Writing Literature Reviews: A Guide for Students of the Social and Behavioral Sciences

I purchased this book at the beginning of my doctoral program and flipped through it from time time without really digging into it much. However, when I learned that one of the elements of my comprehensive examination would be a literature review, I pulled this book off the shelf and started reading. It is written in an engaging, conversational style, with great notes and suggestions not only about HOW to write one, but more importantly (in my view), WHY we write one. I copied a few quotes from the book and kept them on display, with the book by my side, as I wrote that part of my comps. The feedback afterwards from all three reviewers was very positive, and one even stated it was "publication-ready." After engaging with this text, I felt much better about my understanding of the purpose and function of a literature review, and especially how to target it to your intended audience, format, and reason for including it, whether as a stand-alone review in a scholarly journal, a brief summary as part of background for a study report, or as in my case, part of the comprehensive exam to be worked into a doctoral dissertation. The advice to consider each article as a tree and to built your own forest in which to situate your research "home" may seem fluffy to some, but it really helped me visualize what I was working to achieve. This book relieved a lot of my anxiety going into my comps, and will assuredly remain with me for many years to come. Highly recommended.

The seller seems to have downloaded an ebook, printed it, as well as printed a cheaply made cover

The book was in a terrible state. The cover was torn and it looked like a very very old copy.

Ok

It never ceases to amaze me how hard it is to find a good simple resource to help a person get better at various kinds of academic writing given how much of it you end up doing in such a wide variety of degrees. With a full load of classes each with their own mountains of textbooks it is not very helpful when a teacher refers me to a foot-thick book on APA style and expects that to help me get my paper written by next week. I love how this book breaks the process down into manageable steps and provides examples to look at. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say.