Writing a Thesis

Part Three: Reading and Research

The literature review chapter of your thesis (probably Chapter Two) will be one of the most important. It is used to prove that you actually did some research into your topic, and that you know enough to actually write a thesis — be it experimental, evaluative, or anything in between. Keep in mind that every department will have a different method for conducting a literature review, and that some departments may not even require one (such as Creative Writing).

When you conduct a literature review, you need to make sure that the texts you cite from are credible. The best texts are articles from scholarly journals in your field. The next-best are books. Everything else is a distant third.

1. Go to the UCF Library

If you already know how to do research, you may be able to skip this step. But if you've never done research in WebLUIS, the library will teach you how to navigate the WebLUIS system and find material.

2. Go to any UCF Computer Lab

What you will quickly learn is that most material you gather will be many, many pages in length. The library charges per page when you print, but the computer labs do it for free, and much faster as well.

3. Get into WebLUIS

The databases within WebLUIS are specialized to different fields. Here are some examples of WebLUIS databases and what they are good for. Some people do not recommend using the search function on WebLUIS because it returns results from too wide an area of research. Also, it is recommended to select "Full Text" when you can so that you can print the article immediately. When you search for articles, search by relevance first, then by date.

Research Databases

• Academic Search Elite/EBSCOHost has a very wide search of thousands of journals, magazines, and other scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) publications.
• Academic Universe/Lexis-Nexis is good in that it will find newspaper articles and magazine articles, but these articles should not be considered primary sources. As supplemental material, they're not too bad, but they should not comprise the bulk of your citations page.
• ECO (Electronic Collections Online) is restricted to scholarly journals, and through the FirstSearch engine, pulls up articles in PDF format.