Group work-based learning is encouraged in higher education on account of both ped-agogical benefits and industrial employers’s requirements. However, although a plenty ofstudies have been performed, there are still various factors that will affect students’ groupwork-based learning in practice. It is important for the teachers to understand which fac-tors are influenceable and what can be done to influence. This paper performs a literaturereview to identify the factors that has been investigated and reported in journal articles. Fif-teen journal articles were found relevant and fifteen factors were identified, which could beinfluenced by instructors directly or indirectly. However, more evidence is needed to sup-port the conclusion of some studies since they were performed only in one single course.Therefore, more studies are required on this topic to investigate the factors in differentsubject areas.