Conducting Your Literature Review

Description

This book is a step-by-step guide to writing a literature review, and includes tips for modifying the process as needed depending on your audience, purpose, and goals. The lessons in this book can be applied to writing the background section for a thesis or an original research publication. Literature reviews are now much more challenging to compile today than they used to be. You need a structured approach to handle the sheer volume of published research available. This book will help you formulate a strategy for making decisions about what to include and not include in your review, and produce a reliable and unbiased summary of the existing research. You will learn skills for defining research questions, using search tools and managing citations. This book is part of APA's Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research series. Aimed at undergraduate students in research methods courses or others with a lab or research project, each book describes a key stage in the research process. Collectively, these books provide a solid grounding in research from start to finish. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 2 Title - Series......Page 3 Title - Complete......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Series Foreword......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 14 Chapter 1 What To Achieve: Clarifying the Goal of Your Literature Review......Page 22 Chapter 2 Where to Look: Choosing Databases and Other Sources of Literature......Page 34 Chapter 3 How to Look: Developing Search Strategies......Page 48 Chapter 4 What to Look For: Deciding What Literature to Include......Page 60 Chapter 5 How to Organize: Managing Your Material´......Page 76 Chapter 6 How to Abstract: Extracting Key Information From the Literature......Page 90 Chapter 7 How to Assess: Critically Appraising Your Material......Page 102 Chapter 8 How to Synthesize: Determining What to Say About the Literature......Page 112 Chapter 9 How to Document: Writing Up Your Literature Review......Page 124 Further Reading......Page 144 Index......Page 146 About the Author......Page 154 About the Series Editor......Page 156