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Define the research literature in psychology and give examples of sources that are part of the research literature and sources that are not. 2. Describe and use several methods for finding previous research on a particular research idea or question. Reviewing the research literature means finding, reading, and summarizing the published research relevant to your question. An empirical research report written in American Psychological Association (APA) style always includes a written literature review, but it is important to review the literature early in the research process for several reasons. • It can help you turn a research idea into an interesting research question. • It can tell you if a research question has already been answered. • It can help you evaluate the interestingness of a research question. • It can give you ideas for how to conduct your own study. • It can tell you how your study fits into the research literature. 2.3.1 What Is the Research Literature? Available under Creative Commons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). The research literature in any field is all the published research in that field. The research literature in psychology is enormous—including millions of scholarly articles and books dating to the beginning of the field—and it continues to grow. Although its boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, the research literature definitely does notinclude selfhelp and other pop psychology books, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, websites, and similar sources that are intended mainly for the general public. These are considered unreliable because they are not reviewed by other researchers and are often based on little more than common sense or personal experience. Wikipedia contains much valuable information, but the fact that its authors are anonymous and its content continually changes makes it unsuitable as a basis of sound scientific research. For our purposes, it helps to define the research literature as consisting almost entirely of two types of sources: articles in professional journals, and scholarly books in psychology and related fields. 32 2.3.1.1 Professional Journals Available under Creative Commons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Professional journals are periodicals that publish original research articles. There are thousands of professional journals that publish research in psychology and related fields. They are usually published monthly or quarterly in individual issues, each of which contains several articles. The issues are organized into volumes, which usually consist of all the issues for a calendar year. Some journals are published in hard copy only, others in both hard copy and electronic form, and still others in electronic form only. Most articles in professional journals are one of two basic types: empirical research reports and review articles. Empirical research reports describe one or more new empirical studies conducted by the authors. They introduce a research question, explain why it is interesting, review previous research, describe their method and results, and draw their conclusions. Review articles summarize previously published research on a topic and usually present new ways to organize or explain the results. When a review article is devoted primarily to presenting a new theory, it is often referred to as a theoretical article.