So you need to do a lit review.
What is a lit review? And how do you do it?
A literature review is the summary of the significant research published on a topic
It shows the relationship between research studies, and as such, is a secondary source--not a primary source
A literature review can be a full length article. In this case, it would be called a review article or sometimes a literature review article.
It could also be just a part of a published article that is called in literature review section.
The purpose of the literature review is to familiarize the reader with the relevant literature and to
demonstrate the relationships among prior research studies
It informs the reader of what has already been discovered
It is different from other research papers in that it focuses on the literature itself
A literature review is not an annotated bibliography, it's not an encyclopedic essay, and it's not primary or original research
To do or create your own literature review you will need to look for existing review articles. You will
also need to look for research articles on the topic because they'll have a section on literature review
Just to clarify the difference between of review article and a research article...
Here's an example of a review article. Notice in the methodology section of the
abstract it discusses that this is the literature review and not a research study.
Here's an example of the research article. This is actually a reporting of someone's research but it does include references
to earlier studies in the literature review in the beginning part of the article
Where will you find literature reviews? They're published in scholarly peer reviewed journals
and are also published in doctoral dissertations and graduate theses and how
would you find these? Start with the library databases such as ERIC, PsycINFO, or dissertations and theses and link to the full text of
the articles in databases or by using the Find it At Purdue button in the databases.
Let's do an example. Let's look for a literature review of bullying in schools. Start at the library homepage, click on "databases."
Scroll down and find PsycINFO. We're going to start our research with PsycINFO.
Once PsycINFO has been loaded, click on the advanced search.
And let's type bullying in the first line.
And let's make this a subject heading word, so it only searches the subject heading field. In the second box, type schools
or children
Let's leave that second box open so it will search the title, the abstract, and the subject field. And in this box type literature review
Now because we're in PsycINFO, it has a special area
where it tags all literature review is under methodology. So let's choose methodology.
So we have three ideas here: bullying and schools or of children and we're looking for literature review. Our results are ranked by relevancy
so according to computer, the first article is the best article.
This particular article is available in full text, if you click here, the full text will open.
Let's choose this article. Let's open this up
just so you can see what the full record looks like.
Here we can see the author and the author address...it's published in this journal.
And we see our keywords bullying and children showing up. If we scroll down here we can see
that the methodology is a literature review.
All of these articles are tagged this way. Let's scroll down a little bit on the topic
Here's another article. It does appear to be about bullying
and this article is not available in full text in the database so we'd have to click on the
Find it at Purdue button to find it.
Just to review, the difference between review articles and research articles
review articles report on other's work
the purpose of a review article is to evaluate the previous literature. Research articles are meant to
report on the authors' original research. And the purpose of a research artcile is to test a hypothesis.
Both are published in scholarly journals. When you are doing a literature review, you are looking for both types of articles.