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