A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by scholars and researchers

Your purpose is to convey the knowledge and ideas that have been established on a topic and what their strengths and weaknesses are

The literature review you create is defined by your research question   

Questions to ask yourself before conducting your literature review

• What is the scope of my literature review?  Academic articles, government documents, etc?
• Have I identified the best databases?  Will the search terms I am using be wide enough to ensure I can find the relevant material?  Will they be narrow enough to exclude irrelevant material?

• Your research question should focus on a single topic or problem.
• The research question must be answerable using primary or secondary sources. 
• It should not include subjective value judgements. Subjective value judgements like better or worse do not offer a clear criteria for answering the question
• When developing your research question - Start Big. Think of a broader topic that interests you and lends itself to investigation.
• Preliminary Research. Do some preliminary research to see what information on your topic already exists.  It will help you to narrow your original idea. (This might be a time to use Google Scholar to get a sense of the available research).
• Be Flexible.  As you conduct your preliminary research, you might identify the need to change tweak or reformulate your question.
• Clear. The question should clearly state what you intend to research. The more focused your research question is, the easier it will be to conduct your literature search.
• Appropriate scope. The question should neither be too narrow or too broad. If the question is too narrow you might find you don’t have enough to write about.  If it is too broad, it will be difficult to cover all of your research thoroughly.
• Analytical not descriptive. You want your research question to allow you to conduct an analysis of your topic rather than a simple description of it.

• A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another.
• Organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends.
• Your aim is to synthesize and evaluate the research according to the guiding concept of your research question