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Getting Started: Assessing Sources/Creating A Matrix/Writing A Literature Review

This document provides guidance on assessing sources, creating a source matrix, and writing a literature review for an academic research paper. It explains that to familiarize yourself with sources, you need to evaluate each source by analyzing the author's credentials, intended audience, arguments made, and relevance to your thesis. You should then organize relevant sources into a matrix based on patterns and perspectives to understand differing viewpoints. The literature review then describes the search conducted, summarizes and analyzes sources to account for debates, and locates the research question in the scholarly context.

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Hanif Rashid
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46 views

Getting Started: Assessing Sources/Creating A Matrix/Writing A Literature Review

This document provides guidance on assessing sources, creating a source matrix, and writing a literature review for an academic research paper. It explains that to familiarize yourself with sources, you need to evaluate each source by analyzing the author's credentials, intended audience, arguments made, and relevance to your thesis. You should then organize relevant sources into a matrix based on patterns and perspectives to understand differing viewpoints. The literature review then describes the search conducted, summarizes and analyzes sources to account for debates, and locates the research question in the scholarly context.

Uploaded by

Hanif Rashid
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Getting Started: Assessing Sources/Creating a Matrix/Writing a

Literature Review
If youre new to academic research and are writing an argumentative paper for the first time, you
will need to first spend time organizing, assessing, and unpacking your sources. Once you can
see clearly what kinds of voices and perspectives address your research questions, you can enter
into the conversation by addressing counter-arguments as well as articulating and supporting
your own arguments.
Getting the basic steps down now will help as you move on to upper level classes in your major.

The basics:
To achieve the kind of familiarity with sources required for incorporating them into your own
arguments and demonstrating your knowledge, you will need to know: a) how to assess the
sources, b) create a matrix, 3) whats expected when writing a literature review.

ASSESSING SOURCES
Begin the process of evaluating the sources you are finding by first reading the text and
summarizing the author's main points by making notes, written or mental, annotations, or other
means. In academic writing, you also need to be fully informed about the sources that look
relevant to your research: for example, who is the writer and what are his/her credentials, what is
the purpose of and audience for the publication and how does a particular source fit into the
larger, ongoing conversation about this question. In other words, look at the factors external to
the source in order to help you determine its credibility and authority. Answer the following sets
of questions for each of your sources:
Author
Conduct a brief search on the author to determine his/her expertise, reputation, and credibility.
Look at citations, articles, and books by this author to find information about who the author is,
what his/her credentials are, and what occupation or position s/he holds.
Publication and Audience
1. Examine the publication for which the author is writing to determine the author's
intended audience, and the publication's reputation, credibility, and target
reader/researcher.
2. Look in the text for clues to what audience the author is addressing, e.g., specialized or
general vocabulary, types of sources cited, explicit references to the audience.

3. Look at the publication itself: front/back cover, submission guidelines, editorial board,
etc., for an indication of audience and types of articles. Once you're satisfied that your
source is credible and reliable, you are ready to analyze the text itself.
Argument/Evidence
1. Carefully read the text, looking at the evidence the author is using and the structure of the
argument (e.g., whether it moves logically from point to point).
2. Identify the range of evidence (personal opinions or observations, research, case studies,
analogies, statistics, facts, quotations, etc.).
3. Assess how the author presents and discusses alternative perspectives in relation to
his/her thesis?
4. Locate any gaps or inconsistencies in the development of the argument.
Relevance/Consistency
1. Analyze the text in relation to your question and developing thesis, and in relation to
other sources you've been reading.
2. If it supports your thinking, identify the assumptions/biases/perspectives influencing the
writer, and how they compare to your own and those of other writers with whom this one
agrees.
3. If it is an opposing perspective, identify the assumptions/biases/perspectives influencing
the writer, and how they compare to your own and those of other writers with whom this
one agrees?
4. Determine how this source contributes to your understanding or to generating new
questions in your thinking?

CREATING A MATRIX
From your initial forays into the sources, you should have some sense of the range of ways
authors answer your question and that there are, in fact, several reasonable and defensible
answers to your question. It is important to begin understanding what influences different writers
to answer your question differently. You will want to start identifying the perspectives, schools
of thought, sets of variables, etc., that influence the question you're trying to answer. You will
also want to organize your readings into categories that will help you choose the main arguments
in support of and in opposition to your thesis.

WRITING A LITERATURE REVIEW


Bearing in mind that a viable research question produces more than one reasonable
answer, the literature review:
Describes the kind of search that was conducted
Summarizes, analyzes, and organizes the various responses found in the scholarly
conversation regarding the question

Explains why different scholars provide different answers for the same or related
questions (i.e. accounts for the debate/tension in the literature)
As a result, the literature review does more than report the conclusions of researchers; it accounts
for HOW those conclusions are reached.
The literature review plays an important role in research projects because:
It locates our research question within the scholarly debate relevant to our concerns
We don't need to reinvent the wheel, so we need to discover what has been done and
represent it
We let the reader see the history of the question and demonstrate that we have done our
homework
We identify what has not been done, or what has not been done well
Use the following steps in writing your literature review:
1. Organize your sources by detecting a pattern that helps you explain why one group of
sources comes up with one answer and another group comes up with another answer.
Creating a matrix is a very effective way of doing this.
2. Summarize these different groups of sources in terms of how they address the question:
what methodology, evidence, critical concepts, etc. do they employ?
3. Analyze the content of these sources in terms of the answer they provide to your central
question or in terms of the question they raise (which may be slightly different from your
question). Show how they offer important insights. Show how they neglect particular
areas.

This document is based on "Integrating Writing: Assessing Sources/Writing a Literature Review,"


(http://www.bothell.washington.edu/writingcenter/writing/reviews).

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