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Life is a Rollercoaster: The Sociology of Stress

This LibGuide accompanies Professor Annette Schwabe's Fall 2017 SYA 4930-02 Life is a Rollercoaster: The Sociology of Stress course, providing various resources to assist throughout the course.

Checklist for Evaluating Literature

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Source: wikipedia 

1) Read & think critically

2) Make connections with related materials

3) Find out the most important landmark studies and key authors on the topic 

4) Evaluate sources 

5) Be selective : for every material that is reviewed for your paper, you should be able to justify why you include it.

6) Place your working thesis in context

Checklist for Preparing First Draft

  • Review notes
  • Draft an outline
  • Write a preliminary draft 
  • Streer clear of all types of plagiarism 
  • Compare your draft with your topic outline
  • Seek feedback from others
  • Edit and revise

Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab

Writing and Research Library Guides

Citation Management Tools

What is a Literature Review?

 

A Literature Review IS...

  • a selective, integrated analysis and synthesis of what has been researched and published on a particular topic
     
  • a process, typically starting from selecting a topic to review and concluding with writing a manuscript to report the published works on the topic
     
  • an iterative process: you may have to keep coming back to previous stage(s) to refine your topic, modify the search statements, and/or revise a working thesis, etc. 

A Good Literature Review IS NOT...

  • a mere summary of what you have read on a topic
  • a summary of everything that is reported on a topic
  • an annotated bibliography 

         ...BUT IS/DOES

  • a critical summary of relevant and selective literature on the topic
  • situate and focus your research in context
  • use credible and most relevant sources
  • written in clear language
  • a piece of research on its own
  • add value to the existing knowledge on the topic 

 

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