Literature Review in Software Engineering

Hi everyone,

This is my first time posting a question here on this website so please correct me if I'm wrong. Alright my problem is I'm supposed to write a Literature Review for my final year project in Software Engineering. I've done quite a bit of reading what a literature review is but I'm quite confused. According to what I understand, in a literature review each sentence discusses whatever previously done work (like we find some sources and paraphrase them into our own words). My confusion is that what if a particular sentence that I wrote in my literature review hasn't been covered by someone else? For instance, my topic is about "eating habit" and in my introduction of the literature review I wrote "For the survival of every human beings, each of us need to have food supplies blur blur blur". Can I include a sentence like that because I think everyone knows that we must have food supplies in order to live i mean do i need to find sources just to write that sentence in my literature review ? I mean is it a must that every single sentence must have citation and its own reference ? Thanks everyone in advance.

Best Regards

In general, one does not have to cite references for common knowledge. In a literature review, the focus should be on the literature. Often, there's no need for such generalized statements anyway. Since everybody knows that people need food to live, there's no reason to state it. Still, of course, you will write some introductory and transitional sentences that do not cite sources. Furthermore, many literature reviews include a discussion section where the writer draws some conclusions from the literature reviewed in the body of the paper. You may want to check with your instructor to determine whether such a section is warranted in this paper.