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Special Education Graduate Program: Literature Reviews

Keeping Yourself Organized

Organizing Your Lit Review: Spreadsheet Style. This article includes practical advice from a graduate student about how to stay organized during the literature review process.

 

RefWorks is a bibliographic management tool that enables you to export citations from databases. You are then able to use RefWorks to store citations and generate a bibliography in your preferred citation style guide.​

Writing Your Master's Thesis
The Dissertation Journey
Dissertation Desk Reference
Writing a Proposal for Your Dissertation
Destination Dissertation

Tips

Here are some tips for conducting literature reviews:

1. How do you know that you have found the pivotal works on a topic?

  • Use a wide range of search tools including local, state, and national book catalogs. See the Finding Books tab of this guide.
  • Use subject-specific article databases to search through scholarly journal literature.
  • Don't forget to use Google Scholar. This is especially great for entering the name of a theory for example. Try searching for self-efficacy. You will see that the first result points to Bandura's work. An indicator that this is an important work in the field is that his work has been cited by 11,000 other authors. 
  • You know that your searches for information are nearing completion when you start seeing references to the same authors or research pieces. 

2.  How do you track down citations from a reference list at the end of a journal article or book chapter?

  • Look carefully at the citation to determine what type of information you are looking for. Is it a book, an article, or a dissertation? This will be a clue as to what type of search tool you need to use to find the source. If the citation is for a book, then you will need to use a catalog. If it is for an article, then you will typically need to use an article database. 
  • The easiest way to find out if BGSU Libraries has the full-text of an article is to simply enter the article title into SUMMON. Be sure to put quotation marks around the title before hitting the search button. If we do not have the article you are looking for, fill out an Interlibrary Loan form and we will email it to you for free within a few days.