And then based on doing a citation tracing exercise , I will go to those younger scholars who are citing these key authors.
But again, this requires you to know the field already. This is where a supervisor, a coauthor, a colleague or a trusted scholar on Twitter may be helpful with narrowing the search scope. And then use those authors to create a map of the literature. Do I need to do an in-depth reading of All The Things? This is completely a question that has arbitrary answers and a broad range of parameters to work around.
It also depends on what type of literature review you are writing. You need to demonstrate that you know your field of study, broadly and deeply. However, if you are writing a literature review, for example, of agenda-setting theory and its applications to health policy, you may want to read in depth articles on health policy, articles on agenda-setting theory, and then start writing from there.
Again, in-depth reading is correlated with the extent and degree to which you need to demonstrate that you know a field. Hopefully this post will help those who are struggling with literature reviews, as the summer approaches! You may also want to revisit my Literature Review posts. You can share this blog post on the following social networks by clicking on their icon. Posted in academia , research. Tagged with literature review. By Raul Pacheco-Vega — June 17, Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
This has helped me so much. I am currently on a year out from studying at undergrad level due to ill health but when I was studying, I was frequently demoralised by how hard I found it to capture my understanding of the material in my written work.
I realised how ill-equipped I was to do focussed reading and note-taking, having previously been able to consume entire topics of content in my own time. Other common examples of primary sources include speeches, letters, diaries, autobiographies, interviews, official reports, court records, artifacts, photographs, and drawings. Secondary Sources A secondary source is a source that provides non-original or secondhand data or information.
Secondary sources are written about primary sources. Research summaries reported in textbooks, magazines, and newspapers are considered secondary sources. They typically provide global descriptions of results with few details on the methodology. Other examples of secondary sources include biographies and critical studies of an author's work. Tags: how-to. Primary Source. Article critiquing the piece of art. Diary of an immigrant from Vietnam.
Book on various writings of Vietnamese immigrants from the s. If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your instructor:. Look for other literature reviews in your area of interest or in the discipline and read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or ways to organize your final review. There are hundreds or even thousands of articles and books on most areas of study. The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to get a good survey of the material.
Keep in mind that UNC Libraries have research guides and to databases relevant to many fields of study. Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. In the sciences, for instance, treatments for medical problems are constantly changing according to the latest studies.
Information even two years old could be obsolete. However, if you are writing a review in the humanities, history, or social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be what is needed, because what is important is how perspectives have changed through the years or within a certain time period. Try sorting through some other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects.
You can also use this method to consider what is currently of interest to scholars in this field and what is not. A literature review, like a term paper, is usually organized around ideas, not the sources themselves as an annotated bibliography would be organized.
This means that you will not just simply list your sources and go into detail about each one of them, one at a time. As you read widely but selectively in your topic area, consider instead what themes or issues connect your sources together.
Do they present one or different solutions? Is there an aspect of the field that is missing? How well do they present the material and do they portray it according to an appropriate theory? Do they reveal a trend in the field? A raging debate? Pick one of these themes to focus the organization of your review. A literature review may not have a traditional thesis statement one that makes an argument , but you do need to tell readers what to expect.
Try writing a simple statement that lets the reader know what is your main organizing principle. Here are a couple of examples:. The current trend in treatment for congestive heart failure combines surgery and medicine. More and more cultural studies scholars are accepting popular media as a subject worthy of academic consideration. Ben Davis June 1, How many references should a PhD literature review have?
How many references should be in a thesis? How many references should a word dissertation have? How many references should be in a word dissertation? How many references do you need for words? Can you over reference? How many marks do you lose for bad referencing? Is having too many references bad? Do I need to reference every sentence? Do I need to cite if I paraphrase? How do you reference the same source twice?
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