Now here is a topic that is more interesting than you might at first think. In any literature review, you'll be citing sources and quoting from them so, you pick the most relevant quotes and, well, quote them. What more is there to say? Quite a bit, as it happens.
In some undergraduate work, the purpose is to determine your stance on a text or issue, and then to present evidence for that stance. That evidence often comes from the literature and in many cases, the task goes like this: you dig in, do loads of reading, find work that supports your stance, pick the clearest or juiciest quotes, and cite them in support of your view.
This work is not without value. You get practice in working out a clear stance, you get experience in searching for scholarly sources, and in reading them. You gain experience in working out how your work fits with previous work. Who agrees with you? Who does not? In order to answer these questions, you have to have a clear and robust sense of your own argument, you have to understand the arguments that other scholars have made, and then work out if they agree with you or not. And, of course, you get practice in citing source appropriately, using whatever citation conventions your institution requires.
But when it comes to doing your literature review, more advanced work is necessary. We need to move beyond picking quotes that confirm what we already believe. In a dissertation or research project, we dig into the literature with an open mind and then synthesize what we find there. The foray into the literature has two main phases (each of which, of course, will have many sub-phases). When you are formulating your research question, you'll be digging into the literature to see what kinds of studies have been done before, what kinds of questions have been asked, and generally scoping out the current shape of your field. From this process, you'll finalize your research question.
Once you know that, you dig back into the literature, but you are no longer getting the general shape of what is there. Now, you are looking at that shape, expanding your search, and then assessing the whole body of material to fully articulate why your research question needs to be asked. Picking quotes that agree with you will not help you here, because you also have to determine who does not agree with you, and who kind of agrees with you but not entirely and, in this latter case, where the agreement ends and the disagreement begins, and why that matters. You have to look at all the ways your topic has been studied, not just the way you are studying it, or the way you are most familiar with, or the way you secretly think is 'right'. And when you find sources that might threaten the need to ask your question, you have to deal with that, too, and carefully -- such sources can't simply be ignored. Do they make their points in convincing ways in robust studies? If so, your original question might need work. Or, you might assess such work, fairly and thoroughly, and come to the conclusion that the points made do not rest on thorough evidence. But take care here -- there is a big difference between explaining previous work away because it is inconvenient, and dealing with it in principled and well-evidenced way. Are you sure you have been fair in your assessment? Are you sure you have been thorough? Can you demonstrate your view with clear evidence from your assessment? Quotes here will be very useful indeed, but notice how different this is from ferreting out only those voices that converge with yours and ignoring the rest.
So take the plunge in your literature review. Listen to all the voices on your topic and decide why they matter to the question to you are asking.
