Paper Four: Literature Review
Peer Review: Monday, April 5 and Tuesday, April 6
Conference: Thursday, April 8 or Friday, April 9
Final Draft Due: Monday, April 12
Length: 8-11 pages double spaced, plus a Title Page and Reference List
Documentation Style: CSE or APA
Source Requirements: At least five scholarly sources, no shorter than four pages each,
no more than eight years old
Grading Weight: 25%
Topic: A topic of your choice in the natural or social sciences.
Purpose: In the preliminary stages of any significant research project, students and
scholars are expected to carry out an extensive literature review. A literature review, or
review article, is an analytical account of what has been published on a topic by
accredited scholars and researchers. You can imagine that your review is
intended to answer the question, “What is the state of knowledge on my topic?” Your
goal with this paper is to develop and demonstrate expertise on your chosen topic (or to
deepen expertise, if you work with a topic you already know something about), so that
you can present a highly informed and relevant persuasive argument about your topic in
Paper Five.
In addition to enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a review article lets you
develop and demonstrate three fundamental skills: Research, Analysis, and Synthesis.
(1) Research: The ability to find existing knowledge by scanning the literature
efficiently using the databases common to scholars in the university, AND the ability to
identify a set of useful sources.
(2) Analysis: The ability to identify significant findings or conclusions in the published
literature on your topic.
(3) Synthesis: The ability to articulate connections, patterns, common themes and areas
of disagreement within a range of studies. A review article is not just a descriptive list of
the material available on a given topic, nor is it a set of summaries. In writing your
literature review, your first purpose is to describe to your reader what research has been
pursued and what answers have been established for your topic. Your further purpose is
to identify what questions still remain and what work still needs to be done. In meeting
these two goals, an effective literature review synthesizes the literature and analyzes its
significance. This analysis can then be used to determine what still needs to be learned in
order for researchers to have a complete understanding of your topic.
Selecting a Topic: You will continue working with the same topic for Paper Five, so
make sure that you choose something of interest to you. Not all topics will work well,
however. Controversial topics such as capital punishment, abortion, gun control,
legalization of currently illegal drugs, and the drinking age are too broad and unwieldy to
be good choices for Papers Four and Five. I can help you define a topic if you have
trouble coming up with good options.
If a topic of interest does not automatically come to mind, try skimming recent issues of
scholarly journals related to your major or area of interest. You can also search popular
journals and newspapers for potential topics, but keep in mind that current events (less
than six months old) will not have many, if any, scholarly sources published on them yet.
Audience: Your review should be written for an academic audience (students and
professors) interested in seeing the broad trends in research on your topic.
Scope and Organization: Careful research, analysis and synthesis will help you
construct a review article that does the following:
-Identifies overall trends in what has been published about your topic.
-Combines results into an explanation of what is and is not known about your
topic.
-Identifies areas of controversy in the literature on your topic.
-Formulates questions that need further research by identifying a single problem or
new perspective that emerges from your review.
In order to effectively accomplish these goals, consider the following strategies for
organizing and developing your review:
Introduction: In the introduction, you should provide any necessary context for your
literature review.
You can do this by answering the following questions, or by considering questions of
your own: What is the specific research focus that guides your project? What general
topics, issues or areas of concern motivated your research? What is the purpose of your
literature review?
Thesis: Your thesis should define the overall trends you found in the research that has
been published on your topic. It should pay particular attention to any significant
conflicts, agreements, ambiguities or gaps in the conclusions that your sources make.
Body: The body of your literature review should be made up of a discussion of the
trends you found in the research on your topic. To keep the body of your paper organized,
group sources (such as research studies, theoretical articles, case studies, essays, etc.)
according to common denominators such as strategies or approach, conclusions of
authors, specific purpose or objective, etc. As you discuss your sources, summarize
individual articles with as much or as little detail as each merits according to its
comparative importance in the literature. You will need to determine if some of your
sources seem to be more important or more influential than others. Remember, the
amount of space (length) that you devote to each source denotes its relative significance.
Make sure that you assess the body of research as a whole, providing a detailed analysis
of trends, points of concurrence and disagreement, and a careful explanation of the
overall significance of your findings. Each paragraph in the body of your paper should
make a specific point about the state of research on your topic.
Conclusion: In your conclusion, review what the research is lacking: Where are there
gaps in the research on your topic?
What still needs to be studied, understood, argued? What don’t we know? What
questions remain? Why? Explain why any further research is necessary (What do we
stand to gain from filling that gap?) and how such research might better help us
understand the issue at hand.
Evaluative Criteria: You will be evaluated based on the level to which you fulfill the
requirements of this assignment as stated on the assignment sheet. In addition, pay
special attention to: identifying and analyzing relationships among the scholarly articles
you review and maintaining an objective stance (make sure that you do not evaluate how
good or bad your sources are, but instead focus on how similar or different they may be).
Selecting Articles: The articles you select for your review need to be academically
reputable. We will discuss criteria for evaluating sources in class, and you should use
these criteria to select each of your sources for this paper. In order to be reasonably
comprehensive but still manageable, your review should draw on no fewer than five
sources, and no more than eight sources. In addition, your sources should be fairly
substantive and current; thus you should not include among your sources any
articles shorter than four pages or more than eight years old.
You are likely to find 10, 20, or even 30 sources published in the last eight years and you’
ll need to select from among them. Your selection should be based on your evaluation of
which sources best represent the aspects of the research you wish to highlight. There
may, for example, be three studies that all produce similar results; look for the one that is
most comprehensive or current, or that best exemplifies this kind of research for your
purposes.
Because the literature review is limited to academic sources, web sites are not valid
sources for this assignment. Instead, you will have to rely on the databases available
through the NCSU Libraries website.
While the full text of many appropriately academic articles is available online, some
articles are only available in hard copy. For these articles, you will have to find the hard
copy at the library or use Tripsaver for sources that are not available at D. H. Hill.
If you have difficulty finding scholarly sources, you can meet with me during my office
hours or consult a reference librarian for help. If you meet with a reference librarian,
make sure you take this assignment sheet with you!