Relationship Between Stress and Physical Illness

For your term paper, you will compose a literature review on a topic or question that is relevant to this course and that you find especially interesting. When writing a literature review, your goal is to determine the current state of knowledge about a particular topic by asking, “What do we know and not know about this issue?” Rather than merely presenting a summary of various sources, a literature review should be organized according to subtopics (or main ideas) regarding the larger topic or question you have selected. It is imperative to examine several different sources to determine where the knowledge overlaps and where it falls short. In short, a literature review requires a synthesis of different subtopics to come to a greater understanding of the state of knowledge on a larger issue. It works very much like a jigsaw puzzle. The individual pieces (arguments) must be put together in order to reveal the whole (state of knowledge).

I have provided an outline structure for your consideration:

1. Introduction 
   1. Describe the overall topic and why it is important.
   2. Identify common themes and trends in research questions, methodology, and findings. Your goal here is to give a “big picture” of the literature. You will get into specifics in the body of your paper.
   3. Provide a thesis statement (i.e. “The purpose of this paper is…”)
2. Theme A (a theme is a broad word or phrase that synthesizes a more narrow group of related findings)
   1. Overview of characteristics of the theme (commonalities, differences, nuances)
   2. First piece of evidence from the literature that supports the current theme

(Research question(s), Methods/Participants, related findings/conclusions)

1. 3. Second piece of evidence from the literature that supports the current theme

(Research question(s), Methods/Participants, related findings/conclusions)

1. 4. Third piece of evidence from the literature that supports the current theme

(Research question(s), Methods/Participants, related findings/conclusions)

1. 5. Etc., etc., etc. with other evidence that fit Theme A; studies can be repeated if there are multiple findings that fit under more than one them However, no need to re-write methods/participants in detail (just enough to remind the reader about the study)
2. Theme B - follow same structure as Theme A but with a different theme.
3. Continue with additional themes and same structure (as needed)
4. Conclusion
   1. What are the contributions of this literature to the field? In other words, briefly summarize what we know and what we don’t know based on the literature you have reviewed.
   2. What are the overall collective strengths of this research?
   3. What are the overall collative weaknesses of this research?
   4. What might be missing in the literature? 
   5. What are some next steps for research? The next steps should explicitly address how to “correct” for strengths, weaknesses, and gaps.