This video discusses a few techniques to help you write a literature review. I start by discussing what a literature review is, offer strategies for writing one, and discuss how to find relevant research.
What is a literature review?
First off, what is a literature review? It is an article, or part of an article, that summarizes and categorizes existing research on a specific topic or question. In a research paper, it serves the essential purpose of making it clear why you are writing this paper – establishing where your research fits into the range of existing research on your topic.
Literature reviews typically do three things:
1) First, it demonstrates your familiarity with important research in the field. Many topics have been researched extensively. You should be able to identify the most important ones (the ones everyone else cites).
2) Second, it shows what debates exist about your topic. There is no need for more research if everything is settled about your question. But fortunately there is disagreement on many of the core ideas of political science. Why do people vote? What causes war? Why are some countries poor and other rich? There are many theories out there on all of these questions – a literature review establishes what those debates on your topic are.
3) Finally, a literature review sets up your hypothesis. The ideal research paper will test which of several theories about your question is correct. You will advocate for one and try to rule out the others. A well-written literature review clearly demonstrates that your hypothesis will test the theory or theories you just discussed. Are you testing a new way to research a topic? A new variable? A new case? Your literature review should make clear why this is relevant.
Let’s look at an example:
This literature review on the impact of election laws on gender differences in voter turnout starts with a bit of context (defining the problem) then divides its topic into two sections. First, it discusses the existing research on how gender impacts voting. The author identifies two main categories of research – literature on the impact of gender norms and literature on the impact of gender roles. After summarizing that research, the author moves on to research about the independent variable. There is so much research on the impact of election laws that the author doesn’t need to discuss it much – a few sentences acknowledging their understanding of the issue is enough. But the author does spend more time talking about two articles that cover their topic specifically – and that is where she ends the literature review itself.
Key Points
The key thing to remember in writing a literature review is that you are doing an analytical summary of existing research. The maximum grade for a paper that just summarize articles is a B. You need to think about how the articles you have read relate to each other and what they tell you about the topic you are studying.
I find the best way to do this to be to identify the key issues discussed in the literature and then organize your essay topic by topic, not article by article. You will want to start by writing a one-paragraph summary of the articles you read, but then you need to decide what they share in common and how they differ. Shorten your article summaries down to one or two sentences and write your lit review based on those categories, as in the example I showed you.
It may not be possible to write this kind of issue-by-issue literature review if you keep your research narrowly focused on your hypothesis. Often times you need to broaden your focus to the big theories that relate to your topic. For example, you might be interested in looking at the impact of gun control efforts in a particular state. If you only look at research on that state, you might not find much information. You also need to look at gun control legislation nationally or in other states to find the key themes and categories for a literature review.
Finally, you should try to have your literature review set up your hypothesis. This is typically done in one of two ways: using existing research to support the relevance of your hypothesis and/or using existing research to identify what alternate explanations you need to rule out.
For example, in this paper on how states decide how to distribute foreign aid, after establishing in her lit review that domestic political agendas are one reason why foreign aid is ineffective, she describes her theory about the fragmentation of aid budgets and identifies hypotheses that can test it. Then she returns to the idea of domestic politics when she describes the alternate explanations she will need to rule out in her study.
Step 1: Find Research
So how can you get started on your literature review? The first step is to find the most relevant research. I recommend you start by trying to find someone else’s lit review on your topic. There are two good ways to do this:
1) Search within the Annual Review of Political Science. This is a journal that just publishes literature reviews. You can either use the library website to search just within this journal or go to its website and read the table of contents for recent issues. Note that you are not going to find a literature review here on your specific question – what you need to look for are the broader theories and issues covered.
2) The other option is to search for your topic plus literature review. Note that I use quotes around literature review in the search. This requires the phrase – not just the individual words – to show up in the results. This is not as good a method as going to the Annual Review – it will turn up less relevant results – but may produce some useful articles.
Your second step is to just search on your key terms. Your goal here is to find either a good recent article or a very popular article (as determined by the number of citations).
To find a recent article, you can narrow your search terms by using the filters within the library search page. Once you find an article you want to use, read it, but also go to its list of references and see if any of those sources are ones you need to use in your lit review. Pay particular attention to they theories this article outlines in its lit review – they may be similar to what you want to use.
To find a popular article, I usually go to Google Scholar rather than the library. Google Scholar will tell you how many other articles or books cite this one, and you want to look ones that have been cited a lot. This tells you this is an influential piece of research – one you want to consider using in your literature review. In addition to using that, you can click on “Cited by” and pull up the list of articles that use this source. Often you will find other material to use here.
The last thing I want to note is how to choose search terms.
· First, remember to search primarily on your dependent variable – this is what you need to find alternate explanations for, but it also will tend to produce better results than search on every word in your hypothesis. So if your hypothesis is, as training increases, police violence decreases, search primarily on the causes of excessive use of force by police, not on the types of training for police.
· Second, take advantage of the fact that academic language is really hard to understand. If you want to study how effective a government agency is, for example, some scholars will refer to this as state capacity, others as bureaucratic effectiveness. Look for these academic code words in the articles you read and try searching on them – they will often pull up a narrower, more relevant range of sources.
Step 2: Write a Sentence Outline
Once you have a group of articles, you should write an outline before you move to drafting your literature review. You’ll have to turn in an outline for this class, but this is also valuable because it can help you organize your thoughts. Please see my separate video on how to write a sentence outline, but my main point here is to use the outline to force yourself to write shorter summarize of the articles you read and to categorize them by issue. As you can see in this sample outline, the student wrote out the key categories of research as the main points, then used the research they had read as sub-points. Please note that these points are very short! Do not write paragraphs of text here – it does not help you summarize the sources. Keep your bullet points focused on broad topics and short summaries.
Conclusion
Those are the basics on writing literature reviews. If you would like further assistance, come see me in office hours or go to the library site on how to write literature reviews!