PPOL 7350: APP Prep

"Your literature review is the rationale for your entire research project." (Jensen and Laurie, 2017).

Literature reviews should not be an annotated bibliography. Don't just tack summaries of articles and book chapters one after the other. Your job is to integrate previous research and to tell a story for the reader.  What research has been done in the past?  Why is it important?  Where does previous research disagree?  Again, you should also think about how the literature talks to each other: there is already an on-going conversation here. You need to think critically to integrate material. Tie distinct concepts together.  This is the rationale for your entire project.

Read through these posts at SAGE Methods:

Watch this video on SAGE Methods:

Are you noticing a trend here?  Think of your literature review in terms of themes.  I'm going to highlight a section from "How Do I Write My Literature Review?" (Byrne, 2017). 

1. "Establish themes which emerge from the literature.
2. Discuss the themes, especially conflict and difference in understanding of them.
3. Draw it all together to establish:
   1. The agreed state of knowledge on a topic—if there is one (agreement doesn’t happen all that often in the social sciences!
   2. The nature of disagreements and arguments."

Your literature review will be so much more coherent if you organize the existing literature by themes, and them attempt to highlight the agreements and differences between themes.  It's also important to be as systematic as possible when organizing your themes. 

"The References section may very well be the least glamorous part of a research report and the most mechanical, but it is still very important. Each person builds on the ideas of others. When you cite previous work, you are documenting the flow of ideas from one thinker to another. The references you use tell your reader what path you took to arrive at your research question and your conclusions."  (Beins, 2012).  

Read Chapter 8: "References: Citations in the Text and the Reference List" in APA Style Simplified : Writing in Psychology, Education, Nursing, and Sociology:

More recommended sources (highly optional): 

It is a good idea to consult the APA Manual when you have questions about how to cite.  If you aren't sure, consult the manual!  (Eventually you are going to want to cite a regulation or state statute, and the basic APA tutorials won't cover this, but the manual will.)

Beins, B. C. (2012). APA style simplified : writing in psychology, education, nursing, and sociology. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Which articles do I need to cite? 

Only cite references actually used in your paper. 

Should I arrange the authors in alphabetical order?

Never re-arrange the order of authors of an individual reference/article.  Always order the authors as they appear in the article.

I will refer to a single citation over and over.  How do I cite that properly?

"The general rule is that, within a given paragraph, you need to include the year only once. In subsequent paragraphs it is often a good idea to repeat the year so the reader is certain which source you are citing. If you are providing a long discussion of a single reference, you may not need to include the year in each paragraph because there is little chance that the reader will be confused as to which work you are citing."  (Beins, 2012).

I know APA style includes more than just citations.  Am I expected to structure my paper (including margins, font size, etc.) in APA Style?

No, please use whatever structure and format your client expects.  If you have questions, ask your professor. 

Citation managers make it easy to track and organize information resources, and when you are ready, to cite those references.  Zotero, RefWorks, and EndNote are popular citation managers, but you may be familiar with others.  Here I will talk about Zotero.  I recommend Zotero because it is free and fully featured.  

Zotero, like all citation managers, will capture the metadata of an article.  The metadata will include attributes like the author, date of publication, article title, and journal title.  One of the best features of Zotero is that it will also capture a PDF or a web page snapshot and store it with the article metadata.  It is so nice to have one place to go for all your research in one place!  You can also include notes within each citation.  This is a great place to store your annotations, too.  Zotero also lets you create folders and tags (use your key words from your annotation!) to help you organize your sources.   

When you are writing, you can use Zotero integration with Word (and with lesser capabilities, Google Docs) to quickly cite your sources and create a bibliography.  This is another incredibly helpful feature to use when it comes time to write your literature review.  The Word plugin is installed automatically when you install Zotero.

But please, Beware!  Know that citation managers are not infallible.  They do a great job at organizing your references, but they are not always perfect and they do not always capture metadata cleanly.  You will likely have to go through your citations and clean them up.  For example, it is pretty common to see titles in all caps when it is not appropriate, or you might see that the author wasn't correctly cited from a blog post.  But on the whole, a citation manager will save you a lot of time and energy compared to capturing and organizing all of your citations yourself. 

Ready to try it?  Download Zotero here:

Looking for help?  Zotero has plenty of tutorials here:

Zotero also offers several APA style integrations:

More information about using Zotero with Google Docs can be found here:

This week, you should have read the posts and watched one video in SAGE Methods, read one chapter from APA Style Simplified, and downloaded Zotero. 

Additionally, you have one deliverable this week: 

Deliverable 1: Take a screenshot* of your a citation manager (like Zotero) all set up.  The screenshot should include at least 3 saved citations.  Folder organization and tagging is optional.  Submit an image file in any format (image embedded in a Word doc is also fine) to Collab.

Due Date: October 19, 2018, at 11:59am.

*For Windows, try the Snipping Tool.  For Macs, try Grab or Command+Shift+4.