You should use a minimum of 4 peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles to help answer your question (How can psychological principles be applied to improve safety and efficiency in logistics operations within the frac sand industry?). These can include empirical articles and review articles (i.e., narrative reviews or meta-analyses). Read the abstract of each article first, to make sure it is appropriate and relevant to your research question. If it is, read the introduction and discussion sections next, to get a sense of the overall paper, its context, and its findings. Then, go back and read the Method and Results sections to fill in the details. Make sure that this article is truly relevant to your research question and will help you to answer your chosen question. Save PDF copies of all the articles you plan to use in your paper. If you would like to use a source other than a peer-reviewed scholarly journal article in your report, you may do so. However, use any such sources judiciously and strategically. These sources should be in addition to your four peer-reviewed journal articles. When you have located at least four solid peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, take some time to write a brief, succinct summary of the critical elements of each article. Be sure to include enough detail about the article’s methods and findings so that a reader who hasn’t read the article themselves can still understand the article. However, you do not likely need to get into the nitty gritty details like p-values, unless there is something noteworthy about a particular value that you want to highlight (otherwise, you can just focus on the substantive conclusion–a finding was, or was not, significant, for example). Also take some time to think about the strengths and limitations/weaknesses of each article. What did this article/study do that was strong and made an important or unique contribution to your understanding of the research question/topic? How does it help you answer your supervisor’s question? And what do you need to keep in mind when interpreting the study or its findings? Are there limitations, qualifiers or conditionals that impact the findings? Consider the issues regarding external, statistical, construct, and internal validity to identify any major weaknesses or limits to the conclusions that can be drawn from each study/article. In essence, you want to identify what you can, and what you can’t, conclude from each article you read. Now that you’ve considered each article in isolation, based on its own findings, and based on its own merits, it’s time to think about how the articles work together to help you answer your research question. There is no such thing as a perfect study that answers everything about a research topic ideally. Instead, we bring together the findings from multiple studies to draw conclusions about a particular topic or area of research. Thinking about the strengths and limitations of each article, do your sources, taken together, help you to reach any conclusions more confidently about your research question? Are there findings that multiple articles corroborate or converge upon? Or do your articles diverge and come to different conclusions on important points? If so, what might account for the observed differences in those articles–do they use different methods? Different samples? Think about your articles. What do these four (or more) articles tell you about your topic, when taken together, that perhaps no article in isolation can tell you? Now that you’ve done all of that thinking and analysis, you’re ready to start crafting your report. Think about the story you’re telling about the research question and what you’ve found. A common organizational structure for this type of report is to start by articulating the research question you were charged with answering and outlining the problem and its scope. Then, some people will use a “BLUF” approach (bottom-line-up-front), where they provide the conclusion or answer next, with the remainder of the report filling in the details of the process by which the question was researched, and the conclusion was drawn. Others will take more of a story-telling approach, with a beginning (state question), middle (process and findings), and end (conclusion from the research conducted). There isn’t one “right” way to approach the organization. However, whatever organizational structure you choose, you should take steps to ensure that the structure is clear and transparent to your reader. Consider using section headings and other guideposts to help communicate the organizational structure to your readers and guide them through how to engage with and process your report. This literature report will not take the form of a traditional student paper. If you were writing a professional research-based report in the workplace, you would not submit a term paper to your supervisor. You would submit your findings in the form of a memo, a report, or some similar professional writing format. Given that this project is mimicking the type of professional research you might conduct in the workplace, so will the format of your final product. Accordingly, you have significant latitude in terms of the format of your literature review product; the format should make sense in the context of this project and should be appropriate to the intended purpose and audience.
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