Literature Review Paper Expectations & Instructions
Please read through this information carefully:
Themes & Section Headings: The literature review section of your paper should use a level 1 section heading (Links to an external site.) labelled “Review of the Literature,” and should be organized by themes that you have chosen for your paper based on the main ideas you noticed your sources discussing in relation to your research question.
You should format your two themes as level 2 APA section headings (Links to an external site.) in the Review of the Literature section of your paper, and you can see how this is set up within the Student Sample paperPreview the document reading that was assigned this week.
You should review at least 2-3 sources for each theme and you can use the same source for both themes if the author(s) spoke to both of the themes you selected.
For example, if I was writing on the nursing shortage and my research question was, “What are the factors that contribute to the nursing shortage?” I would then look at my annotated bibliography to see what my sources said about this particular question.
Then I would choose the top two themes the authors stated about this research question. Let’s say out of all the sources I reviewed, the top factors contributing to the nursing shortage that everyone talked about in answer to my research question were faculty shortage and nurse burnout/dissatisfaction.
Those two themes would actually become the level 2 headings underneath the Review of the Literature section of my paper. Then, within each heading, I would review the sources that mentioned something about each particular theme under that heading.
review their studies (explaining their purposes and methods in one or two sentences maximum) and the findings in detail by using sources (mainly paraphrasing with minimum quotations), exploring what each author had to say under that particular theme/heading.
Your reader should get a good sense of what the literature out there says about this particular theme and the connections (similarities/differences) between the sources.
Avoiding Plagiarism, Including Self-Plagiarism: Do not copy and paste blocks of text from your annotated bibliography (AB) into your literature review, as this would likely make your writing sound awkward and stilted and could be considered self-plagiarism (see 1.17 on p. 21 in your APA Manual for more on this).
At the same time, you can certainly refer to your AB to help you weave together the main points from the articles to show readers a glimpse into what the literature has to say about particular themes.
Be careful paraphrasing your sources: remember using a string of even three or four words exactly from the text likely requires putting the words in quotation marks and citing the author/date/page number. If you paraphrase or summarize source information in your own words, APA does not require that you include the page number.
Showing Connections Between Sources: Remember, in the Review of the Literature section, you are mainly reviewing what the authors (literature) stated on the issue, but you should also be showing connections between your sources as you are reviewing them.
To make these connections, you should work at using Transitional Devices (Links to an external site.) to link and transition into new ideas/sentences/paragraphs.
Adequately & Properly Citing Sources: You must cite everything that you take from your sources. It is not enough to just have a citation at the beginning or the end of a paragraph in APA.
You will be citing often in this section of the paper since you’re reviewing other sources (see this resource for examples (Links to an external site.)), so don’t worry about having “too many” citations here. At the same time, please keep direct quotes to a minimum and work on your paraphrasing/summarizing skills in this paper, as that is what APA prefers.
Research-Based Writing: You should not use first-person pronouns (e.g., “I, me, my, our, we”) in this research-based literature review.
Many professors in the nursing program do not allow the use of personal pronouns in assignments and most scholarly sources avoid this as well. Remember that your readers know it’s you talking as it’s your paper, so there really is no reason to use “I” in formal writing.
Quantity & Usage of Sources: In the Review of the Literature section, you should only review articles related to themes in that section of your paper.
In other words, you may not end up using all five of your sources in your literature review section. You may want to use a specific source in your introduction or Discussion section, and that is fine. Where it makes sense to use each source is up to you to determine.
Additionally, you may find that one of your five articles in your AB doesn’t work well in your LR; finding a replacement source or two is fine by me, and you do not have to go back and add new sources to your AB. At the same time, you must include at least five sources in your LR–four of which must be empirical studies.
Formatting & Content of Your LR: Keep direct quotes in your LR to a minimum, but providing a surprising statistic or a really good quote about your topic is often effective in the introduction of the paper to help provide some context for the rest of the paper and to demonstrate the importance of your topic. Refer to section 3.4 on pp. 75-76 of your APA Manual for more on writing effective introductions.
Your introduction should provide the necessary background/context for the issue you’ve chosen and include the research question (RQ) that prompted your search in the first place so that the reader can see the importance of the topic and your main focus for the review.
Your “RQ” can be phrased as a statement if it makes your writing flow better, but the focus of your research should be easily apparent to your readers.
Your paper should have these sections: an introductory paragraph (no heading is used for the introduction section in APA; you should simply state your paper’s title; see page 2 of this resource for more info (Links to an external site.)),
Methods section (how you went about searching in the databases for your articles, what years you limited your articles to, what keywords you used, etc.), your Review of the Literature section (including your two themes as level two headings), a Discussion section (this section might also include recommendations like future areas of research), and finally a short Conclusion.
If you take a look at the student sample, you will be able to see how these headings are set up. You should include recommendations either within the Discussion heading or in its own heading.
Also, you should include your Themes Table as part of the LR under the Methods section and be sure to refer to it in the body of the paper so your readers know when to interact with the visual element; see section 7.5 on p. 197 in your APA Manual for more information.
Remember for this APA assignment: Your whole document should be double spaced (except for the table–which can be single, 1.5, or double spaced) and you should use 12-point Times New Roman font.
