You should use a minimum of 4 peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles to help answer your question. These can include empirical articles and review articles (i.e., narrative reviews or meta-analyses). I would recommend using PsycINFO to locate your sources.
Be sure to access PsycINFO through the Auraria Library linkLinks to an external site., which will have you log in with your MSU Denver credentials and provide you access to all of the library’s holdings. If you access something like Google Scholar directly, instead of through the library website, you will very likely hit paywalls that will ask you to pay for articles. Do not pay for articles. You have already paid for access to full-text through your tuition and fees. Going through the library website will allow you to access these subscriptions at no additional cost.
Most of you will have experience using PsycINFO from previous courses. However, if you need assistance with finding sources, or would like a primer on conducting a literature search for articles, please contact me and I’ll be happy to send you resources, talk you through tips, etc.
An important note: keep an open-mind when doing this search. Do not go in with a conclusion or answer to your research question already in mind at this point in the process. That is a sure-fire way to fall prey to the confirmation bias. Instead, go in with open-minded curiosity about your research question. Find the relevant literature that speaks to your research question, whatever conclusions it draws. You will use the research to answer your research question in your paper, but that comes later, and should follow where the evidence leads. Do not cherry-pick the literature to support your preconceived conclusion.
Read Articles:
Read the abstract of each article first, to make sure it is appropriate and relevant to your research question. If it is, read the introduction and discussion sections next, to get a sense of the overall paper, its context and its findings. Then, go back and read the Method and Results sections to fill in the details. Make sure that this article is truly relevant to your research question and will help you to answer your “supervisor’s” question.
Save PDF copies of all of the articles you plan to use in your paper. You will need to upload these PDF copies of your articles with your final literature review product. All full-text articles will be available in a PDF version; do not save the html (web-based) copy or a link alone. You will need to save and upload the PDF of the article. If you are uncertain how to access and/or save a PDF for any of your sources, contact the Auraria librarians using the “Ask Us” function and they will be able to assist you.
Repeat Previous Steps as Needed:
Sometimes, your initial search is not sufficient. You may find articles that look promising at first, but end up being duds that don’t actually address your research question (keeping in mind the important note about open-mindedness and avoiding confirmation bias). Therefore, this can be an iterative process. You should not use the first four articles you find, no matter how irrelevant the articles may end up being to answering your research question. Also, while there is a minimum number of sources required (four), you are always welcome to include more than the minimum number of sources.
A word about other sources: If you would like to use a source other than a peer-reviewed scholarly journal article in your report, you may do so. However, use any such sources judiciously and strategically (e.g., perhaps conduct a CRAAP test on them). These sources should be in addition to your four peer-reviewed journal articles, and will not count toward that minimum count.
Summarize and Evaluate Articles:
When you have located at least four solid peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, take some time to write a brief, succinct summary of the critical elements of each article. Be sure to include enough detail about the article’s methods and findings so that a reader who hasn’t read the article themselves could still understand the article. However, you do not likely need to get into the nitty gritty details like p-values, unless there is something noteworthy about a particular value that you want to highlight (otherwise, you can just focus on the substantive conclusion–a finding was, or was not, significant, for example).
Also take some time to think about the strengths and limitations/weaknesses of each article. What did this article/study do that was strong and makes an important or unique contribution to your understanding of the research question/topic? How does it help you answer your supervisor’s question? And what do you need to keep in mind when interpreting the study or its findings? Are there limitations, qualifiers or conditionals that impact the findings? Take into account the issues we’ll be discussing in Modules 5-8 with regard to external, statistical, construct, and internal validity to identify any major weaknesses or limits to the conclusions that can be drawn from each study/article. In essence, you want to identify what you can, and what you can’t, conclude from each article you read.
Synthesize Study Findings:
Now that you’ve considered each article in isolation, on the basis of its own findings and on the basis of its own merits, it’s time to think about how the articles work together to help you answer your research question. There is no such thing as a perfect study that answers everything about a research topic ideally. Instead, we bring together the findings from multiple studies in order to draw conclusions about a particular topic or area of research. Thinking about the strengths and limitations of each article, do your sources, taken together, help you to more confidently reach any conclusions about your research question? Are there findings that multiple articles corroborate or converge upon? Or, do your articles diverge and come to different conclusions on important points? If so, what might account for the observed differences in those articles–do they use different methods? Different samples?
Think about your articles as a whole. What do these four (or more) articles tell you about your topic, when taken together, that perhaps no article in isolation can tell you?