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POLT 403F – Politics Senior Honors: What to do: The literature review

Tools, tips, and tricks for conducting research in politics, prepared for the students enrolled in POLT 403F Politics Senior Honors.

Literature Review

What do you need to do?

In your literature review, you need to provide a survey of the available research pertaining to your topic.

You can think of this as summarizing the scholarly conversation that you are joining.

To accurately describe this conversation, you need to include:

  • Landmark works that treat your subject (articles, but also monographs and edited volumes, if such exist); and
  • Lesser-known works that treat your subject (often with greater specificity)

You will probably find gaps in the conversation; acknowledging these can also be an important part of your literature review!

How do you do it?

Using multiple resources, and multiple strategies!

Resources

In this guide, we'll explore some of the best resources available to through the Oberlin College Libraries; our focus today is on resources which can expedite your process, and point you toward the articles and books that will make up your literature review.

Many of the resources highlighted here bring the scholarly conversation to the forefront, and include:

  • Bibliographies
  • Book reviews
  • Books (monographs and edited volumes)
  • Dissertations and theses
  • Encyclopedias and handbooks
  • Literature reviews, meta-analyses, and systematic reviews

Strategies

We'll also explore strategies that you can use to evaluate resources, in order to situate them within the scholarly conversation—and thereby, within your literature review!

Strategies highlighted here include:

  • Advanced searching with boolean operators
  • Cited-reference searching
  • Lateral reading (and other source evaluation techniques)
  • Subject searching