Your literature review should rely strictly on scholarly material to include government publications and peer reviewed journal articles as well as scholarly texts. APA parenthetical citations will be used with a reference list. Your literature review should be 15 pp. Please see the lesson module for Weeks 4, 5, and 6 for examples of student and scholarly literature reviews.
This lit review you are writing now is very different from what you did in your proposal. The one in your proposal was just general information on your topic. The lit review you are working on now sets the foundation for your entire study. You should plan on at least 10-15 pages for your lit review!
Your lit review is background on your topic – not what you will be analyzing. The single greatest mistake students make is the content of their lit review! One of the samples attached is my lit review. You will note that it covers all the background the reader needs to understand what comes next – but my two case subjects are not mentioned anywhere! Here is another example – let’s say you want to do a policy review to determine if DACA is working effectively in relation to immigration reform or if it is contributing to the influx of undocumented crossing the border. I would expect the sections in your lit review to be: The Border (you tell me all about the border – length, how you cross, facts on crossing); Immigration (how folks obtain visas and become citizens; statistics on immigration); The Role of Government (DHS, Local, etc); and any other relevant topics. I would not expect you to tell me all about DACA – that would go in the discussion and analysis chapter.
You must use scholarly sources ONLY! And, 80% of them should be peer-reviewed!
If you think you have enough in-text citations, you don’t. Add more. This is the second mistake students make – they never have enough in-text citations. Let me be clear –any concept, idea, fact or example you use directly, through paraphrasing or inference MUST have a citation. It is common for every sentence to have a citation!
You are teaching the reader – not just summarizing the article. The best lit reviews are organized by topic – not article. And remember, you can talk about how it applies to your study, but do not pass judgement. You can identify topics that the article did not cover or compare it to another.
Use subheaders in your lit review. Look at the lit review samples and see how the content is organized.
Leave your personal opinion out of the lit review. The only place where you share your thoughts is in the analysis, conclusions or recommendations!
A best practice is to outline your lit review before you start writing. Trust me – I am one of the folks who can’t stand outlining my work – but someone shared this tip with me and it worked. I shared with my thesis advisor before I got too far into the writing and she was able to give feedback. It meant that I had only minor revisions to do in my lit review after I turned it in! I am happy to look at your outline – but I suggest you send to me no later than May 4 so you don’t get too far along and still have some time to adjust.
You are using APA 7! This is important, because Purdue OWL is still using a different version as of the day I am writing this note. Use the attached information. You need to immediately get a handle on APA – or it will delay everything you are doing! You must have proper APA or your thesis will not be accepted! I also want to remind you – do not use any bibliography tool in Word or other programs. They will not be compliant with APA 7! NOTE: the attached examples were written BEFORE we switched to APA 7 – but they do provide great examples for content and the expectation for in-text citations.
Answer preview
In the 1980s, extremist groups like Ku Klux Klan rose against the US government. During the crackdown, the group founded the ideology of individuals as a critical tool to rise against the government (Dickson, 2015, pg 5). The leaderless guerrilla warfare and individual terrorism rose in the 1990s, even among members of AL Qaeda. Bakker and DeGraaf (2014) explain the word ”lone wolf terrorism’’ became popular by Tom Metzger and Alex Curtis in the 1990s. They incited radicals to plot attacks as individuals to evade being arrested (Bakker and DeGraaf, 2014, pg 46). Therefore, the term lone wolf rebel is by no means an unusual strategy but an ancient approach that has resurfaced source (Baker & DeGraaf, 2014 pg 47; Nesser, 2012
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