What is a Literature Review
For your project, you are asked to provide a short review of the relevant literature. For the first 30 minutes of this workshop, we'll look at techniques for finding information sources for your literature review.
First, let's look at what a literature review is.
Getting an Overview of the Topic
Getting the Lay of the Land
Handbooks and Encyclopedias
Once you've identified your topic, use handbooks and encyclopedias to get overview entries on your specific topic. These entries will describe the key themes, readings, and authors. They should have short lists for further reading which can guide you to key or critical sources on a topic. This is especially helpful when a topic is new to you - it's easy to get overwhelmed by search results when you are new to a topic.
Some examples of online handbooks and encyclopedias relevant to this class:
The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language by Publication Date: 2015Chapters covering both theories and methods in child language research and tracing the development of language from prelinguistic infancy to teenager. Drawing on both established and more recent research, the Handbook surveys the crosslinguistic study of language acquisition; prelinguistic development; bilingualism; sign languages; specific language impairment, language and autism, Down syndrome and Williams syndrome.
The Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar by Publication Date: 2017This handbook provides a critical guide to the most central proposition in modern linguistics: the notion, generally known as Universal Grammar, that a universal set of structural principles underlies the grammatical diversity of the world's languages. Parts III and IV look respectively at the insights derived from UG-inspired research on language acquisition, and at comparative syntax and language typology.
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics by Publication Date: 2016In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. Part III looks at the acquisition of syntax, including argument structure, questions, mood alternations, and possessives.
International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences by Publication Date: 2015The Linguistics section has a number of chapters on linguistic subfields (including syntax) with lists for further reading.papers.
Finding existing literature reviews on your topic
Some databases include "literature review" as one of the limit options you can set before doing your search. Setting these limits will mean that your search will retrieve only literature reviews.
In most databases, you will have to add a term for "literature review" to your search. You may also find results using these terms:
- review article
- systematic review
- critical review
- literature bibliography
- meta-analysis
Digging Deep into the Literature
Finding Scholarly Articles
After you've taken a look at the background literature on your topic, move on to searching the relevant subject databases for scholarly articles on your topic. Look for subject terms and the key authors you've discovered. The relevant databases for language acquisition are:
- PyscINFO - Covers psychology and the psychological aspects of various other disciplines such as language acquisition.
- Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) - the main index for linguistics
- Google Scholar
Sample search in class using the LLBA database:(language acquisition) AND (nominal or pronoun or possessive) AND catalan
Citation Tracking
Citation tracking can be a powerful way to find research on your topic.Citation tracking is used to discover how many times a particular article has been cited by other authors. Some indexes such as Google Scholar will show you how many articles have cited an article. Clicking on the "Cited by" link will bring you to a list of those citations.
So for example if you have a key article that was written in 2003, you can look in the bibliography (aka reference list) for pre-2003 works that the scholar cited and used to develop their arguments. Citation tracking moves forward from that article (post-2003) - it will show you the articles that built on that work. As a general rule, high quality articles attract a greater number of citations.