How (not) to do a literature review

Abstract

This seminar discusses some of the pitfalls of easy access to documents over the Internet in preparing a literature review specific to a particular dissertation topic. A literature review is a summary in your own words of definitions, concepts, theories, methodology and data from selected literature that is directly relevant to your topic and hypotheses and provides a framework for your research questions and methodology. Copy-and-paste is not an acceptable approach to a literature review, and constitutes plagiarism if the copied text is not properly put in quotation marks and cited. Suggestions are given on how to annotate and review literature and avoid plagiarism.