Writing Literature Reviews

I purchased this book at the beginning of my doctoral program and flipped through it from time time without really digging into it much. However, when I learned that one of the elements of my comprehensive examination would be a literature review, I pulled this book off the shelf and started reading. It is written in an engaging, conversational style, with great notes and suggestions not only about HOW to write one, but more importantly (in my view), WHY we write one.I copied a few quotes from the book and kept them on display, with the book by my side, as I wrote that part of my comps. The feedback afterwards from all three reviewers was very positive, and one even stated it was "publication-ready."After engaging with this text, I felt much better about my understanding of the purpose and function of a literature review, and especially how to target it to your intended audience, format, and reason for including it, whether as a stand-alone review in a scholarly journal, a brief summary as part of background for a study report, or as in my case, part of the comprehensive exam to be worked into a doctoral dissertation.The advice to consider each article as a tree and to built your own forest in which to situate your research "home" may seem fluffy to some, but it really helped me visualize what I was working to achieve.This book relieved a lot of my anxiety going into my comps, and will assuredly remain with me for many years to come. Highly recommended.

product as described

This book is for a class I am taking and it came just in time. Thank you! Perfect condition!

The textbook and the prof for my course weren't useful (textbook) or available (prof) so this saved my backside. Very simple to follow and a great beginning if you don't know where to start.

I teach psychology and recently taught a research methods course. I bought this book, and wanted to read through it as a possible new course resource the next time I teach the class. I have both positives and criticisms regarding this book.Positives:Very straight forward and easy to read. Chapter 1 does an outstanding job introducing students to the four types of social/behavioral science reports. My students learn week 1 about the importance of knowing the difference between those types of reports and which are more reliable than others. They are 100% accurate advising students to give empirical reports the most attention, as they are considered to have the highest reliability. Chapter 1 also does a great job breaking the specific parts of an empirical research report. This is significantly important for students to learn immediately. Then, Chapter 1 gives attention to the different writing voices between doing a literature review for a college course, thesis, dissertation, and publishing empirical reports. Chapter 1 by far was my favorite chapter. Students will benefit greatly from chapter 1.Chapter 2 may seem a little repetitive for the 300 or 400 level social/behavioral science student. Strategies for using electronic databases are in my speculation automatically instructed in many colleges now. With that said, the suggestions are still good. Many students will not be familiar with the tricks boolean markers can provide on results. So the advice in chapter 2 is still worth reviewing even if it's information most likely the student will already know. Also, chapter 2 is the beginning of the flow that will continue throughout the entire book: A set of "steps" and "guidelines".The positive about the steps and guidelines in the rest of the book is they are easy to follow, and perfectly align with the goal of the book "being a guide". This objective is completed masterfully, and makes what is in hindsight to be a frustrating and tedious task a little bit more simple. For example: Chapter 5 gives easy to understand guidelines on how to fully analyze the articles a student chooses to review for adding into their literature reviews. Chapters 6 and 7 provide easy to understand guidelines for analyzing and reading quantitative (6) and qualitative (7) articles. It is very important students understand how and why there is a difference.Part 3 of the book gives steps and guidelines on putting together a draft literature review. Another major positive the authors did was being bluntly honest. They inform the student that they will get drafts returned to them for both revision and re-write. They tell the students that's part of the process of writing a literature review and it's going to happen, no escape. I think that's a good thing to tell students. So, they will not have the mindset of thinking their literature review will be done and over with on first submission.Part 4 ends the book on providing steps and guidelines on best approaches to editing drafts when they get returned to the student. I think that was a brilliant set of chapters to end the book with. Again, students must understand that writing a literature review will always involve editing and re-writing. Best of all, I think providing sample literature reviews in the back of the book is a great source for students to have as they encounter their time to write one.The criticisms are short:I think there are too many steps and guidelines in the chapters. I think those suggestions can be significantly condensed. Having too many steps and guidelines could not only confuse the novice writer, but also unintentionally overwhelm students. I felt a sense of feeling overwhelmed with so many steps and guidelines just reviewing it as a professor.The suggestions on constructing definition tables, methods tables, and summarized result tables while are excellent suggestions on becoming well versed on a topic, many students, specifically undergraduate students likely will not have the time to adopt those suggestions. I believe the authors do recognize this to my recollection, so this criticism is not a bad one. Such suggestions in my view are absolutely perfect and should be adopted when writing a thesis or dissertation.Lastly, there are typos in this text. Spacing issues and misspellings. If an eighth edition is published, those issues must be addressed.Overall, I think this guidebook would be a very good companion for students taking research methods and/or working on their thesis or dissertation. Those working on publishing research can benefit from this text as well. If I decide to use this the next time I teach research methods, I will for sure have them get this book and incorporate some of the chapters.

It never ceases to amaze me how hard it is to find a good simple resource to help a person get better at various kinds of academic writing given how much of it you end up doing in such a wide variety of degrees. With a full load of classes each with their own mountains of textbooks it is not very helpful when a teacher refers me to a foot-thick book on APA style and expects that to help me get my paper written by next week. I love how this book breaks the process down into manageable steps and provides examples to look at. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say.

Great book for writing reviews especially for a doctorate program.

I wanted an additional literature review book to add to my library while doing my doctorate degree. This book is excellent.