Guides: URBS 400: Senior Seminar: Conducting a Literature Review

Starting Out on a Literature Review

"Reviewing the literature" / David Byrne. Project Planner. SAGE Research Methods. 2017.
SAGE Research Method's Project Planner guides you through your research project. This section is basic but helpful for making sure you're on the right track.
"Literature review", in : Understanding and evaluating research : a critical guide / Sue L. T. McGregor. SAGE, 2018. pp. 177-204.
A very fine presentation of both theory and practice in writing a literature review. Additional SAGE books and journal articles on literature review writing may be found in SAGE Research Methods.
Conducting your literature review / Susanne Hempel. American Psychological Association, 2020.
One of the APA's Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research series.
More books on writing literature reviews ...

Reference works

Oxford Bibliographies Online
Useful introductions to topics with citations for seminal articles in the field. Search from the main page or navigate by subject.
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
A key resource for understanding unfamiliar concepts in the social sciences.
Sage Knowledge
Encyclopedias and handbooks related to social science.

Find existing lit reviews

You can jumpstart your lit review by finding lit reviews on similar topics that have already been written.

Article databases

Sociological Abstracts
The most comprehensive source for sociology.

PAIS International
Public policy articles and reports.
EconLit
Everything economics.
Business Source Complete
Art & Architecture Complete

ERIC
Scholarly literature in education.
America: History and Life
American history.
NCJRS Abstracts Database
Criminal justice and criminology.
Urban Studies Abstracts
Environment Abstracts

Tip: Use Thesaurus or Index to indentify useful terms for searching.

Tip: Use proximity searching to catch variations.
E.g., literature near/3 review (ProQuest)

Dissertations

The work of doctoral students, dissertations may never be published in book form, but they can be rich resources. They invariably include a lit review as a chapter, and often have extensive bibliographies.

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
Nearly all recent U.S. dissertations are available here in full-text.

Annual Reviews

The Annual Reviews series of journals are entirely composed of extensive lit reviews.

Annual Review of Sociology

Citation Indexes

Trace citations backward and forward in time to see the reception of ideas

Scopus
Indexes most peer reviewed journals in science, technology, and medicine, and many in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Scopus also includes a number of trade publications and conference papers, and can perform author and affiliation searching.
Web of Science
Google Scholar
Access to Google Scholar with Penn-only links to full-text articles. Once authenticated through Penn's proxy, full-text articles to which Penn Libraries subscribe will become available within the Google Scholar search results.