Literature Review

• Take consistent notes
  • note the same kinds of observations throughout your reading
• Create a highlighting scheme
  • Use different colors for identifying themes, types of observations and similar attributes between articles
• Group your observations
  • ​Make observations on post-its so you can group them thematically
  • You can even rough sort the articles themselves into piles in line with you might group the authors
• Summarize only key points i.e. what supports your central ideas
  • Don't overwhelm yourself with covering too many details in your paper
• Paraphrase like a pro
  • Start by reading the passage you'd like to paraphrase several times, then look away and write it in your words as if you were relaying the content to a peer - this will help you avoid copying  exact sentence structure
• Follow Citation style rules
  • Authors/ researchers should be the subjects in your paper
  • For more on using different citation styles, check out the Citation Styles Guide

You usually don't have to create your own citations for scholarly articles, since almost all of our databases have a button that creates a citation in the style of your choice. Links vary depending on the database but look for a link or icon labeled "Cite."

Managing the citations is much easier using Zotero, a free and easy citation management app for Windows and Mac. You can store citations and pdfs, create and share collection, generate bibliographies and in-text citations, use a browser add-on for quick adds to your bibliography, and many other useful tasks. This video shows you how to install and use it.