Crafting an Effective Literature Review
Now that you have compiled 7-10 sources and written an annotated bibliography of at least 3 sources on your topic of choice. It’s time to create an introductory literature review section for your paper. Writing an informative literature review is one of the cornerstones of a good research paper. In brief, a literature review synthesizes the existing literature on a subject and presents it in a logical format for your audience. Broken down into digestible sections based on sub-topics or particular problems within the field. Your literature review should aim to inform the reader of the general background of the topic you intend to study. With sufficient detail that another graduate student peer could read and understand the topic without needing much additional subject-matter expertise. Specific things to consider include:
- What is the state of the art for your topic? (i.e. what are the most important advances)?,
- What former questions have already been thoroughly scientifically proven or disproven?,
- What are the current challenges in the topic?.
- How will your research aim to inform one of the current challenges in the topic?
Crafting an Effective Literature Review
Note, you can (and should) lean heavily on the writing you’ve already done for the annotated bibliography to help answer these questions, now in proper paragraph format. Likewise, as you are writing, you may discover that you want/need more sources to better flesh out your review. This is normal—just find them and add them as necessary (you do not need to update your annotated bibliography, but they will need to be added to your Works Cited in the final report). Finally, you may wish to include figures or images from your sources in your draft. Please remember to acknowledge and cite your sources appropriately within the body of your presentation, and in the Works Cited section.
You may use the literature review resource Links to an external site to help you with the drafting and formatting of your literature review.
Formatting-wise, this is the first “true” piece of your research paper draft. Please refer to the CME style Guide(GIVEN IN ATTACHED FILES) to an external site.and Appendix A – Research Paper for proper formatting of your submission.
You may use whichever citation format you prefer (MLA, Turabian, Chicago, APA, IEEE)—just remember to be consistent! You will be using this format for your entire project. APA