The Literature Review should be at least 3 pages long and should include at least 5 articles. The articles should be obtained from the Library and should be empirically based. Empirically based means they must be a report of data collected from human subjects (as opposed to opinion pieces or systematic reviews of the literature). Meta analyses are acceptable. Ask your instructor, if you are not certain whether an article will be acceptable or not. You will already have received feedback about your Annotated Bibliography, so you can select articles that you used from the Annotated Bibliography, if your instructor found them appropriate. The articles should include a mix of quantitative and qualitative sources.
When you are organizing the literature review, write an outline for yourself. You can use the topics in your outline as headers / subheaders in your literature review. The literature review should proceed from topic to topic, not from article (or author) to article. This is what I mean: Author to author: Johnson (2012) says,…. Miller (2017) says…. Thoroughgood (2020) says…
Topic to topic: Johnson (2012) and Miller (2017) both indicate that wombats are highly aggressive. Burgess, in agreement, stated, “When they start to mature and hit puberty, they just hate everybody and everything” (2016, pp. 1). Thoroughgood (2020), however, states that this only occurs in circumstances where the wombats feel threatened.
Be extremely cautious about the difference between quotation and paraphrasing. If you use the original wording of another author, you must put this in quotation marks and add a citation with a page number. If you do not, you are plagiarizing, and this is a violation of the code of conduct. If you re-word the author’s statements in your own way, you must still site the source.
Be sure to include an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction should establish the topics that you wish to cover, in the order in which they will appear in the paper. The conclusion is where you summarize what you learned and point out what has not yet been studied. That’s the set-up for your research recommendations paper.
Include a full reference list.
