Academic Writing (Literature Review)

Your Major Project will be a Literature Review of a topic of your choice. The topic should be related to an area of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. All referenced articles should be from peer reviewed professional journals. Use APA format APA Online Tutorial: Copy/paste the link [login to view URL] "What is a literature review, then?" A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a certain time period. 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 recapitulation of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. And depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant. "But 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 literature review as a foundation and as a support for a new contribution. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.