Take notes and cite your sources in an annotated bibliography.
As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.
It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism. It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.
The annotations are usually between 50 and 200 words long, typically formatted as a single paragraph. This can vary depending on the word count of the assignment, the relative length and importance of different sources, and the number of sources you include.
Identify themes, debates, gaps
To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for the following:
This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your research will contribute to existing knowledge.
When referring to the content of a survey you conducted in APA Style, you don’t need a formal citation or reference entry. When citing someone else’s survey data, follow the format of the source type it appears in.
Referring to your Survey or Questionnaire
When your research involved conducting a survey, and you want to quote from it (either the answers or the prompts/questions) in your paper, you don’t need to cite it. The survey is part of your research and not a previously published source.
Typically, you will include survey results in an appendix to your paper. If that’s the case, you can refer to the appendix the first time you quote from it in the main text.
If your survey is not included in an appendix, don’t include any citations.
Citing Data from a Published Survey
If it’s not your survey you’re referring to but a previously published one, you should provide a citation. Survey data may be published in a journal article or book, so you should use the relevant format.
Survey data accessible in a database is cited in the following format.
| APA format | Author last name, Initials. (Year). Survey title [Data set]. Publisher. URL or DOI |
|---|---|
| APA reference entry | United States Census Bureau. (2009). American housing survey 2007: Metropolitan survey (ICPSR 24501) [Data set]. United States Department of Commerce. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR24501.v1 |
Reflective annotations: When the assignment is part of a larger research process, you need to consider the relevance and usefulness of the sources to your research.
A reflective annotation is similar to an evaluative one but focuses on the source’s usefulness or relevance to your research.
Reflective annotations are often required when gathering sources for a future research project or assessing their use in a project you have already completed.
The annotation below assesses the usefulness of a particular article for the author’s research in the field of media studies.
Manovich, Lev. (2009). The practice of everyday (media) life: From mass consumption to mass cultural production? Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 319–331. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/596645 (APA style reference)
(The first sentence describes the topic of the article). Manovich’s article assesses the shift from a consumption-based media culture (in which media content is produced by a small number of professionals and consumed by a mass audience) to a production-based media culture (in which this mass audience is just as active in producing content as in consuming it. (These sentences go into more detail about the author's arguments and stance). He is skeptical of some of the claims made about this cultural shift; he argues that the shift towards user-made content must be regarded as more reliant upon commercial media production than it is typically acknowledged to be. However, he regards web 2.0 as an exciting ongoing development for art and media production, citing its innovation and unpredictability.
(the 2nd paragraph assesses the usefulness of the article exploring its weak and strong points). The article is outdated in certain ways (it dates from 2009, before the launch of Instagram, to give just one example). Nevertheless, its critical engagement with possibilities opened up for media production by the growth of social media is valuable in a general sense, and its conceptualization of these changes frequently applies just as well to more current social media platforms as it does to Myspace. (This clarifies how you plan to use the article in your research.) Conceptually, I intend to draw on this article in my analysis of the social dynamics of Twitter and Instagram.
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