hello there my name is chelsea seaburn welcome to the smart student i'm so excited for today's video because it's been a topic that's been requested time and time again and that is how to write a literature review now first things first please know that this video is time stamped i'm saying this because this is going to be a longer tutorial so if you don't want to sit through the entire thing that's fine but please use those to navigate the video but for everyone else i hope you're comfortable because we're going to have some fun am i right [Music] so what is a literature review well a literature review is a preferred method a torture used from professors all over the world just kidding as torturous as writing a literature review may seem i think they're just highly misunderstood so a literature review is a review of literature obviously what that means is that it's a review of research that's already been done about a specific topic in other words you're simply reviewing work done by other people so that you can gain a clear picture of the current knowledge on that subject think of it like an audit or an inspection great so why does a literature review matter well if you've been assigned to write one you probably want to do a good job but on a deeper level a literature review is going to significantly increase your knowledge on your given subject so to be clear a literature review is not the place where you introduce your own original thoughts and ideas it simply sets the stage so you can do that later on and that right there is the fabulous thing about a literature review because whatever your research question is chances are someone has already answered that for you so you're not reinventing the wheel you're simply so in other words you're not reinventing the wheel you're simply researching it so that later on you can look at it from a different angle you can question it you can debate it you can add your own information to it but with the literature review you're not reinventing it you're simply researching it so for example before i made this video before i make any video i spend some time researching the internet about my video topic i do this so that i know what you guys have most likely read watched and researched yourself so that way i know where to fill in the gaps and give you the most useful content when i do this i'm essentially doing an informal literature review because i'm looking to see where current information stops so that i know where to properly pick up from there during that initial researching phase i'm not adding in any new information i'm setting myself up to add in new information later when i make my script or film my video i hope that gives you the basic understanding of what a literature review is and why it matters now let's get into actually creating one so first things first you need to know if your literature review is a standalone assignment or a part of a larger assignment if it's a standalone assignment you're going to follow the same structure as if this were a standard writing assignment in other words you're going to follow the same formatting by creating a title page a reference page and then your paper is going to be structured with an introduction body paragraphs and a conclusion if it's a part of a larger assignment like a research paper your literature review is usually going to be located right after your introduction because it's going to be that last piece that sets up your reader for the rest of your research all right now let's talk steps so i've broken the process of writing a literature review down into two halves that are broken down into four phases you have search organize structure and write search and organize pertain to the researching phase structure and write pertain to the actual creation of writing your literature review for this example i'm going to be creating a standalone assignment because that's going to cover the formatting for both types okay so starting in phase one with step one which is to search the first thing you need to do is identify your topic which shouldn't be too hard because if you're assigned to write a literature review you were probably given a general topic my pro tip for you is to take your topic and think of it in terms of a question in other words go ahead and formulate a research question if you don't already have one because this is going to help you guide your research it's much easier to go online and search for answers to a question rather than aimlessly search about a given topic if you need help with turning your topic into a research question i suggest checking out this video up here but for this example my research question is what are the lasting mental health effects women experience when they diet for weight loss yay us we have our research question now is the time to go search in other words let's go find the literature let's go search for the information when you do this there are a few different angles you can look at your research you can look for answers to your research question trends or patterns contradictions or debates common or reoccurring themes or gaps in the research but no matter what or how you look for it the key is to do smart research and i'm just going to briefly go over this right now but my best advice is when you find an article the first thing you should do is read either the abstract or the introduction because it's gonna tell you if what's in the article is gonna be useful for you then if the answer is yes go ahead and read the conclusion because the conclusion and the introduction together is gonna give you the full scope of what exactly is in that article then if you need to read more on something in that article you can use either the table of contents or maybe section headings to go find that and read more on it that's the key to smart research and that's simply being strategic about it if you'd like to know a few safe academic places to look you can start with google scholar there's ebsco medline econ lit proquest and open access google scholar is a great place to look so let's go ahead and start there the first thing i recommend doing is copying and pasting your research question into the search feature this is going to give you a good pool of potentially relevant articles that you can sift through first one thing i recommend paying attention to is a citation feature listed at the bottom of each listing so for example note how this one has only been cited 349 times while these three sources are in the thousands close to two thousand what they should tell you is that these are strong articles that would make for good sources for your research from here something else you can do is change some of your keywords to refine your search so instead of saying mental health effects i might come up here and say psychological impact instead and let's go ahead and change that that's a hard word to spell am i right here we go and this is going to give me some new articles to look through that are still relevant to my topic shifting through academic databases you can then do very targeted searches through google by using the boolean feature so let's say i come up here and i start with dieting for weight loss this is going to give me a bunch of articles that are about that topic if i want to turn this into a refined boolean search i'm going to come up here and use keywords for this example let's use women's mental health and what this is going to do is it's going to pull up very targeted search results so it's going to fall under the category of dieting for weight loss but then women's mental health will be included in those targeted keywords if i want to refine this even further let's say i put dieting for weight loss in quotations because now it's going to keep this phrase and this phrase in this order which is going to refine my search even more please note that a lot of the academic sources are protected by pay walls if you run into one that is what i suggest doing is taking down the title of the article and then searching for it in your university library you see a lot of those articles that are protected by those paywalls will be available to you through your school and a pro tip is if you run into one that still isn't available in your university library you can always email your professor to try and gain access to it it doesn't always work but sometimes it does the next researching strategy you can use is what i like to call networking with networking you're gonna use the reference list from other articles to find more sources for your research so for example you can find three to five really good articles and then use their reference list to find like-minded sources that's why it's called networking because it's like you're creating this big network of sources aside from articles you can use other academic sources like dissertations in this case you'd find a dissertation whose research is similar to your own and again use their reference list to find a similar sources let's go ahead and move on to the second step in the researching phase which is to organize you see when you research for your literature review you're gonna sift through a lot of information so it's important that you organize it do not and i repeat do not save the task of creating your reference list until you write because one you're not gonna remember what was covered in each source and two you're gonna hate your life and probably drop out of school anyways at the bare minimum what i suggest doing is either creating a google doc word template maybe an excel spreadsheet that has your reference list entries and a brief statement about what each article is about and why it's relevant to your research now that being said best case scenario the step of organizing is going to take the place of an annotated bibliography we are already going to be writing summaries about your articles and your reference list entries if you need help with creating an annotated bibliography of course i have a full video for that as well but for now let's go ahead and go through the annotated bibliography i created for this literature review so i can note a few things that will be helpful to you here's my annotated bibliography and as you can see here i've gone through three different sources please note that yours will have a lot more than mine but i've chosen three so it's easier to digest but let's go ahead and zoom in here and see what we're working with so the first component of your annotated bibliography is always going to be the full reference list entry then underneath that you're going to create your actual annotation and the preferred method that i always used to use is i like to write most of my annotation as a summary of what was actually in the article then i'll include a sentence or two to tell me why that summary is important to my research so for example this annotation identifies the problem of my research now if we're going to scroll down to the next one again it's structured in the same way you can see i have the full reference list entry here the primary portion of my annotation is a summary of what is in the article and then this last sentence tells me again why it's relevant to my research and this one is relevant because it's a solution to my problem and then this last one this last one is a story about a girl who lost a lot of weight and had a lot of mental health consequences so in other words this is evidence to my problem so why this is nice is because when i go to write my literature review i have a problem solution and then evidence that i can plug and play into my writing which makes it very easy to do mind you if you're not writing an annotated bibliography you can still include the same information depending on however you choose to organize your sources after you're finished evaluating your sources the last thing you're going to do when it comes to organizing is give yourself some time to digest the material like i already said you're going to be covering a lot of information that was written by other people so i don't recommend rushing into the writing process if you can put a good night's sleep in between your researching and your writing if you can squeeze a few nights out of it that's even better but the point is to give yourself some time to let the information sink in this may sound like a woo woo waste my time step but it's actually very important for time purposes that's all i'm going to say about that here do what you want with it but let's go ahead and move on so first things first congrats because if you've made it this far you're officially halfway there and this last half is actually the easier half that goes a lot faster because now we're going to create a structure for your literature review and then you're going to go ahead and write but starting with the structure what you're going to do is you're going to select the best most logical order to present your information and then create an outline for it when it comes to structure there are a few different types of literature reviews you can choose from the most common being integrative thematic chronological methodological methodological say that five times fast and theoretical let me briefly break each one down so you understand them so starting with integrative which is the most common of the most common this is where you set this stage for your research later on in other words an integrative literature review critiques information to find where that current information stops so that your new perspectives can be introduced next you have chronological which is sometimes called historical but this is where you arrange your literature by date usually starting with the oldest in coming up to the newest so these types of literature reviews are used to analyze the progression of something over time next on the list is thematic and thematic is where you organize your literature around a main or reoccurring theme for example your topic or your theme might be breast cancer in which case you're going to look at breast cancer from all these different angles next you have methodological where you're going to compare and contrast different methods being used in a given topic so again if you're using breast cancer in this case you might look at the different methods and treatment plans doctors are using to treat their patients lastly you have theoretical which is similar to methodological and that you're comparing in contrast but this time instead of comparing and contrasting methods you're doing that with theories and models so again going back to the breast cancer example you might be comparing and contrasting the different theories there are about breast cancer my literature review today is going to be thematic since it's a standalone assignment i'm simply going to be synthesizing and summarizing the information about my topic rather than setting it up to introduce new research later on once you've chosen what type of literature review you're doing next is the time to format your paper and create your outline never write before you create an outline if you've been with me for a while you know i'm extremely passionate about this but it's even more important when you're writing a literature review because it's going to ensure that your information is presented in that logical order and that you're communicating it effectively it's also going to make your writing process a lot faster so bonus with that but since this is a standalone assignment i'm first going to create my apa title page in reference page then i'm going to go ahead and create that outline if your assignment comes with different objectives you're supposed to address those objectives are what i suggest creating your section headings off of i don't have objectives so what i'm going to do is come up with my section headings on my own again this is just a matter of creating those section headings based off what the most logical order is for your information go ahead and take a look at my literature review example so i can explain what i mean so these are going to be the section headings that i created based off my annotated bibliography and if you remember this annotated bibliography i labeled what each source is about so i have a problem a solution and then i have evidence to my problem so in this case my most logical order is probably going to be in a problem evidence solution formatting now a couple things to note about apa formatting is that the title of your paper is always going to be your first level one section headings and under that is where you're going to include your introduction you don't actually write out the word introduction next when it comes to what level of section headings you should use this is going to be relevant to your paper and the complexity of it for this one if you'll note i'm using level one headings for the problem and solution since they're main section topics but i'm going to include the evidence portion as a level 2 since it supports the problem lastly note how i've included the word conclusion because under apa formatting it's ok to write out the word conclusion your conclusion can technically be included as a level one or a level two section heading i'm including it is a section two because it's going to wrap up the solution portion of my paper all right guys now we're at the last step now is the time to write and here's the thing if you've done your research correctly you've organized it and you've created structure for your paper the writing process is going to be very easy by the time you get to this part you're going to be ready to just dump all the information onto your paper but nevertheless let me give you some tips so if you're writing a standalone assignment like i am i suggest focusing on the body portions first and then create your introduction and conclusion last since i've written an annotated bibliography for this literature review this is going to be really easy for me because i'm simply going to piece together all of those summaries and then shape my paragraphs later let me explain what i mean all right so here we are again and i have a quick pro tip for you that i don't think i mentioned earlier so when you're creating your annotated bibliography i suggest including your in-text citations in your annotations because this is going to make your job of creating your literature review that much easier now i'm going to go ahead and copy and paste the information from my annotations into my outline where they're supposed to go but just quick disclaimer your literature review like i already said is going to use a lot more sources than mine so you're probably not going to use all of the information from all of your sources you're just going to have to use your own discretion when it comes to what you're going to put into your literature review where you're going to expand but we'll get into that in just a little bit if you're wondering what i'm doing now i'm just fixing the line formatting using the margin icon from the toolbar so now that i have the meat of the information in my body paragraphs i'm going to go back through and shape them and the way i'm going to shape my paragraphs is by including linking language that links what i'm saying back to the author and this is very important because this is the one trademark of a literature review that makes them different from the rest of academic writing is that because you're not introducing any of your own original thoughts it's very important that you constantly use language to remind the reader that what they're reading comes from the source not from you so as you can see here in every sentence that i already didn't have linking language from my annotations i'm including words and phrases such as the author discusses presents brownell found the article contributes all of these tie the reader back to the source i'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for these other two paragraphs once i'm finished with that the last thing i'm going to do to shape my paragraphs is to add transitions between them in just like linking language transitions are the words or sentences that link your sentences together these are what i like to call thought links or thought bridges and so this is the nice thing about creating an annotated bibliography beforehand is because most of my paragraphs are already written with those transitions because they're written in paragraph structure so i only really need to add in transitions for these last two paragraphs here because the rest of the paragraphs already have a pretty good structure now we just need to add in our introduction in conclusion when it comes to your introduction you're going to introduce your topic maybe some background information about your topic and your thesis statement because your literature review summarizes work done by other people your thesis statement should pull together all the main ideas from those sources and then a linking phrase again to tell the reader that what they're about to read is work done by someone else a template that i used to use when i wrote literature reviews that you can use is to start with something like the following review of literature and then give a brief explanation of what is going to be discussed so in this example my literature review confirms that there are negative consequences that correlate with women who diet to lose weight so that's what i'm going to put in my thesis statement also note how my thesis statement reflects the structure of my writing it shows that my paper follows a problem solution formatting now your conclusion is going to follow a similar formatting to your introduction one of the most effective strategies for conclusions is to reiterate the main points that you made in your paper again in the order they were structured in your paper lastly you'll end with a concluding statement and that concluding statement can be either where you restate your thesis statement because that's going to tie your entire paper together or it can be the place where you make a statement that's gonna set your reader up for the rest of your research so in that case your concluding statement can identify something like a gap something you're gonna debate or something you disagree with after you're finished writing the last little step for you to do is to edit and proofread your paper and when it comes to this again i suggest putting some time between your writing and your editing if a good night's sleep is all you have great but if you can put more time again that's always better and when it comes to editing and proofreading if you have someone who can read through your literature review that's always going to be your best option my pro tip for you here is that when you give your literature review to someone else to read let them know what either your research question is or your topic is but don't explain anything else to them this way when they read your literature review afterwards you can ask them for a summary of what it was about and depending on what they tell you it's gonna let you know that if you were effective in your writing or if you have some more explaining to do or maybe you need to tighten up some areas but alright guys if you're still here right now you're officially equipped with the right tools that you need to go off and write your own literature review by the way if you're writing a literature review let me know in the comment section what yours is about where you're at in the process i love reading your guys comments i do my best to respond to as many of them as possible but anyways if you are still here right now don't forget to stop by and join the smart student facebook group it's a great place for community and connection right now and as always thank you so much for being here and sticking out this video with me i hope you have a great day as always give this video a big thumbs up share it with your friends and of course subscribe for more videos like this every week thank you