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Doing a Literature Review in Sociology

Advice from a sociologist and a librarian about how to do a literature review.

Organizing Your Personal Library

As Wendy said, the search strategies are the same at this stage, but hopefully, not quite as time-consuming as earlier stages. You should only need to do a few searches to follow up on on what’s most relevant.

What’s arguably more important at this stage is organizing your personal library and making sure it’s ready for your drafting process.This is why citation management tools like Zotero and EndNote are so important. You don’t want to create all your references at the end. Ideally, you build your library as you go. When you sit down to write, you can quickly and easily access your references to create citations.

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