Education - Literature Reviews

This guide outlines the purpose and process of a literature review and explains how to create search terms for conducting research on your topic. While this guide is aimed at doing Education research (e.g. the database suggestions are made with education scholarship in mind), most of the content of this guide is applicable to other fields of study.

• The Research Presentations tab takes you to a series of narrated PowerPoint slides that can help you get started with your research.
• The Purpose and Process tab takes you to information about why a literature review is important (the purpose) and what steps are involved in writing a literature review (the process).
• The Developing Search Terms tab takes you to explanations of the process of converting your research topic or question into a search strategy, including the functions and uses of the Boolean Operators. This section also includes tips on searching for phrases and using truncations, as well as helpful guides on doing searches in Google Scholar.
• The Searching for Literature tab takes you to a discussion of ways for finding more literature on your topic once you’ve discovered a relevant resource by doing “citation mining” and by looking up “citation mentions.” This section also provides a list of go-to databases for educational research.
• The Citation Management Tools tab takes you to a list of similarities and differences between some popular citation managers (Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote).