TERMINOLOGY.
Social scientists refer to published scholarship as literature.The process of reading and reviewing published scholarship in the field is referred to as a review of the literature. This phrase is commonly shortened simply to literature review. When academics talk about conducting a literature review, they are talking about researching (reviewing) the scholarly literature. When they talk about writing a literature review, they are talking about writing a summary of such research. Because this is the most commonly used terminology in the field for this type of research, we will use these terms as we discuss this aspect of research and writing from this point forward.