review paper 13

Your task is to write a literature review on the topic of your choice.

Specifications: 5-6 pages (anything over is fine, but pretty please no more than 10). This page limit only includes the text of your paper, not the title page or references, an abstract isn’t necessary for a homework assignment. You will need to find 6 strong peer-reviewed scientific sources. Paper is 12 or 11 pt font with 1” margins. Attempt APA style, you won’t be graded on your APA style….but attempt it, you will need to know it for nearly any science writing. Here is a good website to help you learn it if you’ve never used it. They have a visual example paper there as well so you can see the style. (I will not accept the paper if you don’t attempt APA style) http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

The Paper:

For this paper I want you to review any topic in the Psychology of Gender/Sex Roles that interests you. You can literally pick anything you want to review as long as it’s related back to the science of studying Sex and Gender roles in some way. A review question for a smaller paper like this should focus on a narrow question of interest within a field.

Basic Format:

You can feel free to stray from this basic format, but this is just to help for people who may be lost in how to structure a research review paper.

Title page (no abstract needed)

Introduction – what is the question you are asking and what do you already know about it…or think you know about it? Try to draw the reader in as well as defining the parameters of the review

The Body – take a paragraph or two to discuss each of your sources, and how they help to answer your research question separately (this can be organized many different ways, check out the writing guides posted on LMS)

Nearing the conclusion – How does the research you found tie together to complement each other to answer your question. Additionally, do the articles contradict each other at all? (an easy way to think about this is to imagine all the scientists in the room together talking about this topic, what would the conversation look like?)

Conclusion – what did you find, what questions do you still have that are left unanswered. And what’s the next step you would take if you could ask another question on the topic

References – in APA style (like the rest of your paper. Use that online writing guide I link to above, its very easy to use and contains a sample paper)

Places to look for research:

http://library.pratt.edu/

your library is amazing. Use it! Librarians are also amazing, use them….but politely! Use the databases section to search collections of articles. Psych info/Psych articles will be very useful for you. But so might sociology, education, etc. depending on your topic

http://scholar.google.com

if you use this search engine from a Pratt internet connection, they should tell you on the side bar of the search which articles Pratt has full access to for free! Keep in mind google scholar sometimes links to blogs and other sources that aren’t the best. You will need to use a more critical eye than you would if you were using the library research databases. This means searching the sources you find to make sure they are from a peer-reviewed scientific journal

Acceptable types of sources:

Gold standard: peer-reviewed research papers found through the library databases. These can be original research, or peer-reviewed Review or meta review papers on a topic. Magazines like Psychology Today do not count as peer-reviewed research.

Silver: Books published by notable scientists in their field (means you have to check their credentials, what training they have, if other peers doing similar work get similar results, and if they’ve published results in peer-reviewed journals before)

Bronze: Interviewing a scientist who does this work yourself, whether in a live or written interview format

Don’t even think about it: Blogs, random webpages run by one person, Wikipedia entries, pop culture scientists like Dr. Phil/Dr. Oz that don’t actually do research. Feelings or opinions not backed up by empirical evidence. Journalistic sources are not scientific sources. If the newspaper article cites science then it is your job to search the databases for work by that scientist so you can read it yourself. Examples of journalistic sources: NYtimes, psychology today, Washington Post, The Guardian, etc.