Literature Review Goal
Literature Review
Goal:
Jobs, research, and your own need to know answers to questions will require you to be able to seek out information relating to a given topic. A literature review is a formal way of gathering
relevant and trustworthy information about a selected topic.
A key part of a literature review is synthesizing information. This concept might be foreign to many students (and difficult to grasp at first), but it is something that will help you be better able
to seek out information from multiple sources and then present it in an organized way (again,
something that will likely be needed for a future job or research).
In APA-formatted research papers, the literature is often incorporated into the introduction or follows the introduction of a given topic. This is because understanding what research has been
done on a certain topic is an important part of expanding what we know on that topic.
Instructions:
(1) This exam will center on the research question/hypothesis you selected in your Week 2 Variables/Data
Analysis assignment. For your remaining written exams, you will work on developing, investigating,
and writing about this hypothesis.
(2) Carefully review the information about Literature Reviews under the Weeks 2 and 3 tab and under the
assignment tab in the course site. It will be very helpful to download the APA6 Template under
Organization – you can use this paper as a template to work from because it already has properly
formatted running heads, etc.
(3) Conduct a review of the literature on your selected topic. Become familiar with research available on
your topic and variables of interest (outcome and predictor variables).
You will want to focus your search on materials that are appropriate for an academic paper, including
journal articles and books. (Review distinguishing between scholarly articles and other types of
information and how to search for scholarly articles under Week 1). At the beginning of the research
process, you will likely gather more information and references than you will include in your final
paper – you will cut down on your information once you begin writing.
(4) Write a 3-4 page literature review in APA 6 format (size 10-12 Times New Roman font with 1 inch
margins) that tells us what research has been done on your outcome variable and what studies have
found related to how your predictor variables may influence the outcome variable from AT LEAST
FIVE scholarly sources (you may already have three from Written Exam 1: Research Questions).
This should naturally flow into a paragraph about what your study aims to do (your hypotheses).
Include a cover page (1 page) with title of your paper, name, and running head. Format the first page
of your literature review as if you were writing an introduction, which means you should include a
title at the top of the page. Be sure to include a final paragraph that introduces the reader to YOUR
hypotheses/research questions. Provide a references page in APA format. An abstract is NOT
required at this time. Your cover page and references page are not included in the 3-4 page
requirement.
Useful information:
NO DIRECT QUOTES! PARAPHRASE INFORMATION IN YOUR OWN WORDS!
Review weblinks provided, especially APA6Template and the 5 paragraph essay for examples on how to organize your literature review.
Avoid using I, we, our (first person). Remember, you are synthesizing information, not
offering your opinion.
Keep in mind that this is a short page limit and you will be unable to do a truly comprehensive literature review, but you can do your best to present the most relevant
information (in a synthesized form) within the page limit.