hi everyone this is a quick tutorial on how to do the other big assignment this is the literature search and your three article summary now the literature search is the part of a research project when you go out and read about what has already been studied with this particular topic and so you're essentially searching the literature for information or a comprehensive idea of what has already been studied so that you're not repeating things or studying something that's not very interesting or hypothesizing something that we have already found not to be true now of course most studies and most topics have already been studied so just because you find something that has already been studied just because your topic is something that's already been studied doesn't mean it won't be interesting you know you might have a particular sample or a particular way so there might be tons of studies that look at this one specific topic and it's still and because it's science we want to make sure we really collect a lot of data and we run many different studies before we say whether something a relationship that we find is conclusive so for example you eat a lot and in the news and in media about the relationship of you know let's say you find like coffee is bad for you and then another news report says coffee is not good for you or is good for you and so you have and a lot of people read this read the scientific studies and get a bit demoralized but the reality is in science it's good to find sort of these contradictory things because it helps us understand ok well maybe there's some aspects of coffee that are good for us and some aspects that are not or maybe there are certain people and certain samples where we find that coffee works benefits them but then there are other types of people maybe let's say diabetic patients or people in different age groups that might not benefit from him so studying a topic in many different ways many different times helps us get at the complexity so let's five into what a literature searches so for this assignment you'll be looking for three peer-reviewed articles from academic journals that address your research topic so this means you can't use things like Wikipedia and news articles blog posts or even summary posts from the scientific let's say newspapers what you're looking for is academic journals and so a good place to start is you can look through the library database if you're looking on campus or you can go to Google Scholar and so Google Scholar is basically a search engine that helps you look through academic journals so let's go with an example let's say I'm studying looking at weather exercise is related to better mental health right so my independent predictor variable is exercise my dependent or outcome variable is mental health so we're gonna use different types of keywords so you can start with a specific keyword and see where it goes from there so let's go to Google so now I am at Google Scholar not just a Google search engine but specifically Google Scholar search engine so see you see so I might say okay I'm looking for exercise and well-being and they find 200,000 results and so as I'm reading I find like all kinds of things and some of them are kind of related some of them are really not and maybe I say you know what I want to get a little bit more specific I'm actually studying happiness and so I might end up getting more specific and say exercise is related to happiness so some of these you see the journal name here Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology you might go through and some of them might really relate to what you're studying and some of them might be very specific and not relate so for example here we have the role of exercise during adolescence on adult happiness and mood so you might think hey this that's kind of really relates to what we're studying another thing you can do is look at what the cited by articles tell you and so the cited by means these are all the [Music] papers that cite that particular paper so you might find some luck looking through those no now we can also think about different search terms so if we're not only looking at happiness but we're looking at general mental health we can say well-being or if we already did that we can say mental health let's see if that works and so this is an interesting one because it's a review so review means this researcher didn't go out and collect data but they looked at the entire literature of many different studies and found what the benefits of exercise are on a review of mental and physical health benefits so this is not just about mental but also physical and so you might think like hey that's a nice perspective to put in there too now you might say let's see if physical fitness gives us something different mm-hmm okay so here you might this is probably a bit old now another thing you want to be careful about is how old some of these studies are know just because they're old doesn't mean that they're incorrect but it's generally nicer to have more relevant or more recent journal articles at least in the last 10 20 years because generally some things that maybe not physical health and mental health but some things really do change over time and so it's and also our statistics have become more sophisticated over time so you generally have better studies or maybe a more appropriate studies in the more recent decades so here I listed some other so if you get if you don't really get enough articles from there if you feel like hey these are way too general I want something specific you can play around with your key whereas and see what else you can find now for this example for this assignment I want you to pick three of the most relevant articles and do a quick summary of them in your own words and you can post these exactly like this so write the title of the article here right I want you to paste a link to the article who are the authors what journal was a published in of this one is sometimes a bit hard for students to gauge if you're not really familiar with journal articles this one I'll be a little forgiving if you don't super know if you're correct on this just try your best at picking up what journal article it is your published is generally pretty easy and this is the more time-intensive part I want you to write in five sentences a description or summary of the study in your own word so I want you to read the study there are some parts that will be a little difficult for you to understand so let's pick let's pick a study okay let's say this one and they'll open up a PDF most of them will be available freely if you don't find it available freely you might need to be on campus to get more access to journal articles so in this study if they have a results section they they don't have a results section this one seems like a pretty easy read but if you get to a study where you have really complex statistical explanations of thing and you don't understand it that's okay to skip that part you could read other parts of the paper and summarize what the findings are now when you're summarizing the findings I want you to think about what was the topic how was the research conducted how many people were in the study how is the data collected what the what the researchers found and whether there was any shortcomings or limitations and maybe even how similar or different this is to your own research question now one thing I want to point out is that it's doesn't really matter if all three articles are painting the same story it could be that article one an article to say have completely different things one finds that it is related the one of the other finds that there is no relation or even in the opposite direction and that's important to actually include in your literature search because you want a comprehensive overview or in this case it's not super comprehensive it's sort of like a mini literature search because we're only writing about three articles but you want to have like a good review of what we found out there while doing research and that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to go in the direction that you protect it so we want to be unbiased readers of the literature so this is five sentences here five sentences for article two and then five for article three so you'll have about three different paragraphs for your literature search and this will directly feed into your introduction for the research paper which will describe next