Literature Review Template: A Ready-to-Use Structure You Can Adapt

A template is only genuinely useful if you understand what each section is actually meant to accomplish, not just what to fill in. This guide gives you a practical, adaptable literature review template alongside guidance on customising it to your specific topic and requirements, rather than treating it as a rigid fill-in-the-blank form.

Before Using Any Template: Know Your Actual Requirements

The single most important step before using any template is checking your specific assignment brief, module handbook, or supervisor's expectations for length, required sections, and citation style. Templates are genuinely useful starting points, but a template that does not match your actual assignment requirements will need real adaptation, not just copying and filling in blanks.

The Template

Title

A clear, descriptive title indicating the specific topic and scope of your review - not just "Literature Review" but something like "A Review of the Literature on [specific topic], [year range if relevant]."

Introduction (typically 10-15% of total length)

• One or two sentences establishing the broad topic area and why it matters
• A clear statement of the specific scope of your review (what time period, what type of sources, what specific angle or sub-topic you are focusing on)
• A brief preview sentence outlining how the review is organised (e.g., "This review is organised around three themes: X, Y, and Z")

Adaptation guidance: if your review is a standalone assignment, this introduction can be slightly longer and more self-contained. If it is one chapter within a larger dissertation, keep it tighter, since the broader research context has typically already been established in your introduction chapter.

Body - Theme One (adjust the number of themes to your topic's complexity)

• Opening sentence naming the theme and its relevance to your overall review
• Synthesis of relevant sources addressing this theme - grouped by their actual content and relationship to each other, not simply listed one after another
• Explicit discussion of where sources agree, disagree, or address the theme from different angles
• A closing sentence connecting this theme back to your overall research question or to the next theme

Adaptation guidance: the right number of themes depends entirely on your topic and length requirement. A short review might need only two or three themes; a full dissertation chapter might need five or more, sometimes with sub-themes. Do not force your literature into a fixed number of themes - let the actual content of the literature determine how many genuine thematic clusters exist.

Body - Theme Two, Theme Three, etc.

• Same structure repeated for each additional theme identified in your literature

Body - Methodological Considerations (optional, include if relevant to your topic)

• If methodology is a significant point of variation or contention across your reviewed sources, a dedicated discussion of methodological differences and their implications for the findings

Adaptation guidance: not every literature review needs this section. Include it specifically when methodological differences between studies genuinely help explain differences in their findings, rather than as a default inclusion.

Conclusion (typically 10-15% of total length)

• A synthesis (not a repeated summary) of what the body of literature collectively shows
• Explicit identification of the specific gap in existing knowledge
• A clear statement connecting that gap to your own research question or the purpose of your paper

Adaptation guidance: if this literature review sits within a larger dissertation, this conclusion often flows directly into your methodology chapter - keep the language forward-looking, explicitly connecting the identified gap to how your own methodology will address it.

Reference List

• Full citations for every source discussed in the review, formatted in your required citation style (APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, OSCOLA, or whichever your discipline and institution requires)

Adapting the Template for Different Contexts

For a standalone course assignment: keep the introduction slightly more self-contained (since there is no larger dissertation providing context), and ensure your conclusion connects clearly to whatever assignment prompt or question you were given.

For a dissertation literature review chapter: the introduction can be tighter, since your dissertation's own introduction chapter has already established the broader context. The conclusion should connect explicitly and directly to your methodology chapter, since that connection is central to your dissertation's overall logical structure.

For a systematic literature review: this template's basic shape still applies, but you will need additional sections not included here - a documented methodology section covering your search strategy, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and screening process, typically with a PRISMA-style flow diagram. A narrative review template alone is not sufficient for a systematic review's reporting requirements.

For a shorter review (under 1,500 words): the same core structure applies, but each theme section will necessarily be more concise, and you may combine what would otherwise be several distinct themes into fewer, broader groupings.

A Genuine Warning About Templates

The most common way a template goes wrong is when a student fills in each section without adjusting the actual content to fit their specific topic - using the template as a literal fill-in-the-blank form rather than a structural guide. A strong literature review template should shape how you organise your material, not replace the genuine analytical work of identifying real themes and synthesising sources within them. If your "themes" feel forced or arbitrary rather than genuinely reflecting patterns in your literature, the template is being applied too rigidly.

Checking Your Template Against Your Actual Sources

Once you have drafted content into each section of the template, a useful final check is to go back through your source list and confirm every source you intended to discuss actually appears somewhere in the body - it is easy to lose track of a source during drafting, particularly in longer reviews with many themes. Equally, check the reverse: does every citation appearing in your body correspond to a source in your reference list, and does every source in your reference list actually get discussed in the body? Mismatches in either direction are a common, easily avoidable error that a careful final pass catches.

Getting Support With Your Literature Review

Adapting a general template into a literature review that genuinely fits your specific topic, discipline conventions, and assignment requirements is where real editorial feedback makes the most difference. If you want a second opinion on whether your literature review's structure is working for your specific material, CampusScribe's editors review literature review structure and content at every stage.

From choosing a topic to polishing a final draft, CampusScribe's subject-specialist editors and coaches help with dissertations, capstone projects, presentations, and more - whether you need topic guidance, structural feedback, or a final edit before your deadline.