I had to write a literature review for this course. To get started, I found some notes of things to look for when reviewing literature. One book by R. Murray Thomas said to look in the following stages:

• topic statement
• define key terms
• rationale - what the topic contributes to the field and why it's important
• methods and instruments of data collection
• ways of classifying and analyzing data
• ways of interpreting data
• ways of reporting data

The problem I had with those tips were that they only really make sense if the literature review is in the context of a whole research project. If you're just doing a literature review, a different book by Donna M. Mertens had some more focused advice in a 9 step format:

1. identify research topic
2. review secondary sources to get an overview - some journals like to publish literature reviews, which could be used as as starting point. When reading journal titles, focus on ones with "review" or "bulletin" in the name such as Review of Educational Research.
3. develop a search strategy
4. conduct search
5. obtain titles
6. read and prepare bibliographic information and notes
7. evaluate the research reports
8. analyze the research findings and synthesize the results
9. use the literature review

Mertens also suggested asking the following questions:

• What are any of the biases, if any, in the literature?
• How current is the research?
• Is there enough information to reinforce the research presented in the literature?
• Is the research predominately primary, secondary, or opinion?
• Does the literature provide a critical analysis of existing literature and the strengths or weaknesses of their own publication?
• Does the literature provide a reasonable guide to reproduce their study?
• Does the literature present information for both sides?
• Are any needs for new studies identified in the literature?

Then I came up with the following additional questions from just reading other literature reviews:

• What is the extent and nature of the variability of the findings?
• What conditions contribute to more effective results on one side of the research than the other?
• To what extent do special features in a study moderate the influences of the researcher on the researchee?
• What are important implications for practice and future directions for research?