I have read several articles about literature reviews. At the same time I found some guides about literature surveys. I am confused... how is a literature survey different from a literature review? What is the standard procedure to conduct a literature survey without making it a literature review?
Answer
Reviewing the literature relevant to a given field is a standard part of doing research, as this serves to put your work into the context of the larger discipline in which you are working.
If there is an actual difference between the "literature survey" and the "literature review," it's that the latter can serve as a paper in and of itself, and is much more extensive than a literature survey, which is typically a major part of the introduction of a research paper.
The literature review as a standalone article could be compared to a "curated" overview of the literature in the field—who has done what, how do papers relate to one another, and what are the most important present and (possibly) future directions of work in such a field. Such papers can also be considerably longer than a traditional research paper, and some reviews might cite as many as a thousand references!
In comparison, the literature survey of a standard research article is usually much shorter (1-2 journal pages), and will not cite nearly as many papers (anywhere from 10 to 100, depending on the topic and the amount of relevant literature available).
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