Psychology

Citing your sources is important for giving credit to the work of others and avoiding plagiarism.

Here is an Academic Integrity Tutorial:

In the world of academia (and beyond), proper attribution of sources also demonstrates how you are engaging and adding to the existing body of knowledge. By citing your sources, you are entering into the scholarly conversation.

Questions or concerns about citations? Please contact your course librarian , or your campus Writing Center.

The American Psychological Association (APA) is the preferred style manual for writing psychology papers.

We have the most recent APA manual: "Publication manual of the American Psychological Association" 6th ediition available for check out at call number BF 76.7 .P83 2010.

APA offers their BASICS OF APA STYLE tutorial.

The Claremont Colleges Library has a Citation Help page, scroll down for help with APA Style.

The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University offers an easy-to-use guide for creating in-text citations and reference lists in APA format, with lots of examples.

APA Style Changes from the 6th edition This research guide highlights differences between the 6th ed. and 7th ed. of the APA Citation Manual.

A Literature Review is a systematic and comprehensive analysis of books, scholarly articles and other sources relevant to a specific topic providing a base of knowledge on a topic. Literature reviews are designed to identify and critique the existing literature on a topic to justify your research by exposing gaps in current research.  This investigation should provide a description, summary, and critical evaluation of works related to the research problem and should also add to the overall knowledge of the topic as well as demonstrating how your research will fit within a larger field of study.  A literature review should offer critical analysis of the current research on a topic and that analysis should direct your research objective. This should not be confused with a book review or an annotated bibliography both research tools but very different in purpose and scope.  A Literature Review can be a stand alone element or part of a larger end product, know your assignment.  Key to a good Literature Review is to document your process. For more information see:

Planning a Literature Review.

What is a literature review?

A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information.

How is a literature review different from an academic research paper?

The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, and a research paper will contain a literature review as one of its parts. In a research paper, you use the literature as a foundation and as support for a new insight that you contribute. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.

How do I know when I can stop?

Literature reviews can be tricky because you don't want to stop before you've found everything relevant to your topic. There are a couple of guidelines for knowing when to stop looking for materials.

1. If you have done steps 1.1-1.3 (below), when you start to see the same articles over again, then you have done your due diligence and can consider your lit review complete.
   1. Searched all relevant databases, using a variety of keywords and subject headings
   2. Mined article bibliographies for their cited references
   3. Looked in Google Scholar or Web of Science to see who has cited those articles
2. Think of the assignment timeline. If you are writing your PhD thesis you can spend more time doing a comprehensive lit review than if you only have a few weeks until an assignment is due. At some point you need to stop.