Just interested in how long people's literature reviews are-esp. in social sciences? My thesis is supposedly going to be around 80 000 words and will follow a very traditional structure:
Chap 1 Intro to topic
Chap 2 Lit Review
Chap 3 Methodology, etc.
Chap 4 Results
Chap 5 Analysis and discussion
Chap 6 Conclusion
Given this basic structure and a qualitative methodology, I was wondering if people might share how many words they are giving or have written in their lit review? One author I looked at, suggested around 24 000 words...what do others think?
(Im currently only on 5000 so know I have a way to go, but will be going on with this throughout the year, while I collect data, still would be good to have a sort of ball park figure in my head to look at).

Hiya pjlu, my lit review is about 10k words. My prof has advised for me to write for each chapter in about 10k to 12K words. I have the same number of chapters that you plan to have, so all together I think the word limit would be about 70K plus.

Thanks Charliebrown, that's really helpful. Ive been trying to find this reference for around 24000 words and am beginning to think that I was seriously deluded or had simply read too much that weekend. 10-12 000 sounds more realistic and makes me feel a lot better about what I have done.
If I can find my 'horror' source, I'll post it later. Now its off to work, far, far away from literature reviews...

Hey, I just checked mine and it was 11,000 words (I passed last summer with minor corrections overall but no changes needed on the literature review), I would say between 10-12,000 definately sounds right as charliebrown said- 24,000 sounds far too long for a literature review! good luck :)

Thanks Psychresearcher-I'm going to aim for 12 and then keep refining it and adapting while I do the data collection, etc. Cheers, P.

Hi!
I'm in the social sciences too, and I'm writing (or rather trying to write) my lit review chapter.
I wrote 21,000 words and my supd told me to reduce it to 15,000. I managed to make it 17,000 and then I was told to make it 10,000! So, now my thord draft is around 11,000 words and I don't seem to be able to reduce it more!

My other chapters are:
Introduction (around 7,000 words as my research is based in a country other than the UK and I have to "set the scene")
Literature review (around 11,000 words)
Methodology (araound 13,000 words)
Analysis 1 (around 12,000 words)
Analysis 2 (around 12,000 words)
Analysis 3 (around 11,000 words)
Conclusion/Discussion (around 12,000 words)

That gives me total of around 78,000 words with a limit of 80,000