Literature Survey

Individual Assignment

Now that your team has decided on a project, you are asked to conduct a literature survey pertaining to your team project. A project may involve many aspects of which others have done substantial research. Your task is to choose an area of your interest, read the related literature as much as you can, synthesize what you find, and produce a coherent paper that represents the major ideas in the area.

For example, assume your team project is compiling a database of racial bias incidents for an organization which will allow easy inputs from the users and efficient interface for summarizing and categorizing the incidents by the maintainer. Such a project may involve issues such as database, web programming, user interface, privacy, social justice, legal, among many other possible aspects. You can choose one of these aspects and survey the literature in that particular area.

The intended readers of the paper should be someone who knows the general issues but may lack the detailed knowledge in the specifics, for example, your instructor. After reading your paper, the readers should gain further knowledge in the area. When writing the paper, you should keep the readership in mind so that you will keep the levels of details and connections among various components as appropriate.

While there are different ways of writing a literature survey, you may pick one that you feel comfortable. Here are the links to two useful webpages that should give you some idea.

You are welcome to write in other formats if you have done similar survey before. Regardless, make sure you list what you cited in your paper at the end, following the APA or MLA style.

Choose and follow a style guideline, either APA or MLA.

You should limite the page length to be 3-5 pages, or 1,200 to 1,500 words.

Peer Review

Peer review can benefit the writer as well as the reviewer. While formal peer reviews can be involved, we will simply ask you to find another student to read your draft and provide some feedback. You can revise your paper based on the feedback. The feedback can be minor such as word usage or other gramatical issues, or it can be major such as organization or factual issues. Regardless, peer reviews will imporve the quality of the paper.

How to do it: You can find a peer of your choice and read each other's paper in reciprocal. Ideally this person is your teammamte as the issue you are surveying will likely affect your team project. If we don't have the exact pair due to different number of students in a team, you can do the review in a round-robin fashion, each person will read a paper from a different person.

In your submission, you must include the name of the peer-reviewer.