• A title page with your topic (you may change the project title later), your name, and the date.
• A literature review of 12-15 sources, which can include the sources used in the Annotated Bibliography. This component should be approximately 7 double-spaced pages, Times New Roman 12-point font or 10-point Arial font, with 1” margins.
• A bibliography of all the sources covered in the literature review, with Chicago Style or APA citations.
1. Begin with your Annotated Bibliography and any instructor feedback(Some of the sources listed a primary appear, rather, to be secondary. The source list would benefit from a focus on only a few key angles to the cyber threat as you progress in refining your topic). Continue to read the relevant sources, including any in your extended Bibliography that you have not yet reviewed.
2. Categorize the sources into schools of thought. What existing explanations appear in the literature that suggest potential explanations for your chosen phenomenon?
o What characteristic or phenomenon (dependent variable) are the authors trying to explain?
o What are the explanatory factors (independent variables) the authors are using to try to understand variation in the dependent variables?
o What other explanations are possible?
o Do the authors relate to each other? Be sure to check which sources they are citing, since this will lead you to the seminal works on the topic, and will also give you a sense of which of your chosen authors fall into similar theoretical camps.
3. Write an introduction that synthesizes the state of the current literature on your topic, and the theory/line of reasoning that you find most convincing.
4. Analyze the sources. You should leverage your Annotated Bibliography material here. However, unlike in the Annotated Bibliography, sources should be discussed directly in relation to each other, grouped into schools of thought, rather than each treated in isolation. Drawing on the earlier terrorism example: the literature review could first introduce the school of thought that contends that terrorists do not achieve their strategic aims. It would identify authors who fall into this school of thought, explaining their research (drawing on the Annotated Bibliography) but clearly relating them to each other. It would then identify a competing school of thought and similarly analyze works that fall within it.
5. Identify your theoretical explanation. This is the approach that you find the most convincing.
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o It will likely be drawn from the schools above; however, it may be a new approach that you did not find represented in the literature.
o Note that just because the theoretical approach already exists does not mean that your work is redundant. In many situations, a theory exists but has not been applied to the cases, or evidence, that you have chosen. For example, a theory about civil war termination that has only been tested on African cases could be applied to cases in Europe.
o Another common situation is that a theory has been applied to a different phenomenon. For example, you might seek to understand international military cooperation by looking at general theories of international relations cooperation and determining which one best explains your chosen topic.
