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Psychology

This guide is your starting place for research in the field of psychology.

According to the seventh edition of the APA Publication Manual, literature reviews "provide narrative summaries and evaluations of the findings or theories within a literature base" (p. 8). They do not systematically review data from studies about the topic/problem, but discuss the trends suggested in the studies. Your literature review should:

  • "define and clarify the problem;
  • summarize previous investigations to inform readers of the state of the research;
  • identify relations, contradictions, gaps and inconsistencies in the literature, and
  • suggest next steps in solving the problem" (p.8).

Even after using the best search strategies and database filters to narrow your results, you may still have a lot of articles to choose from to use in your literature review. How do you choose the most relevant?

  • read the abstract and conclusion in the article - Is this article directly related to your topic?
  • look for articles that have a Times Cited note to gage the impact/importance of the article
  • check the bibliographies of your articles - if you see a particular author referenced a lot, they may be an influential expert in the field. Search for all of their articles
  • use the Methodology filter to see if other people have done literature reviews on a similar topic. They will likely identify key articles you will want to include
  • books or encyclopedia entries written on the topic may include influential research and researchers you can use

infographic listing some of the questions to ask during your research process

 

 

 

 

 

An annotated bibliography basically summarizing individual articles, but when writing a literature review, you are providing an overview of the literature in a particular area of research, which is more complex.

Journal articles are like a conversation where academics publish theories and empirical data and other academics publish their own articles where they may agree, disagree, or be inspired to publish new research that springboards from other articles.

Unlike annotated bibliographies, literature reviews focus on describing the relationships among the literature included in the review, rather than just providing a summary of individual articles.