A strong literature review of an EPQ can instantly help you stand out in front of examiners and other readers. However, many students tend to make mistakes by either summarizing all their findings in this section or providing weak sources. If you are someone working on an EPQ literature review, this example is for you.
Many students treat a literature review as a summary. However, examiners are looking for much more than that. They want to see source credibility, structure, cohesion, and support for your research question through your literature review.
This blog post attempts to brush up on your skills of writing a literature review by giving a real example, structure, and template. It also walks you through common mistakes you might be making and provides expert guidance.
What Is an EPQ Literature Review?
The Purpose of a Literature Review
The purpose of a literature review is to evaluate existing data and research on a specific topic in alignment with your current research question. Note how this is considerably different from simply summarizing all existing journals, research papers, or articles. You also tend to evaluate the sources you are using while providing context in terms of your current research area.
A good literature review should clearly inform the reader on what already exists in a research area, what remains in conflict, and where the boundaries of current knowledge lie.
This is usually one of the longest and most citation-heavy sections of your EPQ, so it is important to cross-check the credibility of the sources that you cite.
All these factors matter a lot because a strong literature review portrays how a student deeply understands their research topic before adding further analysis.
How does it support your research question?
A good literature review does more than just give a background to your research.
It also justifies the research question you are formulating by identifying the gaps in our current understanding of this topic.
A review of relevant studies that already exist also helps you understand your research area as deeply as possible. This gap is what makes your pursuit worth it!
Let's say, for example, your research question says, "To what extent does phone usage impact sleep quality?" The literature review should evaluate the data and information we already have on this topic from other research papers, articles, and credible sources. You also need to see where different research diverges, where they agree, and what limitations they face.
Your own analysis and research findings should therefore feel like a continuation of the existing information rather than something isolated.
What Examiners Look For?
Examiners look for four specific skills when evaluating a student's literature review. These include critical analysis, source evaluation, synthesis, and identification of research gaps.
Most students lose marks because one or more of these four areas are underdeveloped.
Examiners are assessing four specific skills through the literature review, and most mark deductions trace back to one of them being underdeveloped.
For critical analysis, you evaluate the argument of a source rather than simply stating it. You identify its strengths and weaknesses, as well as assumptions that need further assessment. Source evaluation focuses on assessing the credibility of your source-where did you take your source from? Was it a credible research paper, a well-known publisher, an academic journal, or some random Wikipedia citation?
Thirdly, for synthesis, you connect all the sources you evaluated to build a coherent image. Lastly, you identify gaps in existing research to find out what still needs answers. This last point is what gives a student's project its main purpose.
EPQ Literature Review Structure Example
A Literature Review for an Extended Project Qualification should have a logical, clear structure. Here is what it looks like:
- Introduction
- Main Themes And Evaluation
- Critical Evaluation
- Research Gaps
- Conclusion
Let's discuss each one of them.
Introduction
This short opening clearly mentions your research question. Moreover, it outlines the overall scope of your research, highlighting what it covers and what it does not. Make sure to make this section brief. One or two paragraphs maximum, not more than that.
Find out more about how to write an EPQ introduction.
Main Themes and Evidence
The body of this review is organized by themes. You then mention credible sources under those theme sections. Some students make the mistake of addressing every source individually in order of their publication date and so on.
The right way to go about this is to group studies under organized themes and discuss them there. This approach makes it much easier to synthesize the sources as well.
Critical Evaluation
Critical evaluation should be woven throughout the themes or presented in a separate section. Here, you should assess all sources and weigh the methodologies, biases, sample sizes, and credibility of the different searches.
Research Gaps
For this part, you provide a clear statement that identifies aspects current research does not address, contradicts, or fully resolves. This is what actually justifies your own EPQ investigation. This bridges what has already been established and what your research is about to explore.
Conclusion
This is a brief summary of all the insights you drew from current literature and how they connect to what you are about to address in this research area.
EPQ Literature Review Example
In this section, we will give a brief outline of an actual EPQ literature review. Obviously, when writing a real one, you will have to elaborate more. However, you can look at the framework below to get a clear idea of how your EPQ literature review should be structured.
Check out the EPQ Literature Review example below:
Example Literature Review for EPQ on Social Media and Teen Mental Health
Research Question: "To What Extent Does Social Media Affect Teen Mental Health?"
Introduction
This literature review explores the relationship between social media use and mental health outcomes among teenagers, focusing specifically on anxiety and depression diagnoses in adolescents aged 13 to 18. The rapid expansion of social media platforms over the past decade has coincided with a documented rise in mental health concerns among young people, prompting significant academic and public debate about the nature of this relationship. While some researchers argue that social media is a primary driver of declining adolescent mental health, others contend that the relationship is more complex, shaped by pre-existing vulnerabilities, socioeconomic context, and patterns of use rather than platform exposure alone.
This review examines existing research across three themes: the documented negative effects of social media on teen mental health, the evidence for potential positive or neutral effects, and the methodological limitations that complicate drawing firm conclusions from current studies. By critically evaluating this body of research, this review identifies significant gaps — gaps that this EPQ aims to address by closer analysis of how usage patterns, rather than platform use in general, may better explain variation in mental health outcomes.
Theme 1: Negative Effects of Social Media on Teen Mental Health
A substantial body of research links social media use to increased rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescents. Twenge and Campbell (2018) found a statistically significant correlation between screen time and decreased psychological wellbeing among US teenagers, noting that adolescents who spent more than five hours per day on social media were considerably more likely to report depressive symptoms than those with minimal use. Their study, drawing on a large national dataset, attributes this primarily to the displacement of in-person social interaction and sleep disruption caused by late-night device use.
Similarly, the Royal Society for Public Health (2017) reported that platforms such as Instagram were associated with heightened feelings of inadequacy and anxiety among teenage users, particularly related to body image and social comparison. Their survey-based research found that teenage girls were disproportionately affected, citing curated and idealized content as a significant contributing factor to negative self-perception.
Przybylski and Weinstein (2019) offer a more nuanced negative finding, identifying a "Goldilocks" effect — where moderate use showed minimal harm, but both very high and very low levels of social media engagement correlated with reduced wellbeing. This finding complicates a simple narrative that more social media use straightforwardly equals worse mental health outcomes, suggesting instead that the relationship may not be linear.
Collectively, these studies provide credible evidence that social media use is associated with negative mental health outcomes for a meaningful proportion of teenage users, particularly around social comparison, sleep, and excessive use. However, the consistent reliance on correlational data across this body of research raises an important limitation that the next theme addresses directly.
Theme 2: Positive and Neutral Effects of Social Media
Not all research supports a uniformly negative relationship between social media and teen mental health. Allen et al. (2014) found that social media use can provide meaningful social support for adolescents, particularly those who experience social anxiety in face-to-face settings. Their qualitative study suggested that online platforms enabled some teenagers to maintain friendships and develop social confidence, which translated into improved offline interactions over time.
Best, Manktelow, and Taylor (2014), in a systematic review of adolescent social media research, found mixed evidence — some studies showed improved self-esteem and social capital among teenagers who used social media to maintain existing friendships, while platforms primarily used for passive content consumption showed more negative associations. This distinction between active and passive use is significant, as much of the earlier negative research did not differentiate between how teenagers were actually using social media, only how much time they spent on it.
Granic, Morita, and Scholten (2020) similarly argue that social media can support adolescent identity development and provide access to peer support communities, particularly for marginalized or isolated teenagers who may find community online that is unavailable to them offline. Their research suggests that blanket claims about social media's harm may overlook genuinely beneficial use cases that exist alongside more harmful patterns.
This theme demonstrates that the relationship between social media and teen mental health is not uniformly negative, and that the type and context of use may matter considerably more than overall screen time alone — a distinction that much of the literature in Theme 1 does not adequately capture.
Theme 3: Methodological Limitations in Existing Research
A significant limitation across much of the existing research is its reliance on correlational rather than experimental or longitudinal data. Twenge and Campbell's (2018) widely cited findings, while statistically significant, cannot establish causation — it remains possible that teenagers already experiencing mental health difficulties are simply more likely to spend extended time on social media, rather than social media causing the difficulties observed.
Orben and Przybylski (2019), in a large-scale reanalysis of existing datasets, found that the actual effect size of social media use on adolescent wellbeing was considerably smaller than earlier headline-grabbing studies suggested — comparable in magnitude to the effect of eating potatoes on wellbeing, as the researchers somewhat provocatively noted. Their work highlights how publication bias and selective reporting may have inflated public and academic perception of social media's harms.
Self-reported screen time data, used in the majority of studies reviewed, is also a recognized methodological weakness. Several researchers, including Parry et al. (2021), have demonstrated that self-reported social media use correlates only weakly with objectively measured usage logged directly from devices, raising questions about the reliability of conclusions drawn from survey-based studies that dominate this field.
These limitations matter significantly for this EPQ. They suggest that broad claims about social media's impact on teen mental health — in either direction — should be treated with caution until research moves toward more rigorous, longitudinal, and objectively measured methodologies.
Research Gap
While the existing literature provides valuable insight into the broad association between social media use and teenage mental health, three significant gaps remain. First, longitudinal research that tracks the same adolescents over multiple years remains limited, making it difficult to establish whether social media use precedes or follows the onset of mental health difficulties. Second, very few studies adequately distinguish between different types of social media use — active engagement and content creation versus passive scrolling and consumption — despite emerging evidence that this distinction may be more significant than overall time spent. Third, existing research rarely accounts for platform-specific effects, treating social media as a single homogeneous category despite considerable differences between, for example, image-focused platforms and text-based or video-focused ones.
This EPQ aims specifically to address the second of these gaps, examining whether usage patterns — rather than total screen time — offer a more accurate predictor of mental health outcomes among teenage social media users.
Conclusion
The existing body of research demonstrates a complex and contested relationship between social media use and adolescent mental health. While several studies report meaningful associations between heavy social media use and increased anxiety or depressive symptoms, particularly linked to social comparison and sleep disruption, other research highlights genuine benefits related to social support and identity development, and significant methodological weaknesses undermine confident causal claims in either direction. The most promising direction for further research — and the direction this EPQ will pursue — lies in distinguishing between types of social media use rather than treating screen time as a single undifferentiated variable.
How to Analyze Sources Like an Oxford Student?
Strong research does not just find the most relevant information. It critically analyzes it through thorough evaluation, questioning, and interpretation of evidence.
Oxford-style learning especially emphasizes this analytical approach. Students don't just accept ideas as presented to them. They challenge and evaluate them.
Therefore, developing these skills can significantly help you with your Extended Qualification Project (EPQ) as well as make you university-ready.
Summary vs Analysis
Summary and Analysis are two separate things, and this is where most students make a mistake while writing their EPQs. A summary involves going over a resource. Analysis, however deeply it explores it, assesses the strength of the argument and how it supports your own research question.
Identifying Bias
Every source that we see is created from a particular perspective. These might be produced by a certain organization, a journalist, or an institute that might be trying to benefit itself.
Therefore, as a good researcher, you should always look at the background of the source. This could include asking the following questions:
- Who produced it?
- Why was it published?
- When did the research take place, and is it still relevant today?
- What is it trying to achieve?
- Is there some potential for bias?
A mentor can actually help you a lot with this. For example, mentors at The Oxford Mentorship Program help students identify the right sources for their particular research question.
Comparing Researchers
You should also compare different researchers along with their work. Oftentimes, academic research fails to give you one single definitive answer.
Different researchers tend to have different approaches, interpretations, and methodologies. They may also draw contradicting conclusions, and it could be worth mentioning that in your literature review. Similarly, you should also cite their areas of agreement.
Evaluating Methodology
Evaluating methodology is one of the most crucial tasks while conducting a literature review like an Oxford Student. The credibility of research heavily relies on its methodology.
Students should assess factors such as sample size, location, data collection approaches, time, and any limiting factors.
Understanding methodology becomes even more important if your research area is scientific or uses surveys.
Developing Oxford-Style Analytical Thinking
Students at the Oxford Institute are encouraged to actively evaluate all sources they encounter. They ask questions, discuss them, and critically analyze the information. Developing this skill is an important component of both the Oxford Summer and Oxford mentorship programs.
Students learn to assess evidence and develop stronger arguments, and to have the confidence to conduct an academic research project. The skills gained from both programs will positively impact students' success in completing their EPQs and ultimately assist them in preparing for university study.
How EPQ Mentorship Can Improve Your Project?
An EPQ mentorship, like the Online Private Mentorship Program for research by the Oxford Institute, can help you in the following ways.
Choosing a Strong Research Question
The most challenging and crucial phase of an EPQ is perhaps choosing the right research question. Normally, students make the mistake of choosing broad, generic research questions.
In an ideal scenario, it should be focused, researchable, and sufficiently complex.
The right mentor can make this process 10x easier for you. They can help you narrow down ideas and conduct a meaningful analysis.
Finding Academic Sources
Mentors also help you find the best academic sources to cite in your literature review or support your research in other ways. This process, otherwise, can get a bit hectic for beginners.
Developing Critical Thinking Skills
For many students, an EPQ is one of the most challenging independent projects they take up in high school. The critical skills you require for that are next-level.
You must analyze evidence, compare viewpoints, identify limitations, and construct well-reasoned arguments.
Mentorship sharpens your critical thinking so you can deeply engage with your subject matter.
Receiving Expert Feedback
Mentors track your milestones and provide independent feedback at each stage. These constructive comments help you produce a finished work that stands out.
Also, in all honesty, an EPQ is one of those tasks where you keep needing extra push.
Building University-Level Research Experience
An EPQ is also one of the closest research activities to actual university research experience. So, in a way, it makes you university-ready. If you have a mentor who attended top schools like Oxford, Harvard, and so on, they can assist you in feeling this university-like research experience even more.
Moreover, they can also help you write something that would appeal to the admissions officers at your dream school.
The Oxford Online Mentorship Program for Research
If you are working on your EPQ and feel stuck, the Oxford Mentorship Program is for you. The best part is that it is online, so you can access the most credible mentors from anywhere in the world.
Here are some of its characteristics:
- 1:1 mentorship with Oxbridge and Ivy League tutors
- Support from idea generation through to the final 5,000-word paper
- Free 60-minute consultation to start
- Certificate of Attendance + publication opportunity for strong work
Currently, we offer three packages for our private mentorship program. Here are some quick details. For further information, please refer to the details of The Oxford Private Mentorship Program.
- Express — 8 weeks — 12 sessions — £1,999. Best for students on a tight deadline with an existing foundation to build from.
- Standard — 12 weeks — 18 sessions — £2,999. Ideal for students starting mid-project who need structured guidance through the remaining stages.
- Comprehensive — 20 weeks — 30 sessions — £4,499. Designed for students starting from scratch who need full support from initial question development through to final submission and presentation preparation.
All three packages include semi-weekly or weekly one-to-one sessions, milestone tracking, and feedback for improvement.