Flowers for Sarah

I am a graduating senior this year, I just had my last undergraduate class this morning! But I wanted to share how to do a proper literature review and article index. 

I do all my work on google drive just because it’s easier for me. Beware though because when you save it as an excel sheet, the boxes all shrink and it’s so difficult to read. So if your professor will work with google sheets, then I’d go for it. Otherwise maybe just continuously save on your excel sheets. 

First off, you’ll want to organize the references by alphabetical order of the last name of the FIRST author listed. APA does this weird thing where the researcher of most importance is listed first. 

You’ll want several boxes; APA citation, title of article, first author, year published, abstract, keywords, method of study, participants, and the summary. 

Now the best way to go about finding articles is using relevant keywords through you library’s database. However, once you find your first relevant article, what you can do is start looking at the articles THEY cited and so on. 

You’ll usually want to start in a specific database, my professor always tells me to focus in PsycInfo. I only use Google Scholar to supplement my search.