Abstract: Critical speech acts in literature reviews in academic discourse play an indispensable role in the construction, evaluation and promotion of new academic knowledge.This paper looks into criticism in academic discourse literature review across the disciplines, and takes negative evaluation, the pointing out of a gap, and other speech acts emphasizing the superiority of the literature reviewer's thinking in comparison to prior studies, as its object of inquiry.It also makes a categorization of critical speech acts in literature review and briefly analyses the different distributions of each category in natural science and social science literature review.