Annotated Bibliography-

Useful Resources for Your Literature Review Project

What is a literature review?

Writing a literature review entails synthesizing what you find. You want to avoid what one of my professor's used to call "stringing pearls" - just listing all of the articles you found and describing them one at a time. While you may need to describe each article, you also need to summarize in your own words what we know about your theory when we synopsize that literature in the aggregate.

These articles will give you a window into that practice:

Torraco, R.J. 2005 Writing integrative literature reviews: Guidelines and Examples

Turner, J. 2018 Literature Reviews

What are the best databases for searching for articles?

I recommend ProQuest Direct, Google Scholar, ABI/Inform, and EBSCO Web. 

· For academic articles, limit search to "peer reviewed"

· For practitioner articles, limit search to "trade journals" (available in ProQuest)

· For more recent articles, limit search to the last 5 years

· To shorten list, limit keyword search to "everything but full text (NOFT)" - will check for your keyword in title, abstract, keywords, etc. but not anywhere in article (available in ProQuest)

· To further explore ideas in your best articles, locate your article in one of the search tools and look for "cited by" to pull up any articles that cite the article in question

More on finding practitioner articles.

· ABI Inform may be the better database for practitioner journal articles.

· Use your favorite search engine to find articles on the internet. You will want to understand if you are finding online journals or individual blog posts - and you may want to carefully check out the credentials of the person who wrote the article before you place faith in it.

· There are a number of industry web sites that host articles, specifically:

· eLearning Industry ,

· Learning Solutions ,

· CLO Media ,

· Training Magazine ,

· TD Magazine (from the Association for Talent Development - sometimes accessible to members only),

· HR Magazine

· Let me know if you know of others, and I will share

What is APA 6th style?

You are asked to write your papers using the APA 6th edition format guidelines, published by The American Psychological Association, and generally seen as the standard for formal writing in our field. (It's a pain, but you'll come to appreciate that everyone cites references the same way.) These resources will help you with APA style.

Microsoft Word template for APA 6th - this can get you started. APA Style - help from the Purdue Online Writing Lab (God bless them!) APA Style website - the source (use the search feature)