Week 4 - Assignment: Develop an Annotated Bibliography

5/26/22, 9:01 AM Resources for a Literature Review - Research Process - LibGuides at Northcentral University

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NCU Library / LibGuides / Library How-To Guides / Research Process / Resources for a Literature Review

Research Process These pages offer an introduction to the research process

at a very general level.

Home

Finding a Research Topic

Determining Information Needs

Scholarly Research

Preparing to Search

Reading a Scientific Article

Evaluating Information

Finding Similar Resources

Resources for a Literature Review

Resources for a Literature Review or an Annotated Bibliography

Annotated bibliographies and literature reviews are very common

forms of writing. The intent of each is to assist you, as the researcher,

in gathering resources, identifying trends and problems in the research

field, and analyzing those resources to assist your own research. This

type of writing is also very helpful to the reader as it identifies key

research articles and synthesizes the information to create a coherent

picture in which the reader can place your research. Remember that

you only want to include pivotal and influential research in this type of

writing – this means you will want to focus on scholarly articles that

contain primary research. Though literature reviews and annotated

bibliographies accomplish a very similar purpose, they are not written

in an identical manner.

According to the Purdue OWL website, an annotated bibliography is “a

list of sources (books, journals, websites, periodicals, etc.) one has

used for researching a topic. … Therefore an annotated bibliography

includes a summary and/or evaluation of each of the sources.” An

annotated bibliography is compiled of references and summaries in

alphabetical order. For more information see the OWL at Purdue Annotated Bibliographies page. For information about how to find examples of annotated bibliographies, see the Library's Annotated Bibliographies FAQ.

A literature review, on the other hand, is “a summary of what the

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Literature Gap and Future Research

Web of Knowledge

Annual Reviews

Systematic Reviews & Meta- Analyses

Finding Seminal Works

Exhausting the Literature

Resources for Dissertation Research

Organizing Research & Citations 

Scholarly Publication

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scientific literature says about your specific topic or question.” A

literature review generally organizes references by subject matter,

theory type, methodology design, etc. A literature review is generally

much more exploratory than an annotated bibliography, and must pull

together the information that is presented in many disparate sources to

form one, cohesive picture of the research field. For more information

see the OWL at Purdue Types of APA Papers page.

How do you go about getting the resources you need to write a

literature review or an annotated bibliography? Library databases like

EBSCOhost and ProQuest are a great place to start because they

contain so many resources on so many different topics, but there are

some additional databases that you may want to consider using for

these types of assignments. These sub-pages identify resources and

research techniques for your literature review.

OWL at Purdue Annotated Bibliographies

ASC Annotated Bibliographies FAQ

OWL at Purdue Types of APA Papers

Additional Resources

For additional information about conducting literature reviews, please

see the following resources from the NCU Library:

Aveyard, H. (2010). Doing a literature review in health and social care: A practical guide (2nd edition).Berkshire, GBR: Open University Press.

Card, N. (2010). Literature review. In N. Salkind (Ed.), Encyclopedia of research design (pp.726-729). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Chaffee, S., & Lieberma, D. (2001). The challenge of writing the literature review. In A. Alexander, & W. James Potter (Eds.), How to publish your communication research (pp. 23- 47).Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Ford, N. (2012). How to do a literature review. In The essential

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5/26/22, 9:01 AM Resources for a Literature Review - Research Process - LibGuides at Northcentral University

https://library.ncu.edu/friendly.php?s=researchprocess/literaturereview 3/4

Last Updated: May 25, 2022 6:57 PM URL: https://library.ncu.edu/researchprocess  Print Page Login to LibApps Report a problem

Subjects: Arts & Humanities, Business, Computing & Information Technology, Dissertation Resources, Education, Government & Criminal Justice, Health, Medicine & Nursing, Law, Library Services, Tools & Resources, Marriage & Family

Science, Psychology & Social Work, Sociology & Diversity Studies

guide to using the web for research (pp. 53-81). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Literature Review. (2004). In Donna M. Mertens, & John A. McLaughlin (Eds.), Research and evaluation methods in special education (pp. 35-50). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Literature Reviews. (2001). In Bruce A. Thyer (Ed.), The handbook of social work research methods (pp. 400-413). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Literature Reviews and Bibliographic Searches. (2006). In V. Desai, & R. Potter (Eds.), Doing development research (pp. 209- 222). London, England: SAGEPublications, Ltd.

Race, R. (2008). Literature review. In L. Given (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (pp. 488-490). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Thomas, D. R., & Hodges, I. D. (2010). Doing a literature review. In Designing and managing your research project: Core skills for social and health research (pp. 105-131). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Writing a Literature Review. (2006). In N. Walliman (Ed.), Social research methods (pp. 182-186). London, England: SAGE Publications, Ltd.

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Tags: annotated bibliography, Boolean operators, cited, cited references, citing articles, dissertation research, field codes, Google Scholar, literature review, measurements, organizing citations, peer-reviewed journals, popular sources, primary sources, research

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