Services for Graduate Students : Writing your Thesis!

Reasons for searching the literature: 

1. to identify work already done or in progress that is relevant to your work;

2. to help to prevent you from duplicating what has already been done;

3. to avoid some of the pitfalls and errors of previous research;

4. to help you design the methodology for your project by identifying the key issues and data collection techniques best suited to your topic;

5. to enable you to find gaps in existing research, thereby giving you a unique topic.

(Hart, Chris. 2001. Doing a literature search:a comprehensive guide for the social sciences. London:Sage)

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Librarians are experts at finding and managing information. We can help you choose a topic, find resources, evaluate those resources, and much more!