Literature Reviews: Clarify Your Topic

Developing your topic is the first step in the literature review process. If you need basic help developing your topic check out this video.

Encyclopedias and dictionaries are a great places to begin research as they provide concise overviews and keywords to use for researching your topic.

• Gale eBooks
• Oxford Reference Online
• The Oxford English Dictionary
• World Factbook

Kent State University. (2014, September 16). Developing a Topic. Retrieved from http://libguides.library.kent.edu/content.php?pid=340234&sid=2782670

Producing a literature review is not a linear process. You will need to revisit each stage tp fully develop your project.

A literature review may be part of a research paper or proposal or a more comprehensive stand-alone project.

Research containing a literature review.

Facebook Use, Envy, and Depression Among College Students: Is Facebooking Depressing?.

Journal: Computers in Human Behavior

Stand-alone literature review project.

Women with Disabilities' Experience with Physical and Sexual Abuse: Review of the Literature and Implications for the Field

Journal: Trauma, Violence & Abuse.

• The focus of your literature review will need to be clearly identified.

• Avoid selecting a topic that is too broad.
• Check in with your instructor as you develop your topic to ensure you have a manageable project.

• Your research question will originate from the discipline you are studying, but ideally it will focus on a specific interest of your own in that discipline.

• Think about the question or questions you would like to have answered.
  
• Write a specific research topic statement.

• You should have a clearly defined focus for your project, but this focus may change as you develop your project.
  

• Revising and refining your research question will be part of your process.
• Even after you begin to write you will cycle back to the planning and researching stages.
  

• Begin to document your project immediately.
  

• Decide how you will record the information you collect.
  
• Select a citation management program and become familiar with it.
  

Whether your literature review will be part of a research paper or a stand-alone project, you will need to determine what the scope of your project will be.

• How current does the research for your project need to be?

• Research for the sciences is always changing and quickly becomes obsolete.
• For the humanities and social sciences a summary of older literature is often used to assess changes in perspectives.

• How detailed or comprehensive will your project be?
  

• A project can take all or part of the research regarding your topic into account.
  

• In which ways will you examine the research pertaining to your project?
  

• You can focus on different types of research such as qualitative or quantitative studies, or by considering the methodological approaches used in past works.
  

• How will you organize your project?
  

• Chronologically - Organizing materials in the order they were published. This method is useful if it can demonstrate a progression of ideas.
• Thematically - Structured around a common theme found in the literature.

Literature Reviews (2014) The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/literature-reviews/