What is a Literature Review?
How do I prepare for writing a Literature Review?
What are the formatting conventions I should adhere to for my paper?
What should my Literature Review include?
How do I construct a references page?
What are the expectations for the Literature Review assignment?
Purpose of a Literature Review
The literature review contains a narrative summary of the articles related to your topic. It is the first major component of your research paper and can only be written after you have read through and taken notes on a variety of other research articles you are using for your research study. Think of it as the background you are using to bring the reader up to speed on your research topic area. It is comprised primarily of other research articles and their findings. The goal of the author (you) is to get across to the reader (me) two things: 1) the reader should understand why YOUR research question is important for filling a missing gap in the research literature (addressing something new that doesn’t appear to have been attempted yet) and 2) that you have a good grasp of the topic (you are demonstrating strong understanding of the issues related to your topic by what you write about and the articles you include).
(I admit, this is the most challenging component of the research paper and the part of the course that requires the most time and energy. We are getting a head-start on it in our course, though, so you will have plenty of time to complete it before the deadlines. Be sure to send me e-mails if you have questions and to assist each other along the way.)
What your literature review should include:
When you write the literature review, it should include references to conclusions found in other research articles to help build the background of your current study. Any time you cite another source, you must include an in-text citation as opposed to a free-form discussion piece. There will be more on this in the next module, but essentially the format is (author’s last name, year of publication). You must also include a combination of quantitative and qualitative articles as well. Again, there will be more on this later, but essentially the difference is if the data from the articles is using numerical data or subjective interviews. You will be expected to include a minimum of 6 primary research articles that you will find on the LBCC library research databases (I repeat, more on this later). The more you provide, however, the easier the literature review will be to write since you have more substance to work with.
There are a number of documents posted to Canvas posted to help you write it, including examples, APA format expectations, and a good guide for completing the scientific paper. I strongly recommend looking at the PurdueAPAexample file as it lays out the correct formatting for you, and the Literature Review Only file to get a good example of what to complete.
APA formatting conventions:
The Purdue OWL APA convention guide mentioned above will served as a useful guide for making sure you adhere to the conventions of scientific writing format correctly. A few conventions to highlight from the guide:
-making sure everything is double-spaced
-12 pt Times New Roman font
-no contractions
-flush left with indented paragraphs
-use 1″ margins all around
APA Formatting
APA FORMAT: When writing your paper, make sure it is double-spaced,
Times-New Roman, 12-point, and each new paragraph is indented, just as this
paragraph here is. Editors, who read through every scientific paper submission,
often require uniformity in standards because it makes their jobs (and readers’)
much easier if everyone adheres to the same conventions. (NO COMIC SANS!)
Use 1” margins all around (normal layout) for all written submission in APA format. You can select for this in Microsoft Word by selecting Page Layout–>Margins–>Normal.
Number your pages in the upper right hand. You can do this in Microsoft Word by a double-click at the top to open up the header, then selecting Design–>Page Number–>Top of Page. Make sure to select the number and change it to Times New Roman 12 pt.
As you write it:
The major mistake a lot of students make is they have tendency to write about one article in one paragraph, then move onto the second article in the next paragraph, and so on. The literature review should be a blending of the articles and your understanding of the research topic as opposed to an article-by-article breakdown (that is closer to what is called an annotated bibliography). If you are truly understanding the different facets of your topic, you should be able to write about the different nuances of it and include the citations from your notes to support your writing. You might come across some literature review articles in your research database search that can give you a good idea of what to include. What you should not include are first-person perspectives, opinions, technical statistical analyses (e.g., t(29) =3.59, p < .05), or excessive quoting (no more than 10% of your paper should be in quotes, which works out to roughly 1-2 lines per page).
You should be breaking down your literature review into what are called logical subdivisions. As you read more about your topic, you will notice certain themes that emerge within the framework of your topic. For example, if your research topic is "Children of Deaf Adults: An Exclusive Assessment of Family Communication", then you could organize your literature review into three separate sections of that for "Family Communication", "Children of Deaf Adults", and "Eldest Child of Deaf Adults". Then as you read through other articles, every time you find something that is relevant to one of those three areas, you can write about it under that subdivision. It is up to you to identify what the subdivisions are of your topic and how you want to organize it. At a minimum, you should have at least 3 subdivisions. You can even break down subdivisions even further, for example with "Family Communication", you can break that down into "Expressiveness", "Family Satisfaction", and "Motives".
Using subdivisions helps not only with the organization of your literature and having an outline to work within, but also helps you avoid the mistake of writing about one article after the next in distinct paragraphs. Here are two diagrams to help you better understand subdivisions and the proper formatting to use in your paper:
Research Topic:
Children of Deaf Adults: An Exclusive Assessment of Family Communication (Level 1)
Subdivisions:
Family Communication (Level 2)
Expressiveness. (Level 3)
Family Satisfaction. (Level 3)
Motives. (Level 3)
Children of Deaf Adults (Level 2)
Interpreting. (Level 3)
Protecting. (Level 3)
Eldest Child of Deaf Adults (Level 2)
*Notice how there are different formatting conventions depending on how you layer your subdivisions. For the major sections of the paper (Methods, Results) they will use Level 1 headers which are centered and in bold. Then as you break up the major sections into smaller subdivisions, those subdivision headers then move down to Level 2 headers which are flush left and in bold. If you continue to layer further (if that is better for the organization of your paper), then continue following the standard guidelines to ensure distinction between the previous sections.
How to construct a References page:
In addition to the Literature Review, you will also have to turn in your References page alongside it. The references page is a technical document that allows the reader to track down the articles that were cited within the literature review. Anything that is cited within the paper, MUST be included within the references page and vice-versa. The references page is included at the back of your final paper that you will turn in at the end of the semester and you can continue to add to it after you submit your literature review. There is a certain structure to the references style depending on the source of the information:
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/Links to an external site.
For primary research articles (you need a minimum of 6 cited within your literature review), use this formatting style within your references section. I provided a color coded example for each component that needs to be provided for each reference, but it should follow this order:
Author, Year Published, Article title, Journal title, Volume number (and issue), doi number:
Notice the hanging indents. You can manually change this by providing tabs for each line after the first line, or highlight each reference separately and select Paragraph Settings, Indentation, Special, Hanging in Microsoft Word.
Oftentimes, it can take a little extra searching to find all of the information you need. See this example below. Not all of the necessary information is displayed on the first page of the article. You can usually find it, however, by looking at the journal publication from the online database first. All information is required, and in the structure seen here.
After you gather all of the individual references from the literature review, you then need to place it in a single section of the paper called the References page. You can see an example below. Notice how it is organized by alphabetizing by the primary author's last name, only the lines after the first line for each source are indented, and there are no extra space between each source. All of the rest of the standard APA conventions for formatting apply. Notice how in the example below, the header for References is located at the top, centered, and in bold typeface. Other conventions to be aware of:
-Alphabetize your sources by the primary author’s last name (don't alphabetize within the reference itself. There's a reason why decided who gets first-author credit, who may be listed second, and so on.)
-Indent all lines after the first line for each source (hanging indents)
-No extra spaces between each source
No extra spaces between each source
The References will be cross-checked with their citations in the prose to ensure that the articles are being cited properly.
The Literature Review assignment:
If you get stuck writing the literature review, take a look at the web-guide below. I always recommend finding additional articles related to your topic to help you write it. Make sure you take the time to proof-read when you are done. It's a shame to invest so much time researching and writing the literature review, only to spend 10% of the effort to actually present your work in writing. Try exchanging drafts with classmates to improve your papers and look for errors that you may overlook.
The assignment is worth up to 20/20 points based on:
-using at least 6 primary research articles as sources (at least 1 each of quantitative and qualitative)
-adherence to APA formatting conventions
-meeting the expectations for what a literature review should include per the module
-proof-reading evident
-use of logical subdivisions
-references page is included, indicating if each source is quantitative or qualitative, and meets the criteria stated in the module
The Literature review and references page together
