Assignment NO:4 Guidelines

Here is a step by step instruction sheet for assignment 4

1. First do a general search based on your topic. For example if the topic is "Role of ideology in 2007 election in Turkey" do not start with the whole topic. That would be too specific. Do not start with "ideology" or "Turkey", this would be so general that you would not know what to do with the results. Try something like "ideology and elections" or "2007 elections Turkey".
2. A good idea in preparing literature review is to look at what other researchers have done before. So, try to find an article on your topic. For example a general article about "ideology and elections". There are many articles that are called review articles which make a general discussion of the literature. If you find an article like that look at the literature review part of this article. Which articles did the authors use? Most probably they will have used the most important pieces. So you can select your articles for your review based on what others did before you.
3. Another good idea is to start with a look at Wikipedia.org. You should never use wikipedia as a formal referenece but it is a good place to start researching a topic. Just read the wikipedia topic and have a sense of which important articles to find in scholar.google.com.
4. These three steps will give you many possible articles. How are you going to choose which ones to use? Do not start reading the articles. That would be too many. Read the abstracts first. The abstracts are always available. If the abstract is promising, that is, if the articles seems to be about something you can use, just write down the author and the name of the article . You will find these articles later.
5. Select about 15-20 articles (just reading the abstracts). About 10 should be general and about 10 should be about more specific points about your research question.
6. Do not read the articles in whole yet. Just read the introductions. Introductions are just 2 pagas long at most and will definietly give you an idea about whether you can use this article.
7. Of your 20 or so articles, select 5 to 8 most relevant based on their introductions. These 5-8 articles will be used in your literature review.
8. This is what you should do when you read these articles.
• Read the introduction very carefully. Understand what the paper is all about.
• Do not spend too much time on theory, data, data analysis or methods sections. 
• Read the findings/inferences/results sections very carefully.
• If there are explicitly written hypotheses make sure to read them.
9. Once you have read these articles. Order them from more general to more specific. Then here is how you will construct your literature review.
• Start with a general discussion of the topic. Use the most general articles here. 
• Gradually add more specific details about your research question based on your search.
• Make sure that your literature review does not look like disconnected summaries of articles. Construct your review such that you discuss ideas and findings and just give references to papers rather than directly summarizing papers.
• After you discuss the topic add an introduction paragraph on top. You should not start by writing an introduction because you may not know what you will be writing exactly.
• And finish with a conclusion. Conclusion should be about your thoughts on this topic. What is your personal thoughts on this research idea? What do you think will be found if we actually research this field?
• So the lit review will look like:
• 1 Paragraph introduction
• 5-7 Paragraphs article discussions
• 1 paragraph conclusion
10. I am not very interested in how you put citations. Do not try too hard to be academic. Just copy the style of one of the papers you read. Just make sure that you give me a list of Articles you read (Author name, year of publication, title of article, name of the journal). Also copy and paste the abstract of the articles you used at the very end of your paper.