4.4 Literature Review

The definition: the systematic survey of the existing scholarship — the statutes, the cases, the books-and-articles, the reports and theses — on the problem's field. The functions (the exam's list): (1) the gap's certification (the originality's proof — no one has answered this); (2) the foundation's build (the concepts, theories and findings to build on); (3) the method's inheritance (the prior designs' lessons — and errors); (4) the debate's map (the schools and the conflicts — the literature's own case-law); (5) the citation's discipline (the sources' honest acknowledgment). The craft: the sources' search (the databases — the library, the NKP archives, the online journals; the snowball of footnotes), the annotated bibliography's habit, the thematic organisation (the review as an argument about the literature, not a list of it), and the critique's tone (fair, specific, documented). The Nepali field's notes: the NKP and NLR as the primary-adjacent layer; the theses (the TU faculty's repository); the grey literature (the NGO-and- commission reports — the CeLRRd/FWLD layer of Unit 1).