Literature Review Planning Workbook
From collecting research papers to developing a critical literature review.
Open / download the PDF →A strong literature review is more than a collection of summaries. It critically examines existing research, identifies meaningful patterns, evaluates evidence and develops a coherent understanding of what is known and what remains uncertain.
The SRS Literature Review Planning Workbook is designed to help researchers organise this process systematically.
What you'll learn
- How to define the purpose and scope of a literature review.
- How to formulate a focused review question.
- How to develop a transparent literature search strategy.
- How to establish inclusion and exclusion criteria.
- How to extract and compare evidence from published studies.
- How to move from individual summaries to critical synthesis.
- How to identify potential uncertainties and research gaps.
- How to develop a structured literature review outline.
Real research examples
The workbook uses three published studies on retrieval practice and student learning to demonstrate evidence extraction, comparison and synthesis.
It explains how researchers can interpret differences between studies and formulate cautious conclusions without overstating the available evidence.
What's included
- Step-by-step literature review planning guidance.
- Real scholarly research examples.
- Worked evidence extraction and synthesis exercises.
- Search strategy and selection criteria templates.
- Reusable literature evidence matrix.
- Synthesis planning worksheet.
- Literature review outline.
- Final quality checklist and references.
How to use this workbook
- Begin by defining your review question and scope.
- Plan and document your literature search.
- Establish criteria for selecting relevant publications.
- Examine the worked examples to understand evidence extraction.
- Complete the evidence matrix for your own selected studies.
- Compare findings, methods and limitations across studies.
- Develop a critical synthesis and structured review outline.
- Use the final checklist before drafting your literature review.
Important: The worked example uses selected publications for instructional purposes. It does not constitute an exhaustive or systematic review of retrieval-practice research.
Suitable for: Undergraduate project students, postgraduate students, PhD scholars, early-career academics and independent researchers.