The Literature Review
Read over all your notes. Remember, you should have found at least 20 articles that were central to your paper topic.To have found 20 good ones, you should have read many more.
Make a list of the findings of each study (on note
cards?)
Group studies in various
ways—similarities, contrasts, contradictions, complementarities in hypotheses
tested, methods used, findings.
Think about the following questions
and create an outline of the paper.
1.
Why is this area important?
2.
Do all the studies agree about one or more major findings?
3.
Are there two or more major points of view or theories represented in these
studies?
4.
Are there contradictory or contrasting findings represented?
5.
Are there 2-3 major issues that researchers in this area are concerned with?
6.
What do I want to remember about this research area two years from now?
7.
If I had to tell a group of psych majors about these articles, what would I
say?
8.
Are there any practical uses or implications of the findings? What do the
findings mean for everyday people?
You
will need to think of your own questions. Answers to these questions may be a
topic sentence for one or more paragraphs of your summary.
You will obviously have evaluative
reactions to your sample of studies (if not, you should). Some were done more
or less well, some ideas or theories are more or less important, some findings
are more or less valid, etc. These reactions are important, but in formal
scientific writing:
1. they are saved for the end of a
summary or annotation (not necessarily the end of the paper—just after you have
introduced the particular study)
2. they should be justified (give
your reasons for drawing such conclusions)
3. they should be stated directly (e.g., “Hilton et
al. only examined five participants, which…” instead of “I thought it was bad
that Hilton only used five participants”).
There is a widely used formula for
the opening paragraphs of a literature review. The first 1-3 paragraphs set the
topic background, makes the meanings of major terms clear to the audience
(usually not by flatly stating definitions), and gives some perspective on why
the topic is relevant or important. Do not write, however, “X is a very
important area of study” or something along those lines. After you have written
the first paragraph (often the most difficult paragraph to write), read back
over it and see if any of the sentences are unnecessary. If you started on the
third sentence and dropped the first two, would you have lost anything? Avoid
boring sentences that do not add anything.
The next paragraph or two sketch out
the organization to be used in the paper. This paragraph may be enumerative
(e.g., First…second…third). This foreshadowing allows the reader to pick up on
your organizing structure and get them ready for what is coming next. At the
end of each section of the paper, you should summarize your main points in that
section and give a lead-in to the next section.
For this paper, play the role of
someone who wants to convey information on the topic to an academic audience so
that the audience has a pretty good idea of the major aspects of the topic. The
paper should show that you understand the basic issues related to the topic and
the relationships between them.
Try to imagine that you are
preparing a lecture to a psychology class on your topic (we’ll use the example
here of agoraphobia). This may help you decide what types of information to
include and how to organize it. If the students in the class are interested in
agoraphobia, they want to know basically what it is, some examples of it, the
major types of research that have been done (not just a listing of research,
but the major types or categories), and what some of the major findings have
been. They also want to know about the main scientific, methodological, and
social issues surrounding the topic of agoraphobia. What do researchers agree
on? What do they disagree about? Are there different approaches or points of
view taken by different researchers?
This
handout is a modified version of one created by Jack Yates.