Literature Reviews
COMM 390: Lit Review
What is a literature review?
A literature review is not research, it is a review of the research that has been done on your topic.
A literature review is NOT just a summary, but a conceptually organized synthesis of the results of your search. It must
- organize information and relate it to the thesis or research question you are developing
- synthesize and critically analyze the results comparing and contrasting their findings
- identify controversy and themes that appear in the literature
A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It's usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. You are not trying to list all the material published, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question. (From Univ. of Toronto)
Check out these sites for more help understanding literature reviews
- How to ... Write a Literature Review, UC Santa Cruz Library
- The Literature Review: A few tips on conducting it, University of Toronto
- How to do a Literature Review, North Carolina A&T State University
Tips on conducting research for a literature review
- Use bibliographies and reference pages of articles to direct your research. You may start to see some trends with the people who are writing about your topic. Check the bibliography for more articles about your topic.
- Use the authors who you have found to be writing on your topic as starting points. Look for additional articles, and rebuttals, retractions or responses to their research
Use this chart to track articles you read for your literature review:
comm 390 articles for lit review
Comm 390 Literature Review In-class Activity
Article 1:
Article 2:
Article 3:
Identifying Scholarly Articles
what is a scholarly article (aec)
What is a scholarly article?
A scholarly article is how researchers (scholars) communicate the findings and analysis of their research. Scholarly articles:
- Provide original research and analysis - these articles are based on studies or experiements, or analyze an artifact or event. Every scholarly article presents something new about the world we didn't know before.
- Are written by scholars - scholars tend to hold PhDs, or other advanced degrees and are professors at universities.
- Are published in peer-reviewed journals - you won't find these floating about on the internet, they have to be published in a journal. Most times you'll find them in the library databases.
- Might be hard to read - they act as the primary conversation between scholars about a field of study. Since they are written by scholars, for scholars, they contain specialized language that might be hard for the lay person to understand.
Qualitative v. Quantitative Methods
qual quant
Researchers use different types of methodologies based on their research question, or area of study. How can you tell what kind of methodology they've chosen?
| Qualitative Methods | Quantitative Methods |
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Methods include focus groups, in-depth interviews, reviews of documents or literature themes, and observations |
Surveys, controlled experiments, and reviews of records or documents for numeric information |
| More subjective: describes a problem or condition from the point of view of those experiencing it | More objective: provides observed effects (interpreted by researchers) of a program on a problem or condition |
| Text-based | Number-based |
| More in-depth information on a few cases | Less in-depth but more breadth of information across a large number of cases |
| No (or few) statistical tests | Statistical tests are used for analysis |
| Less generalizable | More generalizable |
Use this chart to help organize your work (used in K. Brown's Comm 390 course)
Additional resources:
- What's the difference between qualitative and quantitative methodologies? Xavier Univ.
- Quantitative and qualitative methodology, E. Mich. Univ.
Library Databases for Communication
COMM 390: Articles
Journal articles provide you with the latest research in your field. The research databases below will provide you with both scholarly and popular journal articles in communication.
- What's the difference between scholarly and popular articles?
- What's the difference between qualitative and quantitative methodologies? Xavier Univ.
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Citations
COMM 200: Why Cite?
Why cite?
- To give credit where credit is due;
- So your reader (professor) can get the source that you mentioned in your assignment;
- To add credibility to your research - shows you did the work;
- Avoid plagiarism.
Learn more about writing citations and avoiding plagiarism by visiting these websites:
- Oops, I plagiarized, from UCLA's Bruin Success with Less Stress
- Research Tutorial: Citing Your Sources
APA Style Guides
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How to find an article's DOI (Digital Object Identifier |
Need Help?
Allison Carr
Academic Transitions Librarian
