CS – Research Literature Review

 
Assessment Instructions
Note: You must complete Assessment 1 before you can complete the other assessments in the course.
If you have not yet done so, read the Integrated Action Learning Project description linked in the Resources under the Required Resources heading.
A literature review allows your recommendations to be informed by the experience of others. To complete a literature review for your integrated action learning project, you will devote significant time to researching your IT issue, beginning with sources that have addressed problems similar to those in your project.
Developing a literature review outline means that you will need to go through the work of finding, reviewing, and organizing resources. However, you will not have to go through the additional work of writing them into a formal research section of your paper.
Follow these steps to create a literature review:

Gather a solid body of research in the area of the IT problems you have identified for your final project. You may start with broad secondary sources such as textbooks, Google Scholar, or Information Please. Your goal, though, is to harvest a number of potentially useful sources that are called primary sources. These are articles in which the data is actually part of a project or case study being covered. This data is considered more valuable and reliable because it is first-hand data. It is recommended that you set aside a block of two to three hours to gather as many potential articles as you can. Do not read or review them at this time—just gather as many as you can. You should have at least ten resources for your literature review.
Read and process the articles you gathered, looking for common themes or solutions to the problems you are working on. These themes will become the structure for your literature review outline.
Write an APA-style citation for each resource you plan to use in your literature review. Follow the citation with a brief two- or three-sentence description of the resource.
Write a literature review outline. Once you have an idea of the organization of themes or topics of the articles in your research area, organize those themes in a way that seems meaningful as the main points in the outline. Create a header for each theme, and place the appropriate resource citation(s) with its description under it as a sub-point to the relevant theme. You can use sub-themes if needed.

This literature review or annotated bibliography will become part of your final project proposal. In the literature review section of your proposal, you will be expected to include at least ten sources. By that point in your research, you will likely replace some of the resources in your literature review as you become more familiar with the material.
Note: Textbooks and Wikipedia are not appropriate sources to refer to in your review. Use other respected resources.