Overview: A literature review is a review of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question. It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, to situate your work about existing knowledge.
Helpful Tip: Before actually writing the literature review, you want to create an outline; this helps you to present your information for the literature review in a logic order.
Helpful Tip: Please review and use the “Available Tools” section at the bottom of this assignment to guide your writing.
Organization: Like most academic papers, literature reviews must contain at least three basic elements:
(1) an introduction
(2) body paragraph containing the discussion of sources; (purpose, scope, participants, methods, results, discussion, limitations, and implications)
(3) finally, a Conclusion.
A good literature review will be driven by and directly related to your topic/research question. Include only sources related to your topic, and discuss only relevant points from those sources. A literature review is not the place to insert personal opinions related to the topic/research written by others. In your Conclusion section, you want to identify areas of controversy, discrepancy, or gaps in the research that are relevant to your study.
Instructions:
(1) Students will compose a literature review for 5 sources that will be included in the final research paper.
(2) Discuss each source in the literature review in paragraph format.
Please note:
(1) all written work is written in APA Format
(2) submit MS Word doc or docx files
(3) 12-point font, double-spaced with one-inch margins (top, sides, bottom).