Sometimes the challenge of writing a paper comes from organizing your time. This assignment planner will give you an idea of what steps you need to take and how much time you should spend on each step. There are also lots of different resources that can help you with your research and writing.
Often a broad topic can be narrowed by adding one or more criteria, which can include:
| Too Broad | Try |
| Smoking cessation | Mindfulness therapeutic intervention in aiding smoking cessation |
| Social media in college and university | The use of social media in university classrooms for educational purposes |
| The culture of raising, slaughtering and consuming animals | The politics of sight and power dynamics in animal rights organizations' undercover investigations of factory farming and animal slaughter |
Identifying a well-defined research topic is the first step for writing a literature review. The topic should cover something from the research field that needs to be explored. This will ensure that your contribution will be valuable, that you are providing readers with a different angle or perspective on an issue or problem.
Ideally, your topic should tackle or explore a problem that is just the right size. A topic like “mothers and postpartum depression” is too broad; there will be too much information out there to write a concise literature review. However, a topic such as “maternal postpartum self-criticism and anger” looks at a problem faced by women who are experiencing the so-called baby blues. This gives you a niche within the research field to focus on and explore.
Think about the topic you have chosen and apply these steps.
Look at your topic and pick the important words. Turn them into nouns.
Enter your search and see what results you get.
Here the search was for "family income" "educational attainment" and you will see that maybe searching "academic achievement" "income level" family will be more successful.
Other terms for adult learners can be mature students, nontraditional students, adult students.
Basically I see this whole thing as a vocabulary building exercise. You start with your basic terms and you look at what the academics are using. You might find that "educational attainment" seems to be the right term but when you use "academic achievement," more articles that interest you arise. Now you might have to start your searches again using "academic achievement."
In order to pull out research studies, search your keywords again while including terms like:
Remember that you cannot use all of these different terms in the same search because certain research data collection is mutually exclusive. Case studies will not have methods sections or quantitative data.
When you find an article that you like remember to look at the references. These can give you other papers to look at. Also it is good to see the variety of different papers that the researchers read to write their paper. Sometime we are too literal with our searches. We want a paper that has exactly all the elements of our topic but that might not be possible. Maybe you need to look up poetry or literature appreciation in the broad context and then apply what you read there to the adult education context.
To avoid searching through endless unreliable websites, improve your google searches from the start.
Use these as part of your search:
site:.edu (to search only U.S. universities), e.g. "adult education" "academic achievement" site:.edu
site:.ac.uk (to search only UK Universities), e.g "adult learners" pdf site:.ac.uk
site:.gov (to search the US gov website.)
site:.gc.ca OR site:.canada.ca (to search the Canadian gov website.)
site:.org (to search organizations). Try looking at UNESCO "lifelong learning" site:en.unesco.org
Also include words like disseration, thesis, or pdf to bring up more reliable documents.
Try "aboriginal peoples" retention education pdf site:.gc.ca
Following citation trails will help you find more resources for a particular topic of discussion. It will also allow you to situate a particular work in its greater academic context, and understand how the discussion around it has progressed. By tracking the citation forward (identifying who has cited the article), you can see how previous scholars have responded to the work, including confirmation of research findings, disagreements, corrections, criticisms and further discussions. This, in turn, will help you identify current trends in the research community and other areas for further exploration.
Google Scholar, along with many of the library's research databases (e.g., ERIC, ScienceDirect, and SpringerLink), allows for tracking citations forward. Look for the links "Cited by" (ERIC, Wiley Online Library, and Google Scholar), "Citations" (SpringerLink), "Citing Articles" (ScienceDirect), and "Cited Reference Search" (Web of Science).
Example: Google Scholar
Example: Web of Science
In this example, only one result is retrieved since the exact title was entered. Under "Citation Network" on the right, click on "# Times Cited" for a list of works that reference the article in question. You can also click on "View Citation Map."
