Writing a Literature Review

A topic's scope includes the parameters and limitations you place on the extent of your research.

A topic should not be too big like "Harmfulness of Soda." Or too small like "Harmfulness of Drinking Diet Mountain Dew while Living in Portsmouth, Ohio." Something more in the middle works better, like "Harmfulness of Drinking Diet Soft Drinks while Pregnant."

To help focus your topic, consider adding variables like demographics (population, age, etc.) and other limiters like date range.

Do a preliminary search on your topic in Discovery Service and see how many results you find. If you don't find any or only a few, your topic may be too narrow. If you find 500,000, it's probably too big.

Here are some other questions to ask yourself when determining how you want to limit your research (courtesy of Boston College Libraries):

• What exactly will you cover in your review?
• How comprehensive will it be?
• How long? About how many citations will you use?
• How detailed? Will it be a review of ALL relevant material or will the scope be limited to more recent material, e.g., the last five years.
• Are you focusing on methodological approaches; on theoretical issues; on qualitative or quantitative research?
• Will you broaden your search to seek literature in related disciplines?
• Will you confine your reviewed material to English language only or will you include research in other languages too?

Boston College Libraries. (2016) Writing a literature review: Phase 1: Scope of review. Retrieved from http://libguides.bc.edu/litreview/phase1

Mind mapping is a tool to help you focus your topic or develop a visualization of your paper's structure.

Credo Reference has an excellent Mind Map function. Typing in a topic (the tool requires a fairly general one) shows a map to subtopics that may serve as a narrowed topic or a subject area you want to address in your literature review. Credo goes one step further and allows you to find reference works related to the topics as well as links to databases in which a search for articles on the topic could provide appropriate articles.

To access the Credo Mind Map tool, click on the link below. In the blue bar across the top of the page, click "Mind Map" and you can begin!

If you need help with Credo, please ask!