How many pages should a source‑less literature review contain?

To be completely honest, a source-less literature review should actually contain zero pages because a literature review cannot exist without sources. By definition, this section of your capstone synthesizes existing academic research, theories, and data relevant to your topic. Writing a literature review without sources is like trying to write a book review without reading any books; you simply have nothing to review. If you try to write pages of your own commentary or unsourced assertions, you will end up with an opinion piece or an introduction rather than a literature review, which will likely hurt your grade. Consider a scenario where a student is writing their capstone on how remote learning affects elementary student attention spans. If they try to write the literature review off the top of their head, they might spend three pages explaining why they think iPads are distracting. However, their advisor is looking for what educational psychologists have already discovered about screen time and cognitive development. To fix this, the student needs to find at least five to ten foundational studies to summarize and compare. Once you have those sources, a standard capstone literature review usually runs about three to five pages, depending on your department's specific guidelines. Since your deadline is in ten days, you need to pivot quickly to get this written efficiently. Your first step should be to search your campus library database using very specific keywords related to your main research question. Once you find three or four strong journal articles, look at their bibliographies to quickly find more relevant papers, which will save you hours of aimless searching. Finally, draft your review by grouping these sources by their main themes rather than summarizing them one by one, which will help you write a concise, high-quality synthesis well before your deadline.