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UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

IDS 398: Interdisciplinary Research Methods

This guide will help students in IDS 398 with their literature review assignment.

Writing a Literature Review

From the OWL at Purdue

"A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research (scholarship) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably."