Are you wondering if you can use journalistic articles for your literature review in a research article? The answer is yes, but with great caution. Graduate students who are not familiar with the expectations of high-level research writing can easily be overwhelmed when it comes to their literature review. A literature review can be part of a larger project, such as a chapter of a thesis or dissertation, or it can also be a separate project. Regardless of whether you are part of a project or working independently, certain types of sources are expected.
Please note that a full literature review article may be suitable to meet the requirements of Psychology B.In addition, information about frameworks and methods allows authors and readers of the review to assess the quality of the research, which allows them to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. Similarly, literature summary tables for articles included in a metasynthesis should include information about the characteristics of the participants, the context of the research, and the conceptual contribution of each revised article to help the reader make an informed decision about the usefulness or lack of usefulness of the individual article and the entire review. A literature review published as a separate article presents and analyzes as many important publications in a study area as possible to provide background and context information for a current area of research or study. For an independent literature review, this may mean highlighting the concepts in each article and showing how they support a hypothesis or show a pattern. For example, if the authors of an included article intended to develop a new scale and test its psychometric properties.
For example, if you included a mixed-methods study in the review, reporting methodological and conceptual limitations on “integration” is critical to evaluating the robustness of the study. For example, for a review of the effectiveness of healthcare interventions, a literature summary table should include information about the intervention, its type, timing of content, duration, environment, efficacy, negative consequences, and recipient and implementer experiences of its use. For example, imagine that the authors of an article included in a review used phenomenological research for their research. Textbooks are unlikely to be useful to include in your literary review since they are intended for teaching rather than research; however, they offer a good starting point for finding better, more detailed sources. It is also essential that reviewers provide methodological and conceptual limitations and strengths of articles included in the review since not all review articles include empirical research papers.
Books tend to be less up-to-date since it takes longer to publish a book than a magazine article. Rather than using this topic as one of the findings of the review, reviewers should read and interpret beyond what is described in one article; compare and contrast topics, findings from one article with findings and themes from another article to find similarities and differences; and understand and explain a wider picture for your readers. Therefore, authors of reviews should include philosophical positions in their literature summaries for particular articles. Critical evaluation of individual articles included in reviews is essential for increasing their rigor.
