Choosing a Topic
The first task to tackle, often the most difficult, in writing a review of literature is choosing a topic. Often the task is especially difficult because of a lack of knowledge in the content area. Below are some hints for facilitating your selection of a topic.
First, skim through your textbook and identify broad topics in the discipline that interest you.
Second, read the chapters associated with the topics you pick to develop familiarity with the vocabulary (key words), major investigators, and issues or controversies in your selected area.
Third, narrow the focus of your interest to a fairly narrow (manageable) topic. For example, if you are interested in the effects of different cognitive styles on test taking performance, narrow your field of investigation to some aspect of this topic (e.g., field dependence/independence and test performance)
The next step, after choosing a topic, is to go to the library (or to the electronic files) and search for journal articles published, either on the topic or on a similar or related topic (e.g., learning style). Use key words to find article titles for specific topics; sometimes abstracts are provided for the reader's reference. Abstracts can be useful, time saving devices because they aid in weeding good, associated literature from unrelated, peripheral articles.
Selecting Appropriate Articles
The type of articles that are selected for a good review of literature are theoretical presentations, review articles, and empirical research articles. Choosing the work of a single researcher may be one method for starting a literature review, but this approach should lead you to published works by other authors. Your presentation will be more powerful if conflicting theoretical positions and findings are presented along with the position or prediction that you support in your paper. You should choose several researchers' works that have added to the knowledge base in a specific area. Strive to eliminate (or explain away) articles that have faulty methods or that use faulty reasoning to support their findings.
Reviewing the Articles
It is best if you read the article and then summarize the method, results, and discussion. In this way you do not risk quoting an author out of context or plagiarizing. Additionally you are forced to understand the article more thoroughly than if you copy quotations. Expect to have read the research articles more than once in order to completely understand the material. A common method for reviewing research articles is to write notes about the article while reading it. This may be a mistake. A review of this type often leads the investigator to copying quotations from the article and then using the quotes in the review, or plagiarizing the work of others. Often quotes are taken out of context and are misleading. Using a 5" by 7" index card for note taking has many advantages. The top wide margin of the card can be used to write the bibliographic information (always include all needed information) and the remaining front and back of the card is large enough for your written summary information. Be sure to use a new card for each study reviewed. At the end of your literature search these separate cards will enable you to group similar studies under headings. Also when you type your reference list you can alphabetize the cards and type the list directly from them. This method is a great time saver.
Format
Become familiar with the format of the American Psychological Association (APA). This format is the one most used in education. Links to brief APA style guides are provided on my home page. An even shorter guide is provided here:
Other Considerations
A good review of literature is one in which the topic is narrowly defined. When writing the review the discussion of articles should be integrated and critical. Take changes when you critique the nature of the experimentation and discussions. You will become more proficient at this task as time passes. This is your paper! It is your chance to analyze and interpret literature and expound on ideas. Treat the paper as a forum for expressing important ideas, new insights and provocative conclusions and hypotheses. You are expected to write a paper that is insightful and analytical.
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More Detailed Instructions for Writing a Review of the Literature
The following is excerpted (with slight modifications) from Bem (1995). [Bem, D. I. (1995). Writing a review article for Psychological Bulletin. Psychological Bulletin 118(2), 172-177.] The complete article can be found HERE.
Your review should be accessible to masters students Psychology or Educational Administration, your colleagues in the Art or Music, and your grandmother. No matter how technical or abstruse a review is in its particulars, intelligent professionals with no expertise in statistics, meta-analysis, or experimental design should be able to comprehend the broad outlines of your topic, to understand what you think the accumulated evidence demonstrates, and, above all, to appreciate why someone--anyone--should give a damn.
the writing techniques described in this article are designed to make your review article comprehensible to the widest possible audience. They are also designed to remain invisible or transparent to readers, thereby infusing your prose with a "subliminal pedagogy." Good writing is good teaching.
literature reviews are often frustrating because they offer neither a point of view nor a take-home message. One is left with a somewhat undigested scattering of facts but little with which to put them together. I encourage authors to take a point of view based on theory and to offer readers a take-home message that integrates the review. . . . [T]o be lively and maintain reader interest, they need to make a point, not simply to summarize all the points everyone else has made. (Sternberg , 1991, p. 3)
The primary criteria for good scientific writing are accuracy and clarity. If your manuscript is written with style and flair, great. But this is a subsidiary virtue. First strive for accuracy and clarity.
Achieving Clarity
The first step toward clarity is to write simply and directly. A review tells a straightforward tale of a circumscribed question in want of an answer. It is not a novel with subplots and flashbacks but a short story with a single, linear narrative line. Let this line stand out in bold relief. Clear any underbrush that entangles your prose by obeying Strunk and White's (1979) famous dictum, "omit needless words," and by extending it to needless concepts, topics, anecdotes, asides, and footnotes. If a point seems tangential to your basic argument, remove it. If you can't bring yourself to do this, put it in a footnote. Then when you revise your manuscript, remove the footnote. In short, don't make your voice struggle to be heard above the ambient noise of cluttered writing Write simply and directly.
Organization. The second step toward clarity is to organize the manuscript so that it tells a coherent story. An example of a review organized around competing models is provided by a Bulletin article on the emergence of sex differences in depression during adolescence (Nolen-Hoeksema & Girgus, 1994). The relevant literature consists primarily of studies examining specific variables correlated with depression, a hodgepodge of findings that less creative authors might have been tempted to organize chronologically or alphabetically. These authors, however, organized the studies in terms of whether they supported one of three developmental models:
(a) The causes of depression are the same for the two sexes, but these causes become more prevalent in girls than in boys in early adolescence;
b) the causes of depression are different for the two sexes, and the causes of girls' depression become more prevalent in early adolescence; or
(c) girls are more likely than boys to carry risk factors for depression before early adolescence, but these lead to depression only in the face of challenges that increase in prevalence in early adolescence.
With this guiding structure, the findings fell into a recognizable pattern supporting the last model.
An example of a review organized around a point of view is provided by any of several Bulletin articles designed to convince readers to accept--or at least to seriously entertain--a novel or controversial conclusion. In these, tactics of persuasive communication structure the review. First, the commonly accepted conclusion is stated along with the putative reasons for its current acceptance. Next, the supporting and nonsupporting data for the author's view are presented in order of descending probative weight, and counterarguments to that view are acknowledged and rebutted at the point where they would be likely to occur spontaneously to neutral or skeptical readers. Finally, the reasons for favoring the author's conclusion are summarized.
There are many other organizing strategies, and Sternberg's (1991) editorial emphasizes that there is no one right way to write a review. As noted earlier, a coherent review emerges from a coherent conceptual structuring of the domain being reviewed. And if you remember to organize your review "by relationship rather than by chronology," then, by Jove, I think you've got it.
Metacomments. It is often helpful to give readers of a review article an early overview of its structure and content. But beyond that, you should avoid making "metacomments" about the writing. Expository prose fails its mission if it diverts the reader's attention to itself and away from the topic; the process of writing should be invisible to the reader. In particular, the prose itself should direct the flow of the narrative without requiring you to play tour guide. Don't say, "now that the three theories of emotion have been discussed, we can turn to the empirical work on each of them. We begin with the psychoanalytic account of affect. . . ." Instead, move directly from your discussion of the theories into the review of the evidence with a simple transition sentence such as, "each of these three theories has been tested empirically. Thus, the psychoanalytic account of affect has received support in studies that. . . ." Any other guideposts needed can be supplied by using informative headings and by following the advice on repetition and parallel construction given in the next section.
If you feel the need to make metacomments to keep the reader on the narrative path, then your plot line is probably already too cluttered or pretzel-shaped, the writing insufficiently linear. Metacomments will only oppress the prose further. Instead, copy edit. Omit needless words--don't add them.
Repetition and parallel construction. Inexperienced writers often substitute synonyms for recurring words and vary their sentence structure in the mistaken belief that this is more creative and interesting. Instead of using repetition and parallel construction, as in "Women may be more expressive than men in the domain of positive emotion, but they are not more expressive in the domain of negative emotion," they attempt to be more creative: "Women may be more expressive than men in the domain of positive emotion, but it is not the case that they are more prone than the opposite sex to display the less cheerful affects."
Such creativity is hardly more interesting, but it is certainly more confusing. In scientific communication, it can be deadly. When an author uses different words to refer to the same concept in a technical article--where accuracy is paramount--readers justifiably wonder if different meanings are implied. The example in the preceding paragraph is not disastrous, and most readers will be unaware that their understanding flickered momentarily when the prose hit a bump. But consider the cognitive burden carried by readers who must hack through this "creative" jungle:
The low-dissonance participants were paid a large sum of money while not being given a free choice of whether or not to participate, whereas the individuals we randomly assigned to the small-incentive treatment (the high-dissonance condition) were offered the opportunity to refuse.