📖 8. Understanding the Lit Review

Are You Where You Should Be?

This is Module 8: Understanding the Lit Review, which should be completed between 3/15 - 3/21. If you haven’t completed everything in Module 7, go back and finish all outstanding tasks now. Don’t forget to click on and review each resource in this guide.

Goals and Checklist

• Refresh your umderstanding of how to read scholarly articles
• Develop strategies for integrating both scholarly and public writing using consistent, discipline-specific style
• Understand the purpose of the literature review
• Begin compiling a shortlist of eligible peer-reviewed scholarly articles and articles by public intellectuals in your field

To help with various access needs, including task identification and separation and advance notice, I’ll include an abbreviated list of tasks at the top of each weekly module. You can check these items off, but your input won’t be saved after you close this window. You remain responsible for checking the Calendar and ensuring that you’re completing everything in a timely fashion.

Understanding the Literature Review

Unit 2 of our Qualitative Research Project revolves around doing a literature review.

🛑 Stop: Reread!

Revisit the Assignments page and review the qualitative project guidelines, especially for Unit 2.

Literature means a collection of all the scholarly writings on a topic; review indicates that the writer has done a fairly thorough assessment of that collection of scholarship. The literature review allows you to position your research in the context of work by other researchers, using that work to identify gaps and needed advances and to implicitly justify — without having to artificially say so — the study you’re doing.

Literature reviews ask: What do or don’t we know about what we’re investigating?

By “re-viewing” what established scholars in the field have said, done, and found, you can better:

• Identify what’s known in your field relating to your area of interest
• Establish an empirical, theoretical foundation for your research
• Identify gaps in knowledge that you can fill
• Refine your research hypotheses
• Refine the scope of your research
• Figure out the importance of your study to your discipline

The success of your literature review, i.e. how well you can figure out the above, depends on how effectively you search for information with secondary research, how reliable and relevant the sources you end up using are, and how well you synthesize the sources you end up choosing.

A literature review isn’t just a descriptive summary. It’s a demonstration that you read, evaluated, analyzed, and synthesized all the sources you chose, meaning that you must also identify, establish, and discuss relationships between those sources.

ENG 201 Literature Review Tutorial

🛑 Stop: Complete

This ENG 201 Literature Review Tutorial was created by one of the librarians at Pace for our section of ENG 201. Click every item on each page and make sure to submit your answers at the end of the tutorial. Try to complete as much of this tutorial as possible before making your question post in the #ask-a-librarian-lit-rvw channel in Discord.

No Late Grace Period

This week’s posts are time-bound since we have a librarian visiting us; so like workshops, this week’s low-stakes posts will not be counted under the late grace period.

This week, the librarian who created this tutorial will be visiting our classroom server asynchronously in the #ask-a-librarian-lit-rvw channel! As a result, your Q&A this week should focus on the material from this tutorial and should be posted in the #ask-a-librarian-lit-rvw channel on the usual days, Tue and Fri.

The visiting librarian will pop in and out to answer your questions, and after giving her some time and space to interact with you, so will I!

🛑 Stop: Read!

Review NCSU’s “Understanding the Lit Review” and Purdue OWL’s “Writing a Literature Review.”

NCSU’s and Purdue’s resources, linked above, provide further information on understanding and writing literature reviews.

Anatomy of a Scholarly Article

Learning to read academic scholarship is a skill that takes time and practice to develop. But there are clues embedded in the structure of academic scholarship that can help you adjust your reading strategy for each section and identify and focus on the sections that are most relevant to your rhetorical purpose.

🛑 Stop: Watch:

NCSU’s Anatomy of a Scholarly Article video — click the dropdown menu to show the information in a table! — and review this interactive mouseover version as well.

Think back to Ellen Samuels’ chapter on reading strategies: readers’ ability to parse information is enhanced by understanding the schema — the anatomy, if you will! — of what they’re reading. Each section of a scholarly paper occupies a distinct position and serves a specific purpose in a paper; knowing what these sections are, as well as where they’re typically located and what they’re meant to do, will improve your ability to read, comprehend, summarize, and integrate peer-reviewed scholarship into your own research.

Important!

Some of these parts also indicate whether or not the article in question is peer-reviewed scholarship or a popular publication, including journal title, keywords, .

The resources by NCSU linked above outline the different parts of a scholarly article: journal title; article title; keywords; abstract; introduction; literature review; methods; results and discussion; figures and tables; conclusion; references; and other sections and supplemental information.

For information on the locations and purposes of each of these parts, check out the resources linked above.

Exit Writing

🥳 Congratulations on getting through this chapter! Don’t forget to check the Calendar for the week’s assignments, including your Tue question and Fri answer posts, posting as well as any other assigned writing. Make sure to look ahead to future weeks as well to get a sense of when low- and high-stakes writing for Unit 1 is due.

Reference List for This Week’s Resources