Literature Review Assignment
POLS 270 Methods of Political Inquiry

Chapter 3 of the course textbook provides you with a comprehensive discussion of how to identify and evaluate the quality of sources, compile them into a bibliography, and use this bibliography as a basis for a literature review. Examples of literature reviews are provided in your text and also in just about any peer-reviewed journal article. We also discussed and practiced these skills in class during the first couple of weeks of the course. Chapter 3 contains far more information than I can possibly incorporate into this assignment summary, so my first piece of advice is to re-read this chapter to help guide you in preparing your literature review for this class.

Nevertheless, I also want to highlight a few critically important pieces of information that you should be sure to consider as you prepare your literature review for this particular class. First, your literature review should be approximately 6-8 pages long (not including title page, bibliography, appendices, and/or graphs/charts). It should be computer-generated, double- spaced, with 1” margins all around and in 12 point Times New Roman font. You should use the American Political Science Association (APSA) in-text citation format (http://www.apsanet.org/media/PDFs/Publications/ APSAStyleManual2006.pdf) (a pdf of this document is located on the course Moodle page). You should be sure to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation in crafting these papers. The literature review will be assigned a grade between 0 and 100 and will be graded on the quality of the research and the accuracy of your citations (35 points), the quality and clarity of your analysis of your sources (35 points), and the quality of the organization, grammar, spelling, and punctuation (30 points). Late papers will be assessed a 5 point penalty for each day it is late.

In general, your literature review should be composed almost exclusively of scholarly books and journal articles that focus on your topic. You may cite one or two recent newspaper or newsmagazine articles to lend support as to why your topic is important and/or of interest, but the majority of your sources should include peer-reviewed articles and scholarly books. You should be sure to order any books that you will need through interlibrary loan now so that they are available to you in time to complete this assignment. At this point in the semester, your literature review should include a minimum of eight sources and must include one or two scholarly books, one or two newspaper/newsmagazine articles, with the remainder being peer-reviewed journal articles.
The literature review in this class should be inspired by the dataset that you have chosen to utilize for the class quantitative assignment. This means that you need to be familiar with the content of your dataset. The first step in familiarizing yourself with your dataset is to read the codebook and descriptions of the dataset. You should be thinking about potential dependent and independent variables that you are interested in analyzing in your dataset.
As emphasized in Chapter 3, the best way to organize your literature review is by schools of thought (not simply a summary of each source in chronological order). For example, if you are doing research on the issue of school choice, you might organize your review of the literature into articles that: 1) support and/or oppose school choice, 2) focus on student outcomes, parental satisfaction, and teacher performance, or 3) focus on different aspects of public education as a market failure such as information asymmetry, positive externalities, and public goods. In any case, your literature review should utilize an organizational structure that is clear to the reader and provides insight into the literature that you read. In the end, your literature review should provide an overview of the literature you have read in preparation to do your research paper for this course and should develop a conclusion (or conclusions) about that literature. It also would be appropriate for you to begin considering the types of research questions you have thought of as you read and evaluate the literature for this assignment.