Getting Started with a Scholarly Literature Review

“Do you believe it?” Determining what is valid and usable is the main question for doing scholarly work, and also the basis for understanding research methods. Rather than taking statements at face value, it is up to us to determine if simple claims and opinions have any evidence to back them up. Let’s take a quick look at this NEA page about the value of interactive whiteboards. How do you feel about statements such as:

“Anything that can be done on a computer monitor, can be replicated on the interactive white board.”

and

“Teachers report that increased student engagement is the number one benefit to teaching with this tool.”

and

“Research has repeatedly demonstrated that students learn better when they are fully engaged and that multisensory, hands-on learning is the best way to engage them. Interactive whiteboards facilitate multisensory learning whether it is a collaboration exercise for math problem solving or a Google Earth tour of the Amazon rainforest.”

Does it strike you to ask with regard to the first statement, “Really? do you want to be playing esports or massively multiplayer video games on your whiteboard?”  Or does it go through your mind to ask (with regard to the second statement), “Which teachers reported this?” or  “what was the #2 benefit or could they only come up with 1?” And with regard to the third statement, might you think to ask, “Could you share that research so I can see if I believe it as much as you do?”

Creating a scholarly literature review is an exercise in finding statements that can be interrogated for whether or not they are believable. Statements without the methods or evidence to back them up, may or may not be true. But we just can’t ever know.

You can find a good background about peer review and what constitutes scholarly literature in Chapter 3 of your Tophat text. Read through those materials to enhance your understanding of what we’re looking for here.

Organizing and Maintaining Source with proper APA style citations

RefWorks  is the official UCONN product for organizing your references, but there are others. You can find a nice presentation on using RefWorks at the UConn Library information page. Its main competitor is EndNote (here’s a brief comparison). Ideally an online organizer like this would prove useful throughout the literature review process: Finding, Organizing, Sorting, and Using in-line citations and in reference sections of a paper, and ultimately for publishing in journal (online or paper). Many journals use Latex or BibTex to do the final page layout of the publication, so they often want to save time/money by having authors submit their work set up in that format.

The Process

The traditional way to approach a literature search is to use a database of scholarly work like ERIC, SCOPUS, PsyINFO or Web of Science and enter search terms and boolean logic to find relevant work. All of these are paid sites and are available to UCONN students through the library (NetID required).

These days it seems simplest for most people to just use Google Scholar. But Google scholar relies on researchers to curate their own writings, and so it is not as objectively maintained as University for-pay databases that are peer reviewed. There are certainly ways that Google Sch0lar can be useful as a starting point, and there are things you can do to help Google Scholar take advantage of University resources.

To use the Library, choose DATABASES from the splash page, and then opt for Education or Psychology to use the databases listed above. But the Lit Review process is often messier than that. For example, another way to start is the bread-crumb method (also called a “snowball” method). Find 1 trusted and valuable paper on the topic, the more recent the better, then follow the references cited in that paper, to the sources cited in those papers, and on it goes until the core of the most often used works is fully identified. The image on the white board (above) is a concept map of a bread crumb lit review– messy, but effective.

Also please note, simply doing a database search can produce widely different results depending on how you ask (structure) the search string.  For example in a 2023 paper looking to review literature on whether video game play can change attitudes and stereotypes, the authors tried many search string before landing on this search operator used for the Scopus database:

TITLE-ABS-KEY ((attitude* OR stereotype*) AND (change OR effect OR significant*1 OR

impact) AND (game*) AND (experiment* OR empirical* OR intervention))

and note they needed to use logic operators, parentheses and the wildcard asterick and probably still didn’t use it quite right, give the purpose of it is to catch all words that start with the same letters, such as motivat* will find motivate, motivates, motivation, motivational, etc., and child* will find children as well as child. So there are some library skills/tricks that can make finding relevant literature faster a

 

 

If you get stuck or just like a more personal online help experience, you can always chat live with the Neag UConn Library Liaison consultant or librarian on duty. If the Chat now is green, the librarian is free to chat.  (Library regular business hours only, of course)

 

 

Other Readings:

Writing up a literature review (publishing your synthesis of the literature).

UConn general intro to Library resources for First Year Experience (Freshman)

Essential Understanding:

Conducting a literature review on topics related to the wise integration of technology to classroom learning requires some creativity and the ability to access, synthesize, summarize, and report information from a variety of sources that may vary in scholarly quality.