Literature Reviews
ANNUAL REVIEWS HARVARD KEY
This is a "classic" tool -- the most famous example of the stand-alone literature review. For nearly 100 years, it's offered, each year ,authoritative syntheses of the primary research literature in 46 academic fields, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology -- just some of the fields that might take up questions related to race and ethnicity in the United States.
A search of Annual Reviews can therefore help you easily identify—and contextualize—the principal contributions that have been made in your field. The comprehensive critical review not only summarizes a topic but also roots out errors of fact or concept and provokes discussion that will lead to new research activity.
Some fairly recent examples of literature reviews potentially related to class themes can be browsed here.
Strategies for Locating Lit Reviews published elsewhere:
- In subject databases, like those on this guide, you can often limit your search results this way.If a literature review option exists, you'll probably find it under filters for document type or methodology.
- Review essay is another filter to try, when it's offered. Typically, a review essay will take two or three recent publications as an occasion to discuss trends, approaches, and research directions more generally.
- In dissertations, lit reviews commonly appear as a preliminary chapter. Try ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
Subject Bibliographies
Oxford Bibliographies Online
How OBOs help: Often the issue in information-seeking isn't scarcity of sources, but their abundance. Because they're created and regularly monitored by experts, OBOs can help you solve the problem of knowing what or who to read or which voices in the conversation you should give some fuller attention to. And in addition to identifying key scholarly works/discussions, entries will often also include links to important primary source collections, top journals, essay collections, and book-length studies.
Examples related broadly to capstone course themes and projects might include:
- Identity (Anthropology)
- Children and Social Media (Childhood Studies)
- Mindfulness (Psychology)
- Interventions with Traumatized Populations (Social Work)
Research Methods
Sage Research Methods Online
The ultimate methods library, it has more than 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, case studies, and instructional videos by world-leading academics from across the social sciences. It also boasts the largest collection of qualitative methods books available online from any scholarly publisher.
Users can browse content by topic, discipline, or format type (reference works, book chapters, definitions, etc.). SRM offers several research tools as well: a methods map; user-created reading lists; a project planner and advice on choosing statistical tests.
