Assignment: Literature Review

Assignment: Literature Review

Length: 1500 words, minimum (not including bibliography)

Weight: 25% of course grade

A literature review is a review of research in a particular topic area that aims to bring the reader up to date on what has been happening in that research. Typical published literature reviews may synthesize tens or even 100+ articles.

In order to do this literature review assignment, however, you need to find only ​ten​or more scholarly articles that report recent primary research and that cluster around a particular topic. By “recent” research, I mean that you should try to find articles that have been published within the last two years, preferably within the last year. That said, there are many of you who will use “older” articles due to your subject and available research. That’s fine. Use what articles are best suited for your paper. Remember that “primary” research means that the articles report experiments or observations done by the authors of the article and include the methods and results used in the research. Don’t cite other literature reviews in your own literature review.[unique_solution]

It’s important to avoid picking a topic that is too broad. The more tightly focused the articles are, the easier you will find the review to write.

Getting started

It might help to pick a topic that you already feel familiar enough with from

• work you are currently doing

• something you are studying in another class

• a personal interest

• a topic that relates to your career or graduate school goals

Format

The literature review should have descriptive title that gives a good idea of what the paper covers and an introduction that orients the reader to the general subject area and lets us know the scope of the document (i.e. what topics are to be covered).

The body of the review will be divided up into two or more sections that discuss subtopics within the research area you on which you are focusing. Thus, if you are looking into the recent research on a disease, you might have a section on diagnosis, one on pharmacological treatments, and one on dietary treatment. Of if you are looking into wetland restoration, you might have a section on the need for mitigation, a section on the analysis of what needs to be restored, and a section on possible remedies for problems in wetland restoration. **Note that this kind of organization focuses on the concepts and ideas within the broad topic, not on summaries of individual papers. A paper that merely summarizes one study after another is NOT a literature review.

You have to understand the material well enough to decide what these topics within the review are going to be. It won’t work to simply paraphrase the papers, one after another; there is not much point in writing a review paper unless you synthesize the information for the reader. Once you decide on the topics, work the information from the articles into the topics.

Style

Literature reviews are academic, professional documents that are written for experts in the field. You should write in a formal style and present information in a logically structured document. Avoid first person and meta-language (e.g. “In this paper we will discus…”).

Because literature reviews represent the ideas of others, you will not be including much (or any) argumentative language. Your job as the writer is to synthesize the information about the topic that has already been peer reviewed and published. But you are not merely stringing together quotes from the articles you’ve found. Look at the models we’ve discussed, and note that there is very little direct quoting in those papers. You should, therefore, paraphrase, rather than cite from specific studies.

Citations

Obviously you will need to cite sources abundantly and to provide a correct Literature Cited section (or a bibliography of some sort). We will go over citation formatting in class. Textbooks and manuals that you use for background information should not be cited and cannot count as one of the sources for your review (any textbook material should be paraphrased—don’t steal their wording). The words used in the Literature Cited section do ​not​count toward the 1500 word minimum requirement.

Learning Outcomes:

1. To think and write critically about a complex or multi-dimensional issue.

2. To practice academic research using various databases and multi-media tools.

3. To critically assess the import and validity of various texts.

4. To critically evaluate and synthesize texts.

5. To practice pre-writing and drafting techniques.

6. To engage peer editing techniques to help improve your writing.