How do I write a good peer review?

Literature Review help?

• I have an assignment to write a Literature Review using 7 scholarly sources (peer-reviewed journals and/or academic books) It also says to "provide a 750-1000 word overview of ...show more

• Answer:

  No, you probably don't want to just list and summarize each source sequentially like that. You're supposed to give the reader an overview of all the recent research on this field: as the assignment says, SYNTHESIZE all of the stuff you find. You're being asked to bake a cake, but your plan is like serving your guests a bowl of flour, a bowl of sugar, and a couple of eggs and some sticks of butter. Those are the ingredients of a cake, but that's not a cake. For example, if you were reviewing 150 years of evolutionary biology, you'd explain how Darwin first proposed his theory, the Lysenko came up with a very different theory, then other scientists discredited Lysenko (and here you'd probably go back to cite some more stuff from Darwin), and then Watson et al. discovered DNA (and here again you'd go back and show how this illumiates Darwin, or contradicts or clears up things he had said), etc. The seven sources are all interconnected, and you have to write about them as such, not as if each one existed in a sealed compartment with no context. You can find professional, scholarly literature reviews in the library or online; look at some of them to see how this is done.