 In her social work classes, Anne often heard terms such as review the literature or literature review. At first she was a little confused by these terms. If she needed to conduct a literature review did that mean she needed to look at novels with social work related topics? Anne soon learned that in the academic world the term literature is often used to describe the collective body of scholarly works related to a topic. The literature usually consists of scholarly books or peer-reviewed articles published in academic journals. When Anne was told she needed to review the literature, this meant that she needed to find previously published scholarly articles and books that were relevant to her topic. Anne learned that there were several reasons to conduct a literature review. Looking at previously published sources helped it to increase her own knowledge related to a topic. It helped keep her up to date on current trends and major findings related to her interest. It also helped her to develop directions for her own research and give her ideas for issues that she could explore. Reviewing the literature could help her to see the gaps that still remained in the literature related to a topic. That is, the limitations of previous research studies and the unanswered questions that still needed to be addressed. Anne found that she was often required to include a literature review section whenever she wrote a research paper. In this part of her paper she would summarize previous research related to her topic and show how this was connected to her own research. She also realized that when she started practicing as a social worker, frequently reviewing the literature would be necessary to ensure that she was guiding her actions and interventions based on evidence and research findings as stated in the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics. Anne also learned that in some cases the term literature review is used to refer to a specific type of article published in a scholarly journal. Unlike a quantitative or qualitative research study, in a literature review the author does not usually conduct their own research study. Instead, the entire purpose of the paper is to summarize and analyze the literature on a topic. Anne found that literature review articles could be very helpful in quickly getting up to speed on recent findings of a particular topic, without being required to read multiple articles herself. To sum up, in the academic world, literature is a term often used to refer to all of the previous scholarly works on a topic. In a research article, the literature review is the section of the paper where the author summarizes previous research that is relevant to the topic. In some cases however, the entire purpose of an article is to review the previous literature.