What is a Literature Review?
A literature review evaluates published scholarly resources, and analyzes how they relate to a specific research question. Rather than just summarizing every article or book, a literature review integrates relevant materials into a comprehensive analysis.
A literature review should:
Basic Steps
Citation Management tools will help you to save and organize the articles you find, create a bibliography, and add citations to your paper.
As a Loyola student, you have a lot of options available to you! Choose from the options below, or reach out to the libraries for help deciding.
Keyword Selection
Subject Headings
There are often multiple terms used for the same concept in biological research. This can be because of regional dialects (i.e. USA's Pediatrics vs UK's Paediatrics), colloquialisms (i.e. diabetes vs sugars), binomial naming conventions (i.e. homo sapiens vs humans), etc.
To help you target your search, many databases use "Subject Headings". These are specific terms that they've chosen to represent XYZ concept. If the database uses Subject Headings, you can navigate to their list/guide/thesaurus and test out the terms that you want to use.
Boolean Operators are specific words and symbols that tell a database how it should process your search. You can think of them like basic coding logic, or the PEMDAS Order of Operations. These operators work on MOST, but not all databases. If you're having trouble with your search, reach out to the LibraryH3lp Chat or your Subject Librarian!
It can be tempting to use any source in your paper that seems to agree with your thesis, but remember that not all information is good information, especially in an online environment. Developed by librarians at California State University-Chico (see below for the link), the CRAAP Test is a handy checklist to use when evaluating a web resource (or ANY resource). The test provides a list of questions to ask yourself when deciding whether or not a source is reliable and credible enough to use in your academic research paper. CRAAP stands for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. For more information, please see below.
Something to keep in mind: the CRAAP test is only one method for evaluating content. There are other methods out there that may be more appropriate such as RADAR (Relevance, Authority, Date, Appearance, Reason for writing). However, since it was one of the first evaluations for online content, we'll be focusing on CRAAP for this page.
The timeliness of the information
Another thing to consider - does the website's copyright date match the content's currency? Or is it just a standard range?
The importance of the information for your needs
The reliability, truthfulness and
correctness of the content
UTHORITY
The source of the information
Note - to help answer Authority and Purpose questions, check out a website's About page.
The reason the information exists
Note - to help answer Authority and Purpose questions, check out a website's About page.
Literature resources can be divided into three basic categories: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary.
In scientific literature, a Primary Source is a document or physical object which was written or created during the time under study and is the result of original scientific research or observation. Some types of primary sources include:
A Secondary Source interprets and analyzes primary sources. These sources are one or more steps removed from the event. Secondary sources may have pictures, quotes or graphics of primary sources in them. Some types of secondary sources include:
A Tertiary Source compiles and condenses information from other sources and give a broad overview of a topic. They are a great place to start your research, especially for the refinement of your research question and the selection of search terms.
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