Your literature review is a summary. Here is why that fails.

A common pattern in early drafts: paragraph one summarises Smith, paragraph two summarises Jones, paragraph three summarises Lee. Each paragraph is accurate. Read together, they do not add up to anything, because a list of separate summaries has no argument connecting them.

A literature review has one job a summary does not: to position your research inside an existing conversation, not next to it. That requires identifying where the field actually agrees, where it genuinely disagrees, and, most importantly, where a specific gap exists that your research is positioned to address. Smith and Jones are not just two separate findings; they may directly contradict each other, or one may have used a method the other did not, and that tension is exactly what a real review makes visible.

The test is simple. Read your literature review and ask: does this section argue something, or does it merely report something? If the answer is report, the sources are all present but the connective tissue between them, the part that turns citation into argument, is still missing.