Creating Your Literature Review - Research Strategies

Research is infinite—but your literature review is not. How do you know what sources to review and how to access those sources? Come to this workshop to learn research strategies that will help you narrow your research topic, cover the essentials of that topic, organize your bibliography and set parameters that will result in a comprehensive and concise literature review.

Bring a laptop (or use one of the laptops available at the Libraries), a topic for your literature review, and an idea about relevant databases and/or journals that you can search in for your topic. A librarian will be joining the workshop to help with anyone unsure of which databases they might want to use for a topic search.

Speaker Biography:

Andrew Smolski is a doctoral candidate in sociology. For more than 5 years, Andrew has taught lower-level and upper-level undergraduate courses. For the last year, he has worked on literature review workshops with graduate students as part of the Peer Scholars Program. His research focuses on agri-food systems and political economy, with an emphasis on Latin America and the United States. He collaborates with scholars from Animal Sciences, Crop Sciences, and Agriculture and Human Sciences, building interdisciplinary projects. He has published in Capital & Class, Agriculture, and Development in Practice. As coordinating editor of Latin American Perspectives, a generalist Latin American Studies peer-reviewed journal, he reviews and edits manuscripts in English, Spanish and Portuguese from a global network of scholars.