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ECO 300: Applied Economic Analysis: Literature Review
Definition of Literature Reviews
Definition
A literature review surveys books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to your research topic or thesis statement. It should provide a theoretical summary or critical evaluation of these scholarly works. You will need to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize the research that you’ve found on your topic. A literature review should give context to your thesis and, if possible, reveal any gaps in current literature.
5 Steps for completing your Literature Review
Step 1:
- Look at other literature reviews
- Choose a topic
- Choose a topic that interests you
- Narrow your topic down
- This is important to do otherwise the literature you find will be too massive
Step 2:
- Once you've narrowed your topic look for resources
- You can look for books using the Library Search
- Or look for articles in one of the Economics databases
- Preferably in EconLit
- AT FIRST--skim and scan by reading titles, abstracts, methodologies and review references or bibliographies. Only keep items related to your topic
- Once you have found books or articles that you feel relate to your topic, then do a "Citation Chase"
- Do this by looking at the articles' or books' bibliographies or reference pages
- Find sources from the reference papers that relate to your topic
- Search for those items by typing in the titles in the University Libraries “Find It” box
- Do this by looking at the articles' or books' bibliographies or reference pages
- Once you have found books or articles that you feel relate to your topic, then do a "Citation Chase"
Step 3:
- Read and keep notes on each source
- You could keep notes on index cards, in a special notebook, or by using an electronic device or app
- I recommend keeping notes with Evernote because it is Open Source and once you create an account you can access it from any device
- You may want to use a citation manager to organize all of your citations, there are many to choose from, here is a comparative list of some of the most popular.
- I recommend Zotero, again it is Open Source and accessible from anywhere
- You could keep notes on index cards, in a special notebook, or by using an electronic device or app
Step 4:
- Once you've collected, read, noted, and saved your citations and resources you should begin to see patterns
- Skim your notes to sort out themes (methodologies, data, results, etc.)
- In each theme are you noticing any chronological or structural order, if so, make note of that information
- Does a topic develop over time
- Do authors agree with each other or disagree on methodology or conclusions
- What strengths or weaknesses did you find in the literature
- Don't forget that you're trying to relate this literature to the story you wish to tell and you may find some of your articles fall out of your scope--make note of that to determine whether to mention them or not--talk to your professor about out of scope titles
Step 5:
- Write your literature review
- Make an outline or structural form of your review
- Remember your audience when writing
- Avoid too much jargon
- Be concise; don't go off on tangents; stay focused on your thesis statement
- Introduction should contain some of the following:
- Your purpose for writing the review
- Overview of the problem
- What is the scope of your review
- Talk about the amount of literature you found
- Body of the review should contain some of the following:
- Themes
- Chronological order
- Advancements of theories
- Questions related to topic
- Conclusion should contain some of the following:
- Summarize your findings
- Expose gaps in knowledge
- Provide a rationale for future research
- References in APA style
Lit. Review, How-to videos
What is in a Literature Review?
A literature review may consist of simply a summary of key sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis, often within specific conceptual categories.
- A summary is a recap of the important information of the source
- A synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information in a way that informs how you are planning to investigate a research problem.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
- To demonstrate to your readers what you know about your topic
- To bring your readers up-to-date and fill them in on what has been published on your topic
- To allow you a better understanding of your topic
- The Literature Review byISBN: 9781412961356Publication Date: 2008-07-10A six-step model offers invaluable assistance for selecting a topic, searching the literature, developing arguments, surveying the literature, critiquing the literature, and writing the literature review.
- Last Updated: Nov 18, 2024 12:54 PM
- URL: https://libguides.gvsu.edu/ECO300