Do journal titles need to be included in a brief literature review in the introduction?
Your advisor may be referring to or be inspired by the following:
All journals I know require you to use a complete citation¹ in the rare case that you want to cite something in the abstract of your paper (example).
This makes sense as there are some cases in which people only have access to the abstract and thus a stand-alone citations are desirable.

However, this does not apply to the introduction (of any kind of work) and I would not see any good reason for it. Moreover this has the following problems:


Unless you use this citation style throughout your thesis, it would make your citation style inconsistent, which is confusing for the reader.
It interrupts the regular text flow and thus makes the text more annoying to read.


Whether this is worth starting a quarrel is something only you can decide as it depends on the influence of your advisor and the risks you are willing to take. Most importantly you should find out the opinion on this by whoever will actually read and grade your thesis. If your advisor has some influence but will never read your final thesis, you could change the citation style just before printing.

Either way, you can ask your advisor whether he has any other argument for this other than his own opinion (but again you are taking a risk here, only you can evaluate). After all, he might give bad advice to other people in this regard – or we are all missing a good reason for this advice.




¹ Containing sufficient information to uniquely identify the cited work, usually author, journal and year, sometimes also the page number, but usually not the title.