II. Literature review

A literature review should:

• be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing;
• synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known;
• identify areas of controversy in the scientific literature;
• formulate questions that need further research.

Do not try to list all the material published on the topic, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your research question. It's usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory.

In the literary review you may feel free to criticize. But criticize the work, not the investigators or authors. Please see the following examples.

Example 1

Looking at the development of the hydrogen technologies road map from Cavendish to the present day, many research studies [2,12,15,20,24,27,28] have been conducted and reported in the literature. Although many researchers [4,9,10,13,22,25,30] have made significant contributions to improving hydrogen technologies and awareness, the present global energy system is dominated by fossil fuels, and this pattern is expected to continue till 2030. An important question is for how long these business-as-usual projections can continue without running into constraints in the form of limited reserves of fossil fuels, or severe environmental problems from their combustion, including not only global climate change from CO2 and methane emissions, but also air pollution problems [23].

Holland and Provenzano [19] stated as the age of hydrogen is close at hand. According to Holland and Provenzano, a few decades from now, perhaps by the middle of the twenty first century, hydrogen likely will have replaced oil as the world’s primary on-demand energy currency. Or is hydrogen really a utopia [7]?

(Source: Melih Soner Celiktas, Gunnur Kocar. Hydrogen is not an utopia for Turkey. International Journal of hydrogen energy 35 (2010) 9–18)

Example 2

Montesinos et al. obtained a value of isokinetic temperature of 1150 K. The isokinetic temperature is the temperature at which all reactivities are equal for different conversions. An isokinetic temperature of 1449 K was obtained by Dhupe et al. [6] for CO₂ gasification using catalyzed sodium lignosulfonate. Feistel et al. [7] found this temperature to be 1425 K, obtained using potassium-catalyzed steam gasification.

Gokarn and Muhlen [8] investigated the gasification of char using two types of catalysts and a mixture of both the catalysts. The investigated catalysts were calcium lignosulfonate and sodium lignosulfonate. The carbon matrix was saturated by calcium lignosulfonate at 10% by weight. However, this saturation did not affect the catalytic effect of sodium lignosulfonate in the mixed catalytic system.

Li and Cheng [9] investigated the catalytic gasification of coal char using Na₂CO₃ and K₂CO₃ as catalysts.

(Source: I.I. Ahmed, A.K. Gupta. Pyrolysis and gasification of food waste: Syngas characteristics and char gasification kinetics. Applied Energy 87 (2010) 101–108)

Please read the article about writing the literature review on the University of Toronto website: http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/specific-types-of-writing/literature-review. What tips from these recommendations can be useful for you?

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