Subject Guides: SOC 497: Sociology Senior Research Seminar: Write Your Literature Review & Proposal

Nadine Anderson, Behavioral Sciences and Women's & Gender Studies Librarian

she/her/hers

Contact:

4021 CASL/1153B ML
nfanders@umich.edu

Subjects: Anthropology, Behavioral and Biological Sciences, Criminal Justice, Faculty Resources, Food Studies, Integrative Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Psychology, Sociology, Women's & Gender Studies

Preparing your Literature Review & Proposal

1, Bibliography

Generate a preliminary bibliography of scholarly sources related directly to your research area.

Go to Start Finding Sources and Search Sociology Databases to find scholarly articles and ebooks
Go to Find ebooks to find and browse scholarly ebooks
Go to Cite Your Sources and use Dr. Aronson's templates for citing your sources

2. Literature Review

Literature reviews bring together theories and results from a number of studies to describe the "big picture" of your area of research and provide the context for your study proposal and how it fits into this current research area. Your literature review should be more than a summary of the articles that you read: it should be a compelling narrative about the research trails you followed, how they build up to your study proposal, and why your proposed study is original and important.

Go to Start Finding Sources and Search Sociology Databases to find scholarly articles and ebooks
Go to Find ebooks to find and browse scholarly ebooks
Go to Analyze Your Articles to find key information in your scholarly articles
Go to Use Your Sources for guidelines and instructions on using your sources to build your arguments and justifications for your proposed study
Go to Cite Your Sources and use Dr. Aronson's templates for citing your sources

3. Research Proposal

Outline your research questions and what you hope to accomplish in your proposed study. Outline your methods, including how you plan to study your research topic. If you are conducting a secondary analysis, explain details about the dataset you're using, the type of questions asked, and how you plan to use the data collected.

Go to Analyze Your Articles to find key information in your scholarly articles
Go to Use Your Sources for guidelines and instructions on using your sources to build a research design that will answer your research questions
Go to Find Datasets to identify datasets for your study (only if you want to use a dataset for your study design)

For more writing help, contact the Writing Center and make an online appointment to meet with one of their consultants.