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Skills and Purpose
The Basics
- Determine your selection criteria
- Clarify your scope and core topics
- Find sources that define and justify your work
- Scope is related to the constraints of time and resources
- Collect your sources and organize your work
- Use a bibliographic manager
- Literature Reviews can be organized in several ways. Consider what is most significant in your findings. For example: chronology, theme, or method.
- Process and write about your sources to:
- Synthesize and evaluate
- Identify and shed light on gaps in the literature / research
- identify new interpretations
- resolve conflicts in contradictory studies
- avoid duplication of effort - yet be open to confirmation and building
- point the way forward for future research projects
- Connect the literature to your project
- Place your work in the context of existing research
