This is a question I see come up all the time, especially among postgraduate students: how long should a literature review be? The short answer is—it depends on your overall word count, discipline, and university guidelines. For most dissertations, the literature review usually makes up around 20–30% of the total word count.
For example, in a 10,000-word dissertation, a literature review is often between 2,000 and 3,000 words. The key isn’t just length, though. What really matters is how well you critically engage with sources, identify gaps, and show how your research fits into existing scholarship. Quality and relevance always beat padding for word count.