Literature Review Process
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Your literature review explores how other people have addressed your research question in their specific contexts.
Once you've drafted a research question, the literature review research process follows these steps:
- Search. What sources can I find on my topic? The majority of these will be peer-reviewed studies (primary sources) from academic journals, but you might supplement those with sources like raw data/statistics, policy reports, and educational theory.
- Evaluate and choose. Does this source answer my research question (or part of it)?
- Get, cite, save. The library's website includes some strategies and tips for saving and for organizing your citations.
- Read, take notes, outline, write. The library's website has some strategies for reading and taking notes. These include the literature review matrix.
- Identify gaps. Are there any themes you need to flesh out?
- Revise research question. It is not unusual to realize that you need to revise your research question as you become more familiar with the existing scholarship
- Start over. The literature review process is iterative, so you'll repeat these same steps until you hit saturation, where you start seeing the same names and citations come up over and over again.