A literature review (or lit review, for short) is an in-depth critical analysis of published scholarly research related to a specific topic. Published scholarly research (the "literature") may include journal articles, books, book chapters, or conference proceedings.
A solid lit review must:
When a professor asks that you find scholarly articles on a topic for a research paper, it can be confusing to know where to start, how to find them, and how to tell what counts as a scholarly article. The tutorials on this page are all about how to find scholarly, or peer-reviewed, articles in the library "databases."
Below are videos that answer the questions: What is a journal and peer-reviewed article? What are the library databases? And, how do I search in a database?
In this video, you will learn how to evaluate the difference between scholarly journals and other kinds of periodicals, and how to describe the peer-review process.
Length: 1:24
In this video, you will learn what a database is (vs. a website or search engine), and how to evaluate which database may be best suited for your own research.
Length: 1:23
In this video, you will learn how to create and use keywords based on your research topic to search in an academic database.
Length: 1:28
If you start your search at the NEIU Libraries homepage, the links you follow will identify you as an NEIU user. This will help simplify linking to our resources.
Once you do a search in an article database, use links like these to get the full text of the article:
OR
They will link you to the NEIU Libraries catalog and let you know if we have a subscription to the article, making it available immediately via a link.
If the full text of an article is not available online, you will be directed to request a copy of the article through WorldShare interlibrary loan.
This link opens in a new windowReferences to journal articles, books, magazines, and more in the areas of mass media, communications theory, linguistics, organizational communication, phonetics, and speech pathology dating back to 1900. A merger of Communication & Mass Media Complete and Communication Abstracts, Communication Source is the premier database for communication and media studies.
This link opens in a new windowReferences to articles from over 10,000 full text journals on a wide range of academic areas. Included is a searchable collection of images plus videos from the Associated Press from 1930 to the present.
