CH 496-499: Undergraduate Research

What They Are

• A summary of the relevant literature of a subject.
• Depending on your subject and your field, can be chronologically broad or narrow.
  • Sciences tend to emphasize currency.
• BUT in whatever field, if there is some fundamental text that defined the field or topic of study, that must be included no matter how old it is.
• Lit reviews range from a few paragraphs to a few pages.
  • Or can be extended into a paper solely reviewing recent literature.
• Annotated bibliographies are literature reviews but not in essay form.

Why They're Important

• “Analyzing the past to prepare for the future.”*
• To discover the patterns that emerge within the large body of work devoted to one issue.
• How do the studies speak to each other?  Does one find one thing and another find something contradictory?  Does one ask a question that another follows up?
• To establish an evidentiary basis of common thought and current questions about a subject at the given moment.

*Webster, J., & Watson, R. (2002). "Analyzing the past to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review." MIS Quarterly 26(2), xiii-xxiii.

Analyze!  Evaluate!  Synthesize!

Froese, A. D., Gantz, B. S., & Henry, A. L. (1998). Teaching students to write literature reviews: A meta-analytic model. Teaching of Psychology 25, pp. 102-105.

Analyze

• Keep an eye out for:
  • Pertinent info – who/what/where/when/why
  • Methods – the ever important how
  • Page numbers if you quote something (for easy transfer into your paper!)
  • Numbers (not just “increase/decrease” but “up 50%” or “down 24%”)
• Why was each article written?

Evaluate

• Do you observe any patterns between articles? Is there a common thread in the research done in this field?
• Conversely, do you see any gaps in research? This is a good way to figure out what you can study yourself.
• How does each article compare to the others?

Synthesize

• Use your spreadsheet (or whatever means by which you keep your articles organized) to sort the articles by pattern or theme
• Write what you found into a linear narrative, tying all the studies together by their subject matter and findings, grouping certain studies by pattern/theme
• Quote if necessary but sparingly
• Keep it succinct -- it’s a lot of material but it’s not the bulk of your paper (unless it’s your whole paper!)

For more information:

This is an image of the spreadsheet I used to track dozens of articles for a research article literature review. Your needs may vary, but attached below is a template of this spreadsheet for you to use yourself, if it works for you.

The books here all include mention of lit reviews and how to do them.