Literature Review
Pam Harris
pharris1@swarthmore.edu
+ Research
The scholarly conversation
Research Paper
What the Lit Review is NOT!
Annotated Bibliography
Only a Summary
A book review
+Integrated analysis of scholarly writing
What the Lit Review is NOT
+Can be arranged thematically, chronologically or by questions
- A summary + an analysis
+Makes judgements on the literature:
- Identifies inconsistencies, gaps and contradictions in the literature
+Is guided by your perspective
i.e. If you write a lit review chronologically, you might be emphasizing how your topic has changed over time
- Highlights key findings
What the Lit Review is NOT
+Demonstrates why the topic is significant to psychology
+Discovers relationships between ideas/research
+Provides clues for future research
- Ensures that researches do not duplicate work that has already been done
-Areas to focus
+Demonstrates you are familiar with the topic
Steps
Be organized
Identify a topic
Discover relationships between sources
Identify themes/ideas
Write
Search for literature
Read
Repeat
?
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Text
PsycINFO Thesaurus
+ Controlled Vocabulary
* "With the wide variety of concepts and vocabulary used in the psychological literature, searching for and retrieving records about specific concepts is virtually impossible without the controlled vocabulary of a thesaurus."
American Psychological Association
* The thesaurus has broader, narrower and related terms.
* By using the thesaurus you are putting the work of indexers to use for you.
To think about....
"... how many sources do you need to establish the importance of a theme? Twenty?... in a database containing millions of sentences, full-text search can turn up twenty examples of anything... this might strengthen confirmation bias."
-Ted Underwood,
Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago
Pam Harris
pharris1@swarthmore.edu
Psychology Lit Review + research
By Swarthmore Reference
Psychology Lit Review + research
~ Pam Harris
