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SPT/GST 335 (Campus) Gender & Sport

This guide is a companion to the campus course SPT/GST 335 Gender & Sport (Professor Beth Sheehan).

What is a Literature Review & How to Write one?

What is a "Literature Review?"

A literature review is a synthesis (summary and analysis) of published information about a particular topic or issue. Unlike an annotated bibliography, a literature review is NOT a list of sources, but rather a mini-essay organized into paragraphs about specific issues or themes within a broader research focus. Each paragraph is a discussion of a particular theme using discoveries and findings from different sources/studies. 

What is a Literature Review?

From VCU Libraries, Write a Literature Review (May 24, 2023)

Gender & Sport Project

For this project you will research various aspects of professional women's sports, with a focus on the WNBA (unless you choose another professional women's sport). There will be several factors to consider from the outset that you may have gleaned from your search using the AI tools we learned about in our library session. You will likely discover more as you begin to research and read about the topic. As you locate information to answer your large research question, you will continue to ask further, more detailed questions. These will guide your research for your literature review.

Organizing Your Sources

There are a variety of ways to organize and keep track of your sources. Remember to always download the full text when you find an article online or in a database. Below are two documents: One that includes two different matrices for organizing your sources, and a second one that combines the other two matrices into one. Key information to record about each source includes:

  • Citation information (Title, Author, Date, Publication, URL, etc.)
  • Research question of the article/source
  • Methodology and results (If a research study)
  • Brief summary of main points/conclusions
  • Strengths & limitations - what is it missing
  • Connections to other studies/articles
  • Relationship to your research

How to Write a Literature Review

For your Gender & Sport project you will be writing a social science literature review, a summary and analysis of the existing research on your topic as a lead-up to your original research.

Your goal is to summarize and analyze what is already known about recreational sport participation (specifically club sports, intramurals, fitness programming, or independent recreational activity) by traditional college aged students, particularly in relation to gender, across the available research. Before you conduct your own original research (focus groups on SNHU students) you will want to be familiar with the key issues within your topic of study, so you will know which questions to ask, and how to frame your discoveries. 

Literature reviews are essentially essays with three main parts, like any research paper:

  • Introduction: Gives a quick idea of the topic of the literature review or research question.
  • Body: Contains your discussion of sources and is organized either chronologically (Ex: evolution of intramural sports at colleges), thematically (Ex: Recreational sport participation by: Type of activity; Cost; Time commitment; and Past involvement), or methodologically (Ex: Quantitative studies such as surveys; Qualitative studies such as focus groups and interviews).
  • Conclusions/Recommendations: Discuss what you have learned from reviewing the existing literature so far. What further study is needed? How will your research fit into the existing research? What does it replicate? Where does it add to the conversation?

Below are resources that describe how to write a literature review:

Sample Literature Reviews

In many college level research papers, the literature review may be beneath a section with a heading like: "Introduction" or "History" or "Background Information" or some other heading. Because there are many meanings to the phrase "Literature Review" it can be unclear. In the research papers below, you will see examples of literature reviews prior to the "Methodology" section.

Read the "Introduction" sections of each of these papers written by college students: