997, with ‘design for all’ maintaining a high citation strength of 20.66 until 2015 and ‘universal design’ demonstrating enduring relevance through 2016. This signifies the long-standing and evolving discourse surrounding these concepts. In contrast, terms like ‘mobile phone,’ ‘digital health,’ and ‘participation’ represent the newest fronts in DDE research, with citation bursts emerging as late as 2020 and 2021, reflecting the rapid ascent of these topics in the recent scholarly landscape. The strength of these bursts, particularly the 7.07 for ‘mobile phone,’ suggests a burgeoning field of study responsive to technological advancements and societal shifts. The bar graph component of the figure visually represents the duration of each burst, with red bars marking the start and end years. The length and position of these bars corroborate the temporal analysis, mapping the lifecycle of each keyword’s impact.

Top 17 Keywords with the Strongest Citation Bursts in DDE.

The authors have conducted a keyword clustering analysis on the data presented in Fig. 6 , aiming to discern the interrelationships between keywords and delineate structured knowledge domains within the field of DDE. Utilizing the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) algorithm to derive the labeling of clusters, they have effectively crystallized seven distinct clusters in DDE research, as depicted in Fig. 8 . The cluster represented in red, labeled ‘#0 universal design,’ signifies a group of closely related concepts that have been pivotal in discussions on making design accessible to all users. This cluster’s central placement within the figure suggests its foundational role in DDE. Adjacent to this, in a lighter shade of orange, is the ‘#1 user-centered design’ cluster, indicating a slightly different but related set of terms emphasizing the importance of designing with the end-user’s needs and experiences in mind. The ‘#2 assistive technology’ cluster, shown in yellow, groups terms around technologies designed to aid individuals with disabilities, signifying its specialized yet crucial role in promoting digital equity. Notably, the #3 digital health cluster in green and the #4 mobile phone cluster in turquoise highlight the intersection of digital technology with health and mobile communication, illustrating the field’s expansion into these dynamic research areas. The ‘#6 participatory design’ cluster in purple and ‘#7 independent living’ cluster in pink emphasize collaboration in design processes and the empowerment of individuals to live independently, respectively.

Keyword clustering analysis map for DDE research.

In addition, the timeline function in CiteSpace was used to present the seven clusters in Fig. 8 and the core keywords they contain (the threshold for Label was set to 6) annually, as shown in Fig. 9 . The timeline graph delves deeper into the clusters’ developmental stages and interconnections of keywords. In the #0 universal design cluster, the term ‘universal design’ dates back to 1997, alongside ‘assistive technology,’ ‘user participation,’ and ‘PWDs,’ which together marked the inception phase of DDE research within the universal design cluster, where the focus was on creating accessible environments and products for the broadest possible audience. With the advancement of digital technologies, terms like ‘artificial intelligence’ in 2015, ‘digital accessibility’ in 2018, and the more recent ‘students with disabilities’ have emerged as new topics within this cluster. Along with #0 universal design, the #6 participatory design cluster has a similarly lengthy history, with terms like ‘computer access’ and ‘design process’ highlighting the significance of digital design within this cluster. Moreover, within this timeline network, many terms are attributed to specific populations, such as ‘PWDs,’ ‘children,’ ‘aging users,’ ‘adults,’ ‘students,’ ‘blind people,’ ‘stroke patients,’ ‘family caregivers,’ ‘persons with mild cognitive impairments,’ ‘active aging,’ and ‘students with disabilities,’ revealing the user groups that DDE research needs to pay special attention to, mainly the recent focus on ‘mild cognitive impairments’ and ‘students with disabilities,’ which reflect emerging issues. Then, the particularly dense links in the graph hint at the correlations between keywords; for instance, ‘children’ and ‘affective computing’ within the #6 participatory design cluster are strongly related, and the latest terms ‘education’ and ‘autism spectrum disorder occupational therapy’ are strongly related, revealing specific issues within the important topic of education in DDE research. Other nodes with dense links include ‘digital divide,’ ‘user acceptance,’ ‘social participation,’ ‘interventions,’ ‘social inclusion,’ and ‘design for independence,’ reflecting the issues that have received scholarly attention in social sciences. Finally, on the digital technology front, ‘smart home’ emerged in 2006, followed by the terms ‘digital divide’ and ‘user interface’ in the same year. The emergence of ‘VR’ in 2014, ‘AR’ in 2016, and ‘wearable computing’ in 2017 also explain the digital technology focal points worth attention in DDE research.

Timeline plot of 8 clusters of DDE keywords.

Dual-map overlays analysis of publications clusters

The double map overlay functionality of CiteSpace has been utilized to present a panoramic visualization of the knowledge base in DDE research (Fig. 10 ). This technique maps the citation dynamics between clusters of cited and cited publications, revealing the field’s interdisciplinary nature and scholarly communication. The left side of the figure depicts clusters of citing publications, showcasing newer disciplinary domains within DDE research. In contrast, the right side represents clusters of cited publications, reflecting the research foundations of DDE studies. Different colored dots within each cluster indicate the distribution of publications in that cluster. Notably, the arcs spanning the visualization illustrate the citation relationships between publications, with the thickness of the arcs corresponding to the citation volume. These citation trajectories from citing to cited clusters demonstrate the knowledge transfer and intellectual lineage of current DDE research within and across disciplinary boundaries. Notably, the Z-score algorithm converged on those arcs with stronger associations, yielding thicker arcs in green and blue. This indicates that the foundation of DDE research stems from two main disciplinary areas, namely ‘5.

The left side represents citing publication clusters and the right side represents cited publication clusters.

Health, nursing, medicine’ and ‘7. psychology, education, and social on the right side of the figure. Publications from ‘2. MEDICINE, MEDICAL, CLINICAL’ and ‘10. ECONOMICS, ECONOMIC POLITICAL,’ and ‘6. On the left side, PSYCHOLOGY, EDUCATION, and health cite these two disciplinary areas extensively. In other words, the knowledge frontier of DDE research is concentrated in medicine and psychology, and their knowledge bases are also in the domains of health and psychology. However, there is a bidirectional cross-disciplinary citation relationship between the two areas—additionally, the red arcs from the ‘1. MATHEMATICS, SYSTEMS, MATHEMATICAL’ publications cluster showcase another facet of the knowledge frontier in DDE research, as they cite multiple clusters on the right side, forming a divergent structure, which confirms that some of the frontiers of MATHEMATICS in DDE research are based on a broader range of disciplines. The different network structures macroscopically reveal the overall developmental pattern of DDE research.

Hotspots and emerging trends

To answer RQ3, based on the research findings, the literature was re-engaged to reveal the research hotspots and emerging trends of DDE. These hotspots and trends are primarily concentrated in the following areas:

Embracing co-design and practical implementation in inclusive and universal design research

Research in inclusive and universal design increasingly emphasizes co-design with stakeholders, reflecting significant growth in publication (Table 4 on Co-design). In the digital context, transitioning from theory to practice in equity-centered design calls for enhanced adaptability and feasibility of traditional design theories. This shift requires a pragmatic and progressive approach, aligning with recent research (Zhang et al., 2023 ). Furthermore, the evidence-based practices in DDE (Cluster #6) are integral to this dimension, guiding the pragmatic application of design theories.

Focusing on digital mental health and urban-rural inequalities

In DDE, critical issues like the digital divide and mental health are central concerns. The focus on digital and mobile health, highlighted in Fig. 9 , shows a shift towards using technology to improve user engagement and address health challenges. As highlighted by Cosco (Cosco et al., 2021 ), mental health has emerged as a crucial focus in DDE, underscoring the need for designs that support psychological well-being. Additionally, ageism (Mannheim et al., 2023 ) and stereotypes (Nicosia et al., 2022 ) influence technology design in DDE, pointing to societal challenges that need addressing for more inclusive digital solutions. Patten’s (Patten et al., 2022 ) focus on smoking cessation in rural communities indicates a growing emphasis on reducing health disparities, ensuring that digital health advancements are inclusive and far-reaching. These trends in DDE highlight the importance of a holistic approach that considers technological, societal, and health-related factors.

Integration of empathetic, contextualized, and non-visual digital technologies

In the realm of DDE, the technology dimension showcases a range of emerging trends and research hotspots characterized by advancements in immersive technologies, assistive devices, and interactive systems. Technologies like VR (Bortkiewicz et al., 2023 ) and AR (Creed et al., 2023 ) are revolutionizing user experiences, offering enhanced empathy and engagement while raising new challenges. The growth in mobile phone usage (Cluster #4) and the development of 3D-printed individualized assistive devices (IADs) (Lamontagne et al., 2023 ) reflect an increasing emphasis on personalization and catering to diverse user needs. Tangible interfaces (Aguiar et al., 2023 ) and haptic recognition systems (Lu et al., 2023 ) make digital interactions more intuitive. The integration of cognitive assistive technology (Roberts et al., 2023 ) and brain-computer interfaces (BCI) (Padfield et al., 2023 ) is opening new avenues for user interaction, particularly for those with cognitive or physical limitations. The exploration of Social Assistive Robots (SAR) (Kaplan et al., 2024 ) and the application of IoT (Almukadi, 2023 ) illustrate a move towards socially aware and interconnected digital ecosystems, while voice recognition technologies (Berner & Alves, 2023 ) are enhancing accessibility. Edge computing (Walczak et al., 2023 ) represents a shift towards decentralized and user-oriented solutions.

For intergenerational relationships, students with disabilities and the visually impaired

The concurrent digitization trends and rapid global aging closely resemble the growth curve of DDE publications, as shown in Fig. 2 . The concept of active aging, championed by WHO (World Health Organization 2002 ), exerts a substantial impact. This effect is evident across multiple indicators, including a significant number of DDE papers published in the journal GERONTOLOGIST (109 articles), the prominent node of “elderly people” in keyword co-occurrence, and the notable mention of “elderly people” in keyword analysis (strength=3.62). Moreover, in 2011, China, the country with the largest elderly population globally, contributed 73 articles related to DDE (Table 2 ), further emphasizing the growing demand for future DDE research focusing on the elderly. Within DDE studies on the elderly, intergenerational relationships (Li & Cao, 2023 ) represent an emerging area of research. Additionally, two other emerging trends are centered on the educational and visually impaired populations. The term ‘students with disabilities’ in Fig. 9 illustrates this trend. This is reflected in the focus on inclusive digital education (Lazou & Tsinakos, 2023 ) and the digital health needs of the visually impaired (Yeong et al., 2021 ), highlighting the expanding scope of user-centric DDE research.

The intellectual structure of DDE

Previous studies have dissected DDE through various disciplinary lenses, often yielding isolated empirical findings. However, a comprehensive synthesis that contemplates the intricate interplay among DDE constructs has yet to be conspicuously absent. To fill this gap and answer RQ4, an intellectual structure that encapsulates the entirety of DDE was developed, amalgamating user demographics, design strategies, interdisciplinary approaches, and the overarching societal implications. This holistic structure, depicted in Fig. 11 , The DDE structure elucidates the multi-faceted approach required to achieve digital equity, integrating diverse user needs with tailored design strategies and bridging technological innovation with interdisciplinary methodologies. Its core function is to guide the creation of inclusive digital environments that are accessible, engaging, and responsive to the varied demands of a broad user spectrum.

Design for Digital Equity (DDE) intellectual structure.

At the core of discussions surrounding digital equity lies the extensively examined and articulated issue of the digital divide, a well-documented challenge that scholars have explored (Gallegos-Rejas et al., 2023 ). This is illustrated in the concentric circles of the red core within the keyword contribution analysis, as depicted in Fig. 6 . It reflects the persistent digital access and literacy gaps that disproportionately affect marginalized groups. This divide extends beyond mere connectivity to encompass the nuances of social engagement (Almukadi, 2023 ), where the ability to participate meaningfully in digital spaces becomes a marker of societal inclusion. As noted by (Bochicchio et al., 2023 ; Jetha et al., 2023 ), employment is a domain where digital inequities manifest, creating barriers to employment inclusion. Similarly, feelings of loneliness, social isolation (Chung et al., 2023 ), and deficits in social skills (Estival et al., 2023 ) are exacerbated in the digital realm, where interactions often require different competencies. These social dimensions of DDE underscore the need for a more empathetic and user-informed approach to technology design, one that can cater to the nuanced needs of diverse populations, including medication reminders and telehealth solutions (Gallegos-Rejas et al., 2023 ) while minimizing cognitive load (Gomez-Hernandez et al., 2023 ) and advancing digital health equity (Ha et al., 2023 ).

The critical element of the DDE intellectual structure is the design strategy, as evidenced by the two categories #0 generic design and #6 participatory design, which contain the most prominent nodes in the keyword clustering in Part IV of this paper. Digital transformation through design thinking (Oliveira et al., 2024 ), user-centered design (Stawarz et al., 2023 ), and the co-design of 3D printed assistive technologies (Aflatoony et al., 2023 ; Benz et al., 2023 ; Ghorayeb et al., 2023 ) reflect the trend towards personalized and participatory design processes. Empathy emerges as a recurrent theme, both in contextualizing user experiences (Bortkiewicz et al., 2023 ) and in visualizing personal narratives (Gui et al., 2023 ), reinforcing the need for emotional durability (Huang et al., 2023 ) and accessible design (Jonsson et al., 2023 ). These approaches are not merely theoretical but are grounded in the pragmatics of participatory design (Kinnula et al., 2023 ), the living labs approach (Layton et al., 2023 ), and virtual collaborative design workshops (Peters et al., 2023 ), all of which facilitate the co-creation of solutions that resonate with the lived experiences of users.

One of the significant distinctions between DDE and traditional fairness-centered design lies in technical specifications. Supporting these strategies are fundamental theories and standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (Jonsson et al., 2023 ), the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Alvarez-Melgarejo et al., 2023 ), and socio-technical systems (STS) (Govers & van Amelsvoort, 2023 ), which provide the ethical and methodological framework for DDE initiatives. Additionally, digital ethnography (Joshi et al., 2023 ) and the Person-Environment-Tool (PET) framework (Jarl, Lundqvist 2020 ) offer valuable perspectives to analyze and design for the intricate interplay of human, technological, and environmental interactions.

Another noteworthy discovery highlighted by the previously mentioned findings is the rich interdisciplinary approach within the field of DDE. This interdisciplinary nature, exemplified by the integration of diverse knowledge domains, is evident in publications analysis of DDE (Table 4 ) and is visually demonstrated through the overlay of disciplinary citation networks (Fig. 10 ). Strategies such as gamification (Aguiar et al., 2023 ), music therapy (Chen & Norgaard, 2023 ), and multimodal communication strategies (Given et al., 2023 ) underline the synergistic potential of integrating diverse knowledge domains to foster more inclusive digital environments. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Kayser et al., 2023 ), multimedia advocacy (Watts et al., 2023 ), arts-based methods (Miller & Zelenko, 2022 ), storytelling (Ostrowski et al., 2021 ), and reminiscence therapy (Unbehaun et al., 2021 ) are not merely adjuncts but integral components that enhance the relevance and efficacy of DDE interventions.

Equally important, the relationship between the target users of DDE and digital technologies needs to be focused on as a design strategy. This includes attitudes, needs, challenges, risks, and capacity indicators. Positive outlooks envision digital transformation as a new norm post-pandemic for individuals with disabilities (Aydemir-Döke et al., 2023 ), while others display varied sentiments (Bally et al., 2023 ) or even hostile attitudes, as seen in the challenges of visually impaired with online shopping (Cohen et al., 2023 ). These attitudes interplay with ‘Needs’ that span essential areas, from service to recreational, highlighting the importance of ‘Capacity Indicators’ like digital literacy and digital thinking (Govers & van Amelsvoort, 2023 ) to bridge these gaps. The ‘Challenges and Risks’ associated with DDE, such as the adverse impacts of apps in medical contexts (Babbage et al., 2023 ) and ergonomic issues due to immersive technologies (Creed et al., 2023 ), present barriers that need to be mitigated to foster a conducive environment for digital engagement. Despite a generally positive attitude toward digital transformation, the low usage rates (Dale et al., 2023 ), usability concerns (Davoody et al., 2023 ), cultural differences in thinking, and the need for a humanizing digital transformation (Dragicevic et al., 2023b ) underscore the complexity of achieving digital equity. The widespread resistance and abandonment of rehabilitative technologies (Mitchell et al., 2023 ) further emphasize the need for DDE strategies that are culturally sensitive and user-friendly.

Going deeper, the arrows signify dynamic interrelationships among various components within the DDE intellectual structure. “Needs” drive the design and application of “Digital Technologies,” which in turn inspire “Innovative” solutions and approaches. Feedback from these innovations influences “Attitudes,” which, along with “Needs,” can pose “Challenges and Risks,” thereby shaping the “Capacity Indicators” that gauge proficiency in navigating the digital landscape. This cyclical interplay ensures that the DDE framework is not static but an evolving guide responsive to the changing landscape of digital equity.

future research direction

In the process of identifying research gaps and future directions, innovative research opportunities were determined from the results of temporal attributes in the visual, intellectual graph:

Emotional, cultural, and aesthetic factors in human-centered design: Universal Design (UD) and Design for All (DFA) will remain central themes in DDE. However, affective computing and user preferences must be explored (Alves et al., 2020 ). Beyond functional needs, experiential demands such as aesthetics, self-expression, and creativity, often overlooked in accessibility guidelines, are gaining recognition (Recupero et al., 2021 ). The concept of inclusive fashion (Oliveira & Okimoto, 2022 ) underscores the need to address multi-faceted user requirements, including fashion needs, cultural sensitivity, and diversity.

Digital technology adoption and improving digital literacy: The adoption of multimodal and multisensory interactions is gaining increased attention, with a growing focus on voice, tangible, and natural interaction technologies, alongside research into technology acceptance, aligning with the findings (Li et al., 2023 ). Exploring these interactive methods is crucial for enhancing user engagement and experience. However, there is a notable gap in research on the acceptance of many cutting-edge digital technologies. Additionally, investigating how design strategies can enhance digital literacy represents a valuable study area.

Expanding the Geographic and Cultural Scope: Literature indicates that the situation of DDE in developing countries (Abbas et al., 2014 ; Nahar et al., 2015 ) warrants in-depth exploration. Current literature and the distribution of research institutions show a significant gap in DDE research in these regions, especially in rural areas (as seen in Tables 2 and 3 and Figs. 3 and 4 ). Most research and literature is concentrated in developed countries, with insufficient focus on developing nations. Conversely, within developed countries, research on DDE concerning minority groups (Pham et al., 2022 ) and affluent Indigenous populations (Henson et al., 2023 ) is almost nonexistent. This situation reveals a critical research gap: even in economically advanced nations, the needs and preferences of marginalized groups are often overlooked. These groups may face unique challenges and needs, which should be explored or understood in mainstream research.

Multi-disciplinary Research in Digital Equity Design: While publication analysis (Table 4 ) and knowledge domain flow (Fig. 10 ) reveal the interdisciplinary nature of DDE, the current body of research predominantly focuses on computer science, medical and health sciences, sociology, and design. This review underscores the necessity of expanding research efforts across a broader spectrum of disciplines to address the diverse needs inherent in DDE adequately. For instance, the fusion of art, psychology, and computer technology could lead to research topics such as “Digital Equity Design Guidelines for Remote Art Therapy.” Similarly, the amalgamation of education, computer science, design, and management studies might explore subjects like “Integrating XR in Inclusive Educational Service Design: Technological Acceptance among Special Needs Students.” These potential research areas not only extend the scope of DDE but also emphasize the importance of a holistic and multi-faceted approach to developing inclusive and accessible digital solutions.

Practical implication

This study conducted an in-depth bibliometric and visualization analysis of the Digital Equity Design (DDE) field, revealing key findings on publication trends, significant contributors and collaboration patterns, key clusters, research hotspots, and intellectual structures. These insights directly affect policy-making, interdisciplinary collaboration, design optimization, and educational resource allocation. Analysis of publication trends provides policymakers with data to support digital inclusivity policies, particularly in education and health services, ensuring fair access to new technologies for all social groups, especially marginalized ones. The analysis of significant contributors and collaboration patterns highlights the role of interdisciplinary cooperation in developing innovative solutions, which is crucial for organizations and businesses designing products for specific groups, such as the disabled and elderly, in promoting active aging policies. Identifying key clusters and research hotspots guides the focus of future technological developments, enhancing the social adaptability and market competitiveness of designs. The construction of intellectual structures showcases the critical dimensions of user experience within DDE and the internal logic between various elements, providing a foundation for promoting deeper user involvement and more precise responses to needs in design research and practice, particularly in developing solutions and assessing their effectiveness to ensure that design outcomes truly reflect and meet end-user expectations and actual use scenarios.

Limitations

Nevertheless, this systematic review is subject to certain limitations. Firstly, the data sourced exclusively from the WOS is a constraint, as specific functionalities like dual-map overlays are uniquely tailored for WOS bibliometric data. Future studies could expand the scope by exploring DDE research in databases such as Scopus, Google Scholar, and grey literature. Additionally, while a comprehensive search string for DDE was employed, the results were influenced by the search timing and the subscription range of different research institutions to the database. Moreover, the possibility of relevant terms existing beyond the search string cannot be discounted. Secondly, despite adhering to the PRISMA guidelines for literature acquisition and screening, subjectivity may have influenced the authors during the inclusion and exclusion process, particularly while reviewing abstracts and full texts to select publications. Furthermore, the reliance solely on CiteSpace as the bibliometric tool introduces another limitation. The research findings are contingent on the features and algorithms of the current version of CiteSpace (6.2.r6 advanced). Future research could incorporate additional or newer versions of bibliometric tools to provide a more comprehensive analysis.

This systematic review aims to delineate the academic landscape of DDE by exploring its known and unknown aspects, including research progress, intellectual structure, research hotspots and trends, and future research recommendations. Before this review, these facets could have been clearer. To address these questions, a structured retrieval strategy set by PICo and a PRISMA process yielded 1705 publications, which were analyzed using CiteSpace for publication trends, geographic distribution of research collaborations, core publications, keyword co-occurrence, emergence, clustering, timelines, and dual-map overlays of publication disciplines. These visual presentations propose a DDE intellectual structure, although the literature data is focused on the WOS database. This framework could serve as a guide for future research to address these crucial issues. The DDE intellectual structure integrates research literature, particularly eight thematic clusters. It not only displays the overall intellectual structure of DDE on a macro level but also reveals the intrinsic logic between various elements. Most notably, as pointed out at the beginning of this review, digital equity, as a critical factor in achieving sustainable development goals, requires human-centered design thinking. An in-depth discussion of the research findings reveals that the development of DDE is characterized by a multi-dimensional approach, encompassing a wide range of societal, technological, and user-specific issues. Furthermore, emerging trends indicate that the future trajectory of DDE will be more diverse and inclusive, targeting a broad spectrum of user needs and societal challenges. Another significant aspect of this review is the proposition of four specific directions for future research, guiding researchers dedicated to related disciplines.

Data availability

The datasets generated or analyzed during the current study are available in the Dataverse repository: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/S5XXFB .

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Facial Expression Recognition for Probing Students’ Emotional Engagement in Science Learning

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• Xiaoyu Tang 1 ,
• Yayun Gong 1 ,
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• Jianwen Xiong 1 &
• Lei Bao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3348-4198 2  

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Student engagement in science classroom is an essential element for delivering effective instruction. However, the popular method for measuring students’ emotional learning engagement (ELE) relies on self-reporting, which has been criticized for possible bias and lacking fine-grained time solution needed to track the effects of short-term learning interactions. Recent research suggests that students’ facial expressions may serve as an external representation of their emotions in learning. Accordingly, this study proposes a machine learning method to efficiently measure students’ ELE in real classroom. Specifically, a facial expression recognition system based on a multiscale perception network (MP-FERS) was developed by combining the pleasure-displeasure, arousal-nonarousal, and dominance-submissiveness (PAD) emotion models. Data were collected from videos of six physics lessons with 108 students. Meanwhile, students’ academic records and self-reported learning engagement were also collected. The results show that students’ ELE measured by MP-FERS was a significant predictor of academic achievement and a better indicator of true learning status than self-reported ELE. Furthermore, MP-FERS can provide fine-grained time resolution on tracking the changes in students’ ELE in response to different teaching environments such as teacher-centered or student-centered classroom activities. The results of this study demonstrate the validity and utility of MP-FERS in studying students’ emotional learning engagement.

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Introduction

As an essential indicator of the impact of reforms in science education, effective teaching has received much attention from the science education community. Currently, explanations of effective teaching can be classified into three intertwined orientations: the importance of teachers’ behavioral characteristics in encouraging and facilitating student learning (Blomeke et al., 2022 ; Joshi & Bhaskar, 2022 ); the importance of meeting students’ needs and interests to engage them in the classroom and achieve positive learning outcomes (Elias et al., 2023 ; Kennedy, 2016 ); and the effectiveness of teacher–student interactions (Sun et al., 2022 ; Xintong et al., 2022 ). Regardless of the orientation, the goal is to promote effective learning. The first two orientations prioritize external conditions, while the third focuses on internal psychological conditions. Consequently, students’ effective learning should be intrinsically motivated to construct knowledge and learning transfer with appropriate guidance and learning activities and promote positive emotional experiences.

The different emphases of these three teaching orientations have led to several notable trends in current classroom teaching styles: (1) teacher-centered teaching, which emphasizes teacher-directed behaviors and verbal expressions to promote students’ understanding (Kateřina, 2019 ); (2) student-centered teaching, which emphasizes the active construction of knowledge through students’ hands-on participation in learning activities (Eva & Kathleen, 2023 ); and (3) interactive teaching, which emphasizes the interaction between teacher guidance and student activities (Howe et al., 2019 ) and promotes the construction of knowledge through both subjects’ joint efforts. Teachers’ behavioral characteristics in different teaching styles directly impact students’ emotional learning engagement and subsequently influence their learning outcomes. For example, the extended use of the lecture mode may lead to student boredom and loss of attention from the classroom. Emotional learning engagement constitutes students’ response to the teacher’s teaching behavior and serves not only as a prerequisite for learning outcomes but also as an important indicator of the effectiveness of teaching itself.

Current educational trends increasingly emphasize the role of emotional learning engagement in teaching and learning. For example, in a study on students’ learning effectiveness and core literacy in the UK, measuring students’ enjoyment of learning was the focus (Office for Standards in Education, 2010 ). Canada’s education policy promotes a focus on students’ interests and performances in learning (Ontario, 2014 ). Moreover, studies from China suggest that teachers should evaluate students’ learning through their emotional performance, such as their interest and participation in daily learning activities (China, 2022 ). These results show that using students’ emotional engagement as a factor for evaluating the effectiveness of classroom teaching has become a significant trend in education assessment. Psychological studies have also shown that positive emotions, such as concentration and happiness, can promote students’ learning efficiency. In contrast, negative emotions, such as boredom and anxiety, can decrease intellectual development (Sun et al., 2015 ). Moreover, it has been found in numerous studies that classroom emotion and interest are key factors in science learning retention (Prescod et al., 2018 ; Sadler et al., 2012 ; Schelfhout et al., 2021 ). Therefore, importance needs to be attributed to students’ emotional changes in the classroom, as such changes can constantly remind teachers to make timely adjustments to their teaching strategies to keep students actively engaged in science learning.

In the literature, the commonly used measures of student engagement are self-reports and structured observations, which could be biased in measuring implicit emotional engagement. In addition, structured observations are usually designed with a specific observation plan and purpose, which limits the measurement to be single-angled and subjective, and information on students’ emotional experiences is also limited (Mikeska et al., 2019 ). Moreover, although self-reports can reveal students’ psychological feelings more directly, they are often widely inaccurate in the emotional dimension, especially in lower grades (Ben-Eliyahu et al., 2018 ). Furthermore, this uncertainty may be exacerbated by the time lag in measurement and the influence of social expectations. In addition, analyzing data from structured observations and self-reports is labor intensive and can be subjectively biased. Therefore, finding a machine-based objective measuring method could be invaluable for advancing research in this area. The recent emergence of facial expression recognition technology has led to the development of a promising approach (Liu et al., 2021 ) that can automatically perform feature extraction and expression recognition on facial images (Mollahosseini et al., 2016 ). Motivated by recent work, this study develops a multiscale perception facial expression recognition system (MP-FERS) for measuring students’ emotional learning engagement and validates the measurement outcomes of the MP-FERS using a mixed research approach.

Literature Review

Student engagement as a multidimensional construct.

Many studies have demonstrated that student engagement is a multidimensional construct and can significantly impact students’ academic achievement (Engels et al., 2021 ; Muenks et al., 2017 ). In general, student engagement includes behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement (Fredricks et al., 2004 ). Behavioral engagement reflects aspects of student learning behaviors, including answering questions, participating in class discussions, and completing expected tasks (Sedova et al., 2019 ; Wang et al., 2011 ). Cognitive engagement is not directly observable and reflects the degree to which students think about or focus on learning activities (Greene, 2015 ). This engagement is mainly involved in the mental effort and cognitive strategies used for understanding knowledge (Connell & Wellborn, 1991 ; Newmann, 1992 ; Olivier et al., 2021 ).

Compared to the first two types of engagement, emotional engagement is an implicit psychological state. Since this study focuses on students’ emotional engagement in the classroom, it is further defined as emotional learning engagement (ELE), which specifically refers to students’ emotional responses to the learning process and classroom environment, including interest and belonging (Connell & Wellborn, 1991 ; Skinner & Belmont, 1993 ). As part of the dyadic interaction between a learner and a learning activity, ELE is present throughout the learning process (Ben-Eliyahu et al., 2018 ). ELE aligns well with research on flow, which refers to learners feeling positive emotions, losing time, and becoming fully immersed during a learning activity (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014 ). Flow is often used to describe high-quality ELE. Both situational interests caused by the specific characteristics of classroom activities and personal interests aroused by the willingness to undertake challenging tasks can equip students with a mindset directed toward classroom tasks (Renninger et al., 1994 ), which constitutes the psychological basis of classroom experiences. Numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of emotions. Positively activated emotions (e.g., joy, anticipation) may lead to higher behavioral and cognitive engagement (Linnenbrink, 2007 ; Pekrun et al., 2009 ), while negatively activated emotions (e.g., confusion) may lead to more in-depth inquiry about the learning materials (D’Mello & Graesser, 2012 ). The deactivations of emotions (e.g., fatigue) reflect a negative state of being absent from classroom activities, which can lead to a lack of psychological affiliation, causing behavioral and cognitive engagement burnout (Linnenbrink, 2007 ; Pekrun et al., 2002 ). Notably, deactivated neutral emotions (e.g., boredom) reflect a tendency to detach from ongoing activity and cannot be ignored when modeling learning engagement (Ben-Eliyahu et al., 2018 ).

In summary, the literature has demonstrated that ELE can play a vital role in student engagement by influencing behavioral and cognitive engagement from a psychological perspective, which focuses on emotional dimensions such as interest, pleasure, and enjoyment. Thus, this study focuses on measuring ELE and its interactions with the learning environment.

The Influence of ELE on Academic Achievement

Emotions are ubiquitous in academic settings (e.g., emotions such as enjoyment, anger, anxiety, and boredom that arise during the learning process), and they can profoundly impact students’ academic engagement and performance (Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012 ). Evidence shows that negative emotions such as anger and sadness are negatively associated with achievement (Hernández et al., 2016 ), while positive emotions such as enjoyment are positively associated with achievement (Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012 ). Recent studies have found a feedback loop between emotion and achievement over time (Pekrun et al., 2017 ; Putwain et al., 2018 , 2022 ). For example, higher enjoyment and lower boredom predict greater subsequent achievement, and, in turn, greater academic achievement predicts subsequent greater enjoyment and lower boredom. This suggests that emotion and academic achievement are consistently and tightly intertwined. These empirical studies revealed the feasibility of using student engagement as an indicator of effective teaching (Reinhold et al., 2020 ).

ELE can have complex and extensive influences on academic achievement because it provides a critical psychological foundation for learning. ELE can influence both behavioral and cognitive engagement, which can further influence academic achievement (Geertshuis, 2019 ; Liu et al., 2022a , 2022b ). For example, students with positive emotions are more likely to devote time and energy to learning and can prevent themselves from possible academic burnout (González-Romá et al., 2006 ). Thus, these students may show more sustained behavioral engagement and are more likely to deal effectively with learning difficulties (Wang & Eccles, 2012 ). The control-value theory explains that emotions determine the use of cognitive resources and learning strategies, as well as motivation, to influence achievement (Meinhardt & Pekrun, 2003 ; Pekrun, 2006 ). Positive emotions (e.g., enjoyment) retain cognitive resources, increase interest and motivation, and promote flexible and deep learning strategies, leading to a better likelihood for academic success. Conversely, negative emotions (anger, sadness) may induce irrelevant thinking, reduce cognitive resources, disrupt attentional focus, and prevent the systematic use of deep learning strategies, all of which are detrimental factors to academic progress (Kuhbandner et al., 2010 ).

Overall, student engagement is dynamically related internally, with emotion being the most foundational factor in academic achievement. ELE influences the formation of motivation, interest, and attention, thus promoting sustainable behavioral engagement (Yang et al., 2021 ). Behavioral engagement, in turn, influences cognitive engagement through different learning modes, ultimately affecting learning outcomes (Chi & Wylie, 2014 ; Yang et al., 2021 ). These studies have provided strong evidence demonstrating the predictive role of emotional engagement in academic achievement, which provides the theoretical and experimental basis for using the MP-FERS to measure student engagement in this study.

The Influence of Teaching Style on ELE

Numerous studies have demonstrated that teaching style affects students’ learning interest and enjoyment (Kang & Keinonen, 2018 ). Emotion, as a result of the classroom context, mediates learning outcomes that reflect teaching effectiveness (Schukajlow & Rakoczy, 2016 ). As science education shifts from teacher-centered to student-centered, many studies note that student-centered instruction is more likely to increase students’ affective interest than traditional teacher-centered instruction (Alimoglu et al., 2017 ; Renninger & Bachrach, 2015 ; Trobst et al., 2016 ). For example, cooperative learning (Sibomana et al., 2021 ), game-based approaches (North et al., 2021 ), and problem-solving approaches (Taub et al., 2020 ) can increase students’ enjoyment and positive attitudes toward learning. A cooperative learning environment stimulates student interaction and significantly increases positive emotions (Martínez-Sierra, 2014 ). Conversely, game-based instruction conforms to students’ instincts, thereby increasing their enjoyment of learning and confidence in success (Battersby et al., 2020 ; Byusa et al., 2022 ). Further evidence of the facilitative effects of student-centered instruction on student engagement was provided in a mixed study that investigated the perceptions of engagement factors among middle and high school students who varied in their level of science engagement. The researchers found that student-centered instruction significantly influenced ELE, motivational beliefs, and social support (Fredricks et al., 2018 ).

Summarizing the literature, the positive effect of student-centered instruction on students’ ELE is relatively consistent across ages (Areepattamannil, 2012 ), grades, and subjects (Capar & Tarim, 2015 ). Emotional interest, as a strong predictor of the science learning retention rate, cannot be ignored, and teaching style is an essential factor. This study will further investigate this relationship by using the MP-FERS, which will also provide evidence for the validity of the measurement using this system.

Measuring ELE by Facial Expression Recognition

Since the abovementioned three types of engagement differ in their degrees of externalization, they are commonly measured by teacher observations and student self-reports (Ben-Eliyahu et al., 2018 ; Fredricks et al., 2004 ). External behavioral engagement is often measured through teacher observations (Bakker et al., 2015 ; Guo et al., 2014 ), while cognitive engagement is measured through student self-reports or work samples such as standardized tests and student work (Bakker et al., 2015 ). However, measuring ELE is particularly difficult because emotions are implicit. Self-reports are currently the most popular method for measuring emotions. Such measurements rely on behavioral indicators of ELE, which are often difficult for younger students to use to discriminate between the different types of engagement items (Fredricks et al., 2004 ). In addition, self-reports are often used as a one-time metric and lack the temporal resolution for tracking ELE variations over time and in connection with specific learning contexts (Park et al., 2012 ).

To examine classroom effectiveness, we choose to measure ELE, which is influenced by the classroom environment and is characterized by student emotions resulting from classroom elements such as learning content and activities. The traditional measure of ELE usually collects students’ subjective feelings and self-evaluations after a course, requiring students to recall the class content and their mental states. This method is both abrupt and subjective (Henrie et al., 2015 ), resulting in a measurement of student engagement that may deviate significantly from the real engagement level due to the delay. In addition, students may conceal their low level of engagement due to the influence of social expectations, leading to inaccurate measurements.

The 2017 Horizon Report (Freeman et al., 2017 ) suggested that classroom measurement should focus on using measuring tools to track, analyze, and reflect the learning data from student classroom engagement. With the advancement of technology, information technology can be used to measure student engagement.

Mehrabian and Russell ( 1974 ) research showed that emotional expression consists of 7% words, 38% voice, and 55% facial expressions, which indicates that facial expressions can be an essential avenue for measuring emotion. Although the emotional intensity of facial expressions may vary due to cultural differences (Tsai et al., 2019 ), the basic categories of emotions expressed are broadly consistent (Anthony & Nicolas, 2021 ). As a result, facial expression recognition (FER) techniques are now widely used. Currently, the information expressed by students’ facial expressions is associated with their learning emotions. FER is gradually being applied in teaching environments. Studies have suggested that students’ expressions reflect their cognition. Wang et al. ( 2014 ) studied puzzlement detection using FER. Liaw et al. ( 2021 ) analyzed changes in students’ facial expressions and found a significant relationship with conflict-induced conceptual change, which is valuable for predicting students’ learning outcomes. Several studies have also attempted to analyze students’ emotions with facial expressions. Chen et al. ( 2015 ) built detectors of confusion, engagement, and frustration with features extracted from FER. Zhu and Chen ( 2019 ) constructed a database of students’ spontaneous facial expressions and applied it to evaluate emotions during e-learning. Most of these studies have classified emotions based on extracted feature information. Recent research has further quantified emotions as classroom status indicators. For example, Pei and Shan ( 2019 ) generated students’ concentration scores via FER. Shen et al. ( 2021 ) constructed an engagement equation based on four emotions, namely, neutral, understanding, disgust, and doubt, to generate students’ classroom engagement scores. The findings of these studies suggest the feasibility of developing the MP-FERS for classroom evaluation.

Although the aforementioned studies achieved acceptable identification accuracy and precision, the quantitative criteria lack theoretical support. Few have explored the strength of the link between engagement measured by computer vision and actual engagement (for example, comparing FER measurements with teacher observations or self-reports). Furthermore, discussions of how FER measurement results work for teaching feedback are lacking (Vanneste et al., 2021 ). This study attempts to address these limitations by exploring two research questions, which are discussed next.

In this study, the PAD emotional state model proposed by psychologists, such as Mehrabian ( 1995 ), was used for quantifying ELE through facial recognition. The PAD model describes emotional states through pleasure, arousal, and dominance and uses continuous sampling and recognition of facial expressions to systematically quantify emotion as ELE in real time. It has been demonstrated that almost all the reliable variance in the other 42 emotional response scales can be explained by the PAD emotional state model (Mehrabian, 1996 ). Moreover, the PAD model remains valid for facial expression analysis (Cao et al., 2008 ; Jia et al., 2014 ). Since each emotion has a set of PAD values, the PAD emotion space region can effectively characterize the learner’s emotional state. Gilroy et al. ( 2009 ) established a correlation between flow and emotional state measures through PAD values. As discussed earlier, the flow state represents high-quality ELE, which supports the use of the PAD model as the method for quantifying ELE.

Research Questions

This research proposes a method for measuring ELE using the MP-FERS and discusses its effectiveness in science classrooms. Specifically, this research aims to answer the following two research questions:

To what extent can MP-FERS produce valid and reliable measures of students’ ELE in a real classroom setting?

How may students’ ELE, as measured by the MP-FERS, vary with different teaching activities?

Research Methodology

As discussed previously, measuring ELE is essential but challenging. Using primarily quantitative methods to investigate ELE involves limitations. Therefore, mixed methods were used in this study (Creswell and Clark, 2011 ). Mixed methods are suitable for problems where quantitative or qualitative methods are insufficient for developing a comprehensive understanding (Greene, 2007 ). This study collected adequate data from multiple sources to better explore the feasibility of using the MP-FERS to measure ELE. With the types of data and analysis methods used, a mixed-method approach was needed for this study.

Multiscale Perception Facial Expression Recognition System (MP-FERS) for ELE Measurement

Facial expression can provide an essential basis for determining students’ ELE. However, teachers have limited capacity to capture changes in each student’s facial expressions over time. Accordingly, this research designed a machine learning-based MP-FERS to measure ELE in real time.

The Organizational Structure of MP-FERS

The organizational structure of the MP-FERS is shown in Fig.  1 . First, an HD camera collects real-time videos of students’ facial expressions, which are streamed into the sentiment analysis module. Then, the sentiment analysis module predicts the emotions of students’ facial images extracted from the video. Finally, the various emotions identified are further analyzed through the engagement measurement module to be quantified based on the pleasure-displeasure, arousal-nonarousal, and dominance-submissiveness (PAD) emotion model proposed by Mehrabian ( 1995 ). The ELE values are then calculated through an equation to generate a change curve on the display terminal. The continuous sampling and recognition of facial expressions facilitate a more precise capture of students’ ELE caused by changes in the classroom environment. Essentially, the MP-FERS primarily measures situational emotions that reflect the effectiveness of instruction.

The organizational structure of the MP-FERS comprises a camera, sentiment analysis, and engagement measurement modules. MP-FERS is deployed on an edge computing box with an input image size of 640 × 640 and running at a frame rate of 5 fps

Sentiment Analysis Model of MP-FERS

Facial expressions are among the most potent, natural, and universal signals that humans utilize to convey emotions and intentions. The sentiment analysis model used in this study consists of two steps: (1) facial image preprocessing and (2) facial expression recognition for sentiment classification. Preprocessing of facial images is performed mainly by using an HD camera to acquire students’ classroom images and then using the OpenCV toolbox to extract students’ facial images. FER in the classroom environment may reduce the amount of complete facial feature information due to facial occlusion or pose changes, resulting in a small recognizable range and low accuracy. To address this problem, this study employs a vision transformer (ViT)-based (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020 ) multiscale local and global perception network (MLGPN), which learns the local and global representation of expressions and the relationship between different representations at multiple levels, reducing interference from occlusion and pose changes. Its overall network structure is shown in Fig.  2 . First, the multiscale local perception unit embeds a channel attention module that guides the network to learn global and local salient features of expression images at different scales. Then, the expression features with multiscale information were analyzed to produce channel and spatial information about the features through the global perception unit composed of the Vit architecture, which adaptively models the global dependencies of learning expression images in different dimensions. Finally, the hierarchical stacking of multiscale local and global perception (MLGP) blocks composed of two types of perception units effectively reduces the influence of pose changes and occlusions.

The overall architecture of the proposed MP-FERS. The input image is first processed by a backbone network based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) to obtain a 256 × 14 × 14 feature map. The feature map is then passed through the stacked MLGP block layer, where it sequentially passes through multiscale local attention units and global perception units. A classification header module is connected after the output of the last layer of the MLGP block, which consists of fully connected layers for dimensionality reduction, batch normalization, GELU, and other modules. The output sequence is turned into a vector of expression polarity probability distributions, and the expression categories are finally obtained via softmax normalization

To better validate the robustness and generalizability of the model, this study was conducted on three large-scale field datasets popularized by FER. The results are shown in Table  1 . FERPlus contains 28,709 training images and 3589 test images. The RAF-DB dataset is a representative wild FER dataset with 12,271 training images and 3068 testing images. AffectNet is the largest field dataset for the FER task, with 283,901 training samples and 3500 test samples. Compared to the other methods, the MP-FERS method achieved the best accuracy on all three datasets, as shown in Table  1 . The experimental results demonstrate that MP-FERS can learn local nuances and region-global relationships of expressions, effectively reducing the effects of occlusion and pose changes.

Designing the Measurement Model of ELE

Quantifying emotion scales to produce an engagement index is one of the challenges faced by researchers in the field of emotion measurement. By reviewing studies on ELE, we found that each level of engagement is either associated with or directly explained by emotion. For example, high engagement is expressed as excitement, happiness, and surprise, while disengagement is expressed as tiredness, boredom, and sadness (Altuwairqi et al., 2021 ; D’Mello & Graesser, 2012 ). The definition of engagement categories is consistent with the description of multidimensional emotions. Hence, this study associates emotion categories with ELE.

Next, we quantify the predicted emotional labels of facial expressions through the PAD emotion model in this study. The PAD conceptualizes emotions of pleasure, arousal, and dominance (Mehrabian, 1995 ), which are linked to the positive and negative characteristics of emotions, the level of neurophysiological activation, and the individual’s state of control over the situation or others, respectively. Unlike discrete emotion models and other dimensional emotion models (Arent, 2005 ; Wundt, 1980 ), the PAD emotion model describes subjective experiences and maps their relations to external performance and physiological arousal; thus, it is considered more appropriate to describe students’ ELE under the influence of classroom situations (Jia et al., 2014 ). In expression recognition, human expressions are classified into seven main types: happy, angry, disgusted, fearful, sad, surprised, and neutral. Table 2 shows the mapping values of these emotions in the three dimensions proposed by the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Although the PAD values are useful, they are not integrated into a single engagement measure. To address this, we created a single measure in terms of the PAD values to represent the overall ELE of an individual or the whole class, which is described in Eq. ( 1 ). Since the contribution of the three dimensions to ELE varies across subjects and teaching forms, the weight values of each dimension \(\left(\alpha , \beta , \gamma \right)\) are constantly changing under the attention mechanism. The subscript \(j\) refers to the number of emotional categories, \(P,A,D\) refers to the mapping values of the seven emotions in the PAD model (Table  2 ), and \({P}_{j}\) is the probability of each emotion category. \(\sum_{j=1}^{7}P{P}_{j}, \sum_{j=1}^{7}A{P}_{j}\) , and \(\sum_{j=1}^{7}D{P}_{j}\) represent pleasure, arousal, and dominance values, respectively. During the pretraining of the evaluation model, this research established the equation by adjusting the parameters several times so that the machine scores would be the closest to the manual scores.

Equation ( 1 ) calculates the ELE at multiple points in time. To evaluate individual students and the whole class, we define \({E}_{k}\) as the average ELE of the \({k}^{th}\) student in Eq. ( 2 ), which calculates the effect of classroom activities on stimulating individual interest in learning. By combining the \({E}_{k}\) of all students, we can calculate the ELE of the whole class as shown in Eq. ( 3 ), which combines the engagement of all students. In the equation, m denotes the total number of time points measured during the class, and n represents the number of students.

Procedure and Analysis

As discussed in the review, research on facial emotion recognition tools lacks validity confirmation. The validity of the MP-FERS is equivalent to the concept of validity in social science research. Therefore, this study evaluated the validity of the MP-FERS by comparing the MP-FERS outcomes with other measures, including self-reports of engagement and students’ academic performance. The overall framework of the measures and comparisons are shown in Fig.  3 .

A mixed-methods approach is used to validate the MP-FERS dataset. This is a triangulated validation model that includes evidence from self-reports, academic achievement, and teaching style, each corroborating MP-FERS results from a different dimension

As discussed earlier, objective evidence of ELE should come from students’ behaviors in real classroom situations, i.e., the measurement using MP-FERS, which is the core of this study. Due to the greater specificity of the MP-FERS data compared to those collected by traditional test instruments such as questionnaires, we employed criterion-related validity (Cohen et al., 2007 ). Criterion validity reflects the degree to which a measurement instrument is valid for measuring or predicting an individual’s performance in a given context. It is critical to find suitable criteria that reflect students’ ELE. In this study, two criteria were selected for validation.

First, self-reports are still regarded as the standard method because they produce perceptive and subjective evidence directly from subjects (Fredricks et al., 2004 ). In this study, students’ self-reported engagement was measured within the same time frame as that of the MP-FERS, which can serve as a criterion to validate concurrent validity.

In addition, evidence of related factors cannot be ignored. As discussed in the literature review, students’ ELE is strongly influenced by teaching style and is an effective predictor of academic achievement. For this reason, the degree of student-centeredness in the classroom and student academic achievement are also selected as related criteria to validate the predictive validity of the scale.

By analyzing and comparing the three interrelated groups of measures from multiple data sources, mixed methods facilitate the triangulation of the data analysis to establish the validity and reliability of the MP-FERS measurement outcomes (Delahunty et al., 2018 ). Since perceptive and subjective evidence strongly predict related evidence, if the ELE measured by the MP-FERS matches subjective evidence and predicts related evidence equally well, a high level of validity of measurements should be demonstrated using the MP-FERS.

Participants and Context

The study was conducted with 118 eighth- and eleventh-grade students from two middle schools in Guangdong Province, China. These students majored in a science-based curriculum track that included courses in physics, chemistry, and biology. Ten participants did not complete the final test (8.5%); this is a relatively low percentage of missing participants that may not have affected the subsequent analysis (Hair et al., 2010 ). Ultimately, 108 students completed the course and reported their engagement and academic achievement. The sample included 62 boys (57%) and 46 girls (43%).

Study Design and Procedure

This study was conducted in physics classes. We recorded the participants’ classroom facial expressions for six 40-min-long lessons. To maximize the ability to measure authentic emotional engagement, the researchers administered self-report questionnaires immediately after each lesson was completed. To measure students’ academic achievement, their final exam scores were obtained from the schools. Finally, three researchers majoring in science education analyzed the teaching clips, which were categorized into three teaching styles.

Before the study, students and teachers voluntarily agreed to participate and to provide us with all of the requested personal data. The participants were informed that sensitive facial information would not be retained and that all the data would be kept confidential. Official informed consent was obtained following the requirements and policies of the schools and the local ethics committees.

Additional Measurements and Analysis

In addition to using the MP-FERS for measuring students’ ELE, numerous additional measurement methods, including a questionnaire survey for self-reported ELE, course grades for academic achievement, and class video analysis for teaching style, were used in this study.

Self-Reported ELE

To measure self-reported ELE, the Science Learning Engagement Scale (SLES) developed by Ben-Eliyahu et al. ( 2018 ) was used. The SLES is a reliable and valid instrument for measuring student engagement and includes emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. The original scale is used to measure student engagement in both formal and informal learning. In this study, only the context of science classroom learning, which included 17 items, was retained. The complete scale is shown in the supplementary material. The three reverse-structured questions (Q3, Q4, Q5) included in the scale were reverse-coded before analyzing the data. A higher score indicates a higher level of engagement.

Academic Achievement

In this study, academic achievement was evaluated using students’ final physics test scores. The questions were assigned by the local municipal education authorities and developed by a panel of senior teachers after two rounds of reviews. The tests included multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank (short answer), and computational show-work questions, with a total possible score of 100. Since we only measured ELE in six lessons during the semester, the test scores on selected questions that corresponded to the content areas of the six lessons were used for student achievement. Each student’s score was normalized.

Teaching Style

The teaching styles were categorized using the S-T interaction analysis scale, which is a typical method for quantitatively analyzing classroom instruction that quantifies the distribution of teacher behavior (T) and student behavior (S) based on a classroom observation framework (Kaiyue et al., 2021 ). This method distinguishes student-centered instruction from teacher-centered instruction by analyzing teacher occupancy (Rt) at each classroom stage (Fu & Zhang, 2001 ). According to Li et al. ( 2021 ), Rt > 0.7 is the lecture type, which is defined as teacher-centered in this study; Rt < 0.3 is the practice type, which is defined as student-centered in this study; and 0.3 < Rt < 0.7 is the interactive type. In this study, the coding method was based on educational information processing technology (Fu & Zhang, 2001 ). A period of class time was coded as teacher behavior (T) if it was dominated by the teacher with explanations, demonstrations, media displays, questions, or evaluations. In contrast, a class period was coded as student behavior (S) if it was dominated by students with speech, reading, thinking, discussing, experimenting, or notetaking. According to previous S-T analysis studies (Dong & Ke, 2015 ; Liu et al., 2014 ), the minimum teaching session length was typically 2 min, while the duration of the behavior was typically less than 3 min. Therefore, the classroom videos were divided into 2- to 3-min segments of teaching clips, which were coded based on the teacher and student behaviors discussed above to determine the teaching styles.

Correlation Analysis for Criterion Validity

To establish the criterion validity of the MP-FERS, ELE scores measured from the MP-FERS were compared with self-reported data. In addition, correlations between ELE scores and students’ physics test scores were also analyzed. However, since the MP-FERS and self-reports are completely different measures, the absolute scales of the results from the two methods are not directly comparable, but correlations can be used to compare their variances. However, since ELE is believed to be a strong predictor of academic performance, analyzing the correlations among ELE measures and student academic performance can provide useful evidence for establishing the validity of the MP-FERS. Descriptive details of the dataset are included in the supplementary materials. The correlations are provided in Table  3 and discussed next.

Self-reports are commonly used as subjective measures of ELE; therefore, we first compared the correlation between ELE scores from the MP-FERS and self-reports. The correlation matrix showed that the ELE scores from the MP-FERS and self-reports were positively and significantly correlated ( r  = 0.496, p  < 0.01; R 2  = 0.25). This result suggested that the MP-FERS has appropriate concurrent validity with students’ self-reported ELE scores. Accordingly, the ELE measured by the MP-FERS is a suitable indicator of students’ emotional state in the classroom.

However, the correlation was within the medium range, indicating a moderate level of inconsistency between the subjective and objective measures. In self-reports, many students reported close to perfect scores on the emotional engagement dimension, leading to a small variance in the measurement. However, there were clear differences in students’ learning behaviors and facial expressions, as seen in the videos, which indicate that students’ self-reports of ELE are likely biased by intended preferences. For example, a significant fraction of students displayed expressions of boredom during the instruction, as seen from the class video, but reported a high level of engagement. Therefore, we need to further analyze the correlations between ELE measures and academic achievement to determine which measure has more predictive value for learning. If the MP-FERS results are more significantly correlated with science achievement than self-reports are, ELE from the MP-FERS is more strongly correlated with student performance. Thus, we can consider the MP-FERS score to be a better predictor of student performance. Two examples of student data are shown in the supplementary materials.

As shown in Table  3 , the ELE obtained from the MP-FERS was strongly correlated with physics scores ( r  = 0.845, p  < 0.01; R 2  = 0.71) and was much greater than the correlation between self-reported ELE and physics scores ( r  = 0.479, p  < 0.01; R 2  = 0.23). This result suggested that the MP-FERS score was a better predictor of student performance than self-reports were. This result further reveals the weakness of self-reports, which are subjective and involve a high degree of uncertainty. For example, students may know what teachers expect them to answer and do not want their low level of engagement to be revealed; thus, self-reported ELE can be strongly biased by social expectations. Moreover, self-reports were obtained after the completion of an entire lesson, which means that students may ignore some neutral or mildly negative feelings and still feel good about themselves. The identified limitations of self-reports are consistent with similar concerns in the literature, as discussed in the literature review. Accordingly, we believe that the strong correlation between MP-FERS scores and students’ physics test scores demonstrates a higher level of criterion validity for the MP-FERS than for self-reports.

Applications of MP-FERS to Informing Teaching

The unique advantage of the MP-FERS is that it can provide near real-time measures of ELE, which can be used to inform teaching practices. To explore how the MP-FERS can be applied in real classrooms, we analyzed the relationships between teaching style and students’ ELE measured by the MP-FERS. As indicated by related research, teaching style can significantly influence ELE (Fredricks et al., 2018 ); therefore, understanding how such influence manifests in a classroom can provide valuable information for teachers to adjust their teaching strategies so that appropriate ELE states can be maintained during the teaching process.

Student ELE in Different Teaching Styles

To examine the utility of the MP-FERS, we compared the differences between the measured ELE states of students in different teaching styles, including student-centered, interactive, and teacher-centered styles. If the student-centered ELE is significantly higher than the teacher-centered ELE, then we can consider the MP-FERS a practical tool for probing students’ emotional responses to classroom teaching and helping teachers improve teaching effectiveness.

In the analysis, we divided the collected classroom videos into a total of 139 clips of 2–3 min each and calculated the average ELE of the whole class in each clip. Researchers also reviewed the teaching style of each clip based on teacher and student activities; 49 teacher-centered clips, 52 interactive clips, and 38 student-centered clips were identified. The ELE was measured with MP-FERS using video images from 65 students whose ELE could be identified in a teaching clip. Each student typically had 800–1400 measured ELE data points in a lesson. All the students’ data were aggregated to produce the average ELE in video clips of the three different teaching styles. The results are shown in Fig.  4 as violin plots, which combine the features of the boxplot and density plot. The plots were generated using the ggpubr package in the statistical software R. Explanations of the types of information included in the plots are also provided in the supplementary material.

Emotional learning engagement (ELE) in teacher-centered, interactive, and student-centered styles. The violin plots show the distributions of students’ ELE in the three teaching styles, as well as the medians. The p -value from ANOVA was used to compare the differences among all three groups, while the p -values between any two group means were obtained with t -tests to compare the difference between two specific groups

As shown in Fig.  4 , there was a significant difference in ELE scores across the three teaching styles ( F (2,136) = 3.99, p  = 0.021; η 2  = 0.055). The mean ELE score was highest for the student-centered style ( M  = 58.15, SD  = 7.43) and lowest for the teacher-centered style ( M  = 53.41, SD  = 6.95), while the ELE score for the interactive style ( M  = 55.59, SD  = 8.67) was between these two values. Independent t -tests indicated that the ELE was significantly greater in the student-centered clip than in the teacher-centered clip ( t  = 3.06, p  = 0.003; Cohen’s d  = 0.66). However, the ELE in the interactive clip was not significantly different from that in either the student-centered clip ( t  =  − 1.47, p  = 0.15; Cohen’s d  = 0.32) or the teacher-centered clip ( t  = 1.39, p  = 0.17; Cohen’s d  = 0.28).

The results showed that students had higher ELE in teaching clips with a higher degree of student activity, which is consistent with the findings of previous studies (Fredricks et al., 2018 ; Renninger & Bachrach, 2015 ). Therefore, the MP-FERS measurement of ELE can be considered a convenient and viable tool for probing real-time ELE in teaching and learning.

ELE for Students at Different Academic Levels

To explore how different teaching styles may impact the emotional reactions of students at different academic levels, the students were sorted into two performance groups: a high-score group (top 50%) and a low-score group (bottom 50%). The two groups’ ELE scores for different teaching styles were analyzed and are shown in Table  4 .

One-way ANOVA revealed that ELE score significantly differed among the three teaching styles for both the high-score group ( F (2,696) = 9.57, p  < 0.001, η 2  = 0.027) and the low-score group ( F (2,609) = 13.96, p  < 0.001, η 2  = 0.04). The ELE in both groups was highest in the student-centered style group and lowest in the teacher-centered style group (see Table  4 ). This result indicates that the effect of teaching style on students’ emotional experience is relatively consistent across performance levels. The overall ELE was significantly higher in the high-score group than in the low-score group ( p  = 0.001). However, among the three teaching styles, the difference between the performance groups was significant only for the teacher-centered style ( t  = 2.79, p  = 0.005; Cohen’s d  = 0.25), and there were no significant differences between the two groups for either the interactive ( t  = 1.31, p  = 0.190; Cohen’s d  = 0.13) or student-centered styles ( t  = 0.42, p  = 0.672; Cohen’s d  = 0.05). This finding suggested that students’ emotional responses to interactive and student-centered styles are similar across achievement levels. Both interactive and student-centered teaching styles involve open-exploratory methods, which provide students with more opportunities to express themselves and be engaged in learning. An active classroom atmosphere allows most students to experience a sense of participation and thus present collective engagement. On the other hand, in the passive teacher-centered style, higher performing students often have a better chance of keeping up with the instructor’s lectures than weaker students, leading to a more pronounced difference between their engagement levels. In addition, since teacher-centered lectures lack interaction, students’ ELE depends heavily on their own intrinsic learning motivations and interest, which are significantly correlated with achievement and therefore can also lead to differences in ELE between performance groups. To summarize, the results suggest that designing appropriate interactive and student-centered activities can be an effective strategy for improving the ELE of the majority of students, regardless of their academic performance levels; therefore, such activities can provide a more inclusive environment for teaching and learning.

Changes in Student’s ELE During a Lesson

One advantage of MP-FERS over traditional self-reports is that the measurements are automatically performed with class videos that can produce near real-time outcomes; this approach can be used to analyze fine-grained teaching interactions for evaluating their effectiveness and extend the ability for real-time feedback to improve the classroom environment toward better learning engagement. To examine whether MP-FERS can provide real-time fine-grained ELE feedback for monitoring and improving teaching interactions, the temporal variation in MP-FERS-measured ELE in one lesson was analyzed. Since students’ ELE varied greatly from lesson to lesson due to changes in content and teaching emphasis, we selected one lesson as an example to demonstrate the features and capacities of MP-FERS for real-time measurement. The results are shown in Fig.  5 with a time resolution of 3–5 min. The outcomes were calculated with a moving average of a 5-min window throughout the 40-min class time. Each window in the plot was calculated based on 9 students’ data, with approximately 60–170 data points per student in each 5-min time frame. The total sample size for each calculated mean is in the range of 540–1530, which makes the standard errors very small (error bars not shown). For the time frame of each data point plotted, the teaching style was also determined based on the majority of the types of teaching activities.

The curves of students’ emotional learning engagement in a lesson

The results showed that both the teaching style and the students’ ELE varied substantially throughout the lesson period. The trends in ELE indicate that high-performing students can often maintain a higher and more stable level of ELE, while low-performing students have a lower and more fluctuating ELE during class time. The results also showed that most of the peak engagement stages involved student-centered styles, such as doing exercises (minutes 27–33) and group discussions (minutes 35–37). These findings are consistent with the summative results discussed in the previous section but provide a timeline extension to allow fine-grained resolution for examining the changes in ELE with time and teaching style, which can provide valuable utility for research and teaching. For example, the results show that appropriate interactions can significantly increase students’ ELE. During the instruction episode in minutes 27–33, the middle school teacher in the class asked all the students to assume the role of bomb disposal expert and dismantle an explosive device, which had a control circuit fabricated in series and parallel forms. All the students in the class participated in the activity, which stimulated an ELE peak, as shown in Fig.  5 . This example illustrates that students’ interest in science can increase when they are given roles in which they can take the lead to solve a context-rich problem.

The results in Fig.  5 can also provide useful diagnostic information for further analysis of teaching activities. For example, during minutes 15–20, which was a teacher-centered stage, the ELE changes of the high- and low-score groups were vastly different from the states in the remaining time frames. Further analysis of this teaching stage suggested that the teacher was explaining a difficult practice problem in which high-performing students were able to keep up with and respond to teacher. On the other hand, low-performing students were not able to meaningfully follow the discussion and were left out of the interaction loop, which might further lead to frustration among these students. Given this feedback, teachers can improve the design of their teaching by changing to use a more inclusive strategy, such as adding additional “scaffolding” steps, to help develop desirable learning pathways among all students.

Conclusions and Implications

In this research, we developed a multiscale perception facial expression recognition system (MP-FERS) for measuring students’ emotional learning engagement, which was applied to study real classrooms’ teaching activities.

For the first research question, it was found in this study that ELE measured by the MP-FERS is moderately correlated with ELE measured via self-reports, indicating moderately good concurrent validity. Moreover, the ELE measured by the MP-FERS is more strongly correlated with academic achievement than self-reported ELE, revealing greater predictive validity; these findings are consistent with those of Muñoz-García and Villena-Martínez ( 2021 ). The results also suggest that the MP-FERS can help address the weakness of self-reports, which are a subjective measure that is likely biased by students’ intentions. In contrast, the MP-FERS is an objective measure that cannot be easily concealed by students’ intentions. We scrutinized the self-reported and MP-FERS measures, and found that self-reported ELE was generally higher than the ELE measured by the MP-FERS for both high- and low-performance groups. This finding could indicate potential biases in self-reporting, where students may tend to report in a way that aligns with teachers’ expectations. The MP-FERS, on the other hand, provides a relatively objective measure that is less likely and harder to be intentionally biased. In addition, the MP-FERS is noninvasive and far more efficient than a questionnaire and provides real-time results at much finer temporal resolutions, which are valuable for research and teaching. In previous research, Whitehill et al. ( 2014 ) constructed an FER model that discriminates between four levels of engagement, whereas human observers can distinguish between only high and low engagement. Ashwin and Guddeti ( 2020 ) also found that the machine classification of emotional states provides the same classification as human annotations. All of these outcomes demonstrate the efficiency and potential of FER systems for measuring ELE through students’ facial expressions.

For the second research question, this study explored how teaching styles impacted students’ ELE overall and at high- and low-performance levels. Students are generally more engaged in student-centered and interactive activities. This finding is consistent with previous studies that used self-reports to measure ELE, all of which have demonstrated the positive influence of student-centered teaching on student engagement (Baeten et al., 2010 ; Watson et al., 2021 ). From Fig.  4 , the distribution of ELE across teaching styles reveals that ELE is concentrated at a lower level for teacher-centered style and toward a higher level for student-centered style. For interactive styles, the ELE is more broadly distributed from low to high levels. The results suggest that interactive teaching may be influenced by a more diverse set of factors. Since the interactive style involves interactions among multiple participants (teachers, students, and groups) and is characterized by interactive cycles throughout, the stimulation of ELE in the interactive style may depend not only on the form of the activities, but also on the design of the interaction processes. For example, the design of question chains and the way of guidance are both important factors in promoting ELE. However, interactions that do not match students’ proficiency levels may be counter-productive to ELE. This suggests that teachers need to pay particular attention to the design of interactive teaching to help all students develop their desirable learning pathways.

In addition, the results also demonstrated that MP-FERS can produce accurate real-time measurements of ELE at a fine-grained temporal resolution, echoing the current literature on measuring emotion in the teaching process (Liaw et al., 2021 ). This feature makes it possible to study the temporal variation in ELE levels in response to different teaching activities and can help teachers improve classroom instruction in places where students’ ELE is low. We analyzed the temporal variation in MP-FERS-measured ELE in one lesson. The synchronous changes in ELE among high- and low-performing groups across the timeline reflect their immediate responses to teaching activities, demonstrating the sensitivity of ELE to teaching variations. The results also reveal differences in the ELE responses between the high-performing and low-performing groups. In the student-centered style, the difference in ELE is small. Student-centered teaching is more open-ended and students have a greater sense of self-control, so low-performing groups may be emotionally satisfied through a variety of activities. In contrast, in most of the teacher-centered styles, the difference between the two groups is significant and even showed an opposite trend (minutes 15–20). In a teacher-centered style characterized by lecturing, students’ emotional satisfaction may be more related to the ability to keep up with the teacher’s lectures. This suggests that teachers need to pay attention to the difficulty of lecturing content and develop desirable learning pathways that can promote comprehension among low-performing students. On the other hand, teachers can also learn from teaching formats that produce high engagement for all students and thus tailor their future instruction toward a higher level of learning engagement.

Notably, facial expressions may be subject to cultural variations, and ELE may vary across classroom settings, disciplines, and demographic groups. Follow-up studies should expand into other science disciplines and student populations. In addition, further research could consider digging deeper into the value-added effects of students’ emotions on learning performance, such as retention of scientific concepts and participation in science activities, enabling educators to recognize how fostering ELE can contribute to learning outcomes in the science classroom.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as the MP-FERS has the potential to enhance the measurement of teaching effectiveness. However, variations in facial expressions across cultures and the privacy and ethical acceptance of AI technology should be carefully considered (Wu et al., 2020 ). For example, incomplete or biased data collection may lead to biased educational decisions. Overreliance on technology may reduce emotional communication between teachers and students and weaken teachers’ discriminative ability. In conclusion, it is vital to respect each student’s unique learning process and refrain from imposing uniform standards. Data derived from intelligent tools should inform and help refine teachers’ pedagogical approaches and strategies.

Data Availability

The models used herein uses a large-scale open dataset from the Internet open source, publicly available on Google Search. Data sheets are available upon request through the corresponding author.

Code Availability

Code is original and produced by the authors. Contact corresponding author to inquire about availability of code.

The data generated during the current study are partly available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Because the class video data included images of students, we cannot share them with the readers due to the ethical reason.

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Conceptualization: Xiaoyu Tang, Lei Bao. Methodology: Yang Xiao, Xiaoyu Tang. Formal analysis and investigation: Yayun Gong. Writing—original draft preparation: Xiaoyu Tang, Yayun Gong. Writing—review and editing: Lei Bao, Yang Xiao. Funding acquisition: Xiaoyu Tang. Supervision: Lei Bao, Jianwen Xiong.

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Tang, X., Gong, Y., Xiao, Y. et al. Facial Expression Recognition for Probing Students’ Emotional Engagement in Science Learning. J Sci Educ Technol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-024-10143-7

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