Looking at examples is the right instinct and it usually goes wrong in the same way: people copy the shape of the prose and miss the shape of the work underneath it. A good review reads as an argument about a body of evidence, not as a sequence of summaries, and the difference is entirely in what the author did before writing. This page is about reading an example for that underneath part, so the thing you produce has the same bones rather than the same paragraph rhythm.
Read for the organising principle first
Every good review is organised around something: chronology, method, theoretical position, population, or the disagreement itself. Find the principle within the first two pages, because it tells you what the author decided their field was actually arguing about. If you cannot find one, you are reading a list, and a list is what most weak reviews are: twenty paragraphs each beginning with an author's name, in the order they were read.
Count what is being synthesised, not what is cited
Look for sentences where two or more studies are held against each other and something is concluded from the comparison. Those are the sentences that make it a review. A paragraph that describes one study and then another and then a third without ever putting them in the same sentence is a summary, however many references it carries. A useful exercise on any example: highlight only the synthesising sentences and see how much is left.
Notice what the author excluded, and whether they said so
Strong reviews tell you what they left out and why, even when they are narrative rather than systematic: a date cut-off, a language limit, a decision to treat one sub-field as out of scope. That single paragraph is what turns the review from a personal reading list into something a reader can check. It is also the part almost no student writes, and the easiest place to be better than the example you are copying.
What a literature review abstract has to compress
Into roughly 250 words: what question the review was asking, what body of work it covers and over what period, how the material was selected, what the main lines of agreement and disagreement are, and what the gap is. The temptation is to spend the whole abstract on background. A reader deciding whether to read your chapter needs the selection and the finding, and the background can go in one sentence.
Two examples that are worth more than ten
A published review in the journal you are aiming at, and a completed thesis from your own department. The first shows you what the field's editors accept; the second shows you what your examiners accept, which is not the same thing and matters more for a chapter. Reading twenty examples from anywhere teaches you the genre in general and nothing about the two audiences you actually have.
How to use one without copying it
Take the example apart rather than imitating it. Write down its organising principle in one sentence, list its sections and what each is doing, note where it synthesises rather than summarises, and find the paragraph where it says what it left out. That is a page of notes and it is transferable; the phrasing is not, and prose borrowed from a review in another sub-field reads exactly as borrowed.
The commonest mistake in a first attempt
Organising by source. Twenty paragraphs each beginning with an author's name, in the order they were read, is the shape almost every first review takes and it is the shape a supervisor spots in a page. The fix is structural rather than editorial: choose what the field is arguing about, make those the sections, and let each paragraph handle several studies at once. It usually means rewriting rather than revising, which is why it is worth catching early.
Questions people ask about literature review example
Where can I find good literature review examples?
Published reviews in the journals your own field reads, and completed theses from your own department, which is the version closest to what you will be marked against. Read two of each before writing anything, and read them for structure rather than for phrasing.
How long should a literature review be?
In a thesis, usually a chapter of somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 words, and your department's own convention beats any general answer. A better measure is coverage: whether a reader knowing the field would say you had missed anything important.
Should I copy the structure of an example?
Copy the discipline, not the shape. The useful thing in a good example is that the author chose an organising principle and stated their selection; the paragraph rhythm is theirs and will not fit your material.
Does a narrative review need a method section?
Not formally, but a short paragraph saying what you searched, over what period, and what you deliberately left out will improve it more than anything else you could add. It is also what makes the work defensible when a supervisor asks about a missing paper.
Can I reuse the structure of a published review in my field?
Its organising principle, yes, and that is the transferable part. Its section headings and phrasing belong to its material, and borrowed prose reads as borrowed to anybody who knows the area.