A literature review is an account of the existing published work bearing on a question — what has been claimed, on what evidence, and where the claims conflict. The term covers several quite different products: the framing chapter of a thesis, the narrative overview article, and the systematic review with a pre-registered protocol and explicit search and screening rules. Only the last has anything resembling shared procedure, and even there the guidance comes from methodological communities rather than a governing body. Elsewhere the term is used loosely, and a review one discipline would call thorough another would call unstructured. Citing a single methods text would turn one tradition’s advice into a rule and misdescribe how the word is actually used.
Why this entry carries no source list. This lexicon cites an official primary source wherever one exists, and says so plainly where none does. No body governs this term. There is no standards organisation for it, no register, and no text whose authors could claim to have settled its meaning. Methods literature describes practice and argues about it; a citation to one author would dress a position in a live argument as a rule, which would mislead more than silence does. What follows is the convention as it is actually used, with the disagreements named rather than smoothed over.
Deeper treatment: this term also has a full entry in the Business Library.
Critical synthesis of existing scholarship that maps agreements, debates, gaps, and tensions — not a summary of each source in turn; Swales's CARS model structures one as establishing the territory, finding the niche, then occupying it.