Master of Fine Arts

Writing a literature review is about developing an understanding of the contextual ecology of your research problem, or question.

The process of writing a literature review can be broken down into several major activities:

• Selecting your topic and developing search terms
• Research - use the library's General Search or use specific databases if you want a smaller, more focused results list. Scan the literature, start to narrow your area of interest down.
• Read, Describe, Analyze and Critique
• Compare and Contrast
• Discover relationships between sources
• Identify major themes and concepts
• Identify gaps and disagreements
• Organizing and managing your sources (this is where Zotero enters the process)
• Write, revise and create final bibliography