Psychology

By the end of conducting your literature search and evaluation, you should know why your research question is important (according to data from empirical studies), the variables that have been studied in reference to your larger research questions, what methods have been used to measure those variables, how those variables are connected to each other (mediating, moderating, correlating, extraneous, intervening), what the field of psychology still doesn’t know about your variables and their connections to each other, any limitations of studying these variables, and the strengths and weaknesses of the study designs to date. If you don’t know the answers to these, it is likely that you aren’t done with your literature review and you need a better understanding of the research so far. You may need to look up definitions, deep read your articles again until you fully understand the study, and find any gaps you have in your knowledge of these variables.

Synthesizing Sources in Your Literature Review:

In your research paper, you are moving from summaries of individual research studies to creating a larger story on your research topic. You are writing a narrative with your paper of the research that has already been done and where it should go next (your own research study). In that narrative, you are giving the history of the study of your larger research question, making comparisons between studies, pointing out gaps, and explaining strengths and weaknesses of the studies and their findings. 

One way to synthesize the literature is to break it up into specific variables. For each variable: 

• Define the variable for your audience
• Explain how these variables relate to your other variables
• Report what was found already about these variables
• Talk about how studies contradict or support each other
• Determine what questions still remain in the field about the variable
• Outline the methodologies used to measure this variable. Is one method better than another and why?
• Where does your study come in?

Since many of your studies are looking at the same variables, you can't simply summarize each one individually, you need to look at all of them as a whole to answer these questions.  

Empirical Study Writing Style

Empirical studies are based entirely on research. They are direct and to the point, utilizing research to back up every part of the paper. 

• Your personal experience is valuable and may be the motivation for your study; however, statements in your actual writing need to come from the research you’ve found and not your experience, opinion, or generalized knowledge. Notice how authors do this in the literature review section of the studies you're using. 
• Statements should come from the methods, results, or discussion sections of empirical studies rather than the literature review section, which is based on other studies, or the abstract, which is only a summary. 
• The tone is direct and gets to the point without fluff. Every sentence needs to have a purpose. 
• In research studies, direct quoting is rare. Summarize, paraphrase, synthesize, evaluate, or analyze instead.  
• You do not need to introduce your studies with statements such as "This article" or "This study", simply make your statement that comes from the study and put a citation at the end, just like they do in the literature review sections of the studies you're using. 

Writing Using APA Formatting

Use this APA 7th edition template and check out the APA Guide.