Discovering the hidden piece of the puzzle to writing for Success S UZANNE VAN DEN H OOGEN, MLIS R ESEARCH T OOL K IT W ORKSHOP J UNE, 2014

A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. Your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries. Taylor, Dena. n.d. The Literature Review: A Few Tips on Conducting It. University of Toronto. writing/literature-review,accessed January 15, writing/literature-review

NOT a collection of summaries or abstracts NOT a copy of article abstractsNOT a research essay You are responsible for synthesizing and critically examining the literature!

To provide an overview of what scholars have written about on a specific topic; To describe the conceptual or theoretical frameworks used to analyse that topic; To explain the strengths and weaknesses of this knowledge and these theoretical/conceptual frameworks by comparing and contrasting the work of various authors.

Developing an effective search strategy will help you to quickly and accurately locate relevant information on your topic.

Read about your topic What do you know about your topic? Develop questions you would like to answer during your research Transform your topic into a question Keywords can have a profound impact on the results of your research Use key words and key concepts Use a thesaurus Identify synonyms and related terms Boolean Operators Phrase Searching Vocabulary Tips & Tricks