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SOCI 4321: Race and Ethnicity

Library resources for presentations and papers. Including ASA citation and formatting information.

Purpose of this Guide

The information in these pages will help you:

  • conduct your literature review
  • find and evaluate articles in scholarly journals
  • properly format and cite your sources and your paper
  • Contact librarians for research assistance.

What's a Literature Review?

A literature review surveys scholarly articles, books and other sources (e.g. dissertations, conference proceedings) relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, providing a description, summary, and critical evaluation of each work. The purpose is to offer an overview of significant literature published on a topic.

For an example, look at The role of justice and social exchange relationships in workplace deviance: Test of a mediated model from Human Relations.

  • p. 1687-1688 contain the abstract, and the introductory literature review.
  • p. 1689-1695 continues the literature review, tying previous research to the author's studeny design, theory and hypotheses.
  • note that the last 7 pages of the article contain the full reference list.

A good literature review will be well focused on the specific research question. The sources used will be currrent, relevant, authoratative, accurate, and from an unbiased perspective.

For Further Information, see UCSC's guide on writing a literature review.