literature review on newspaper reading

• Library Catalogue

Media literature review guide: How to conduct a literature review of news sources

On this page, first steps: questions to ask, key things to keep in mind, sources by media type, online news, news websites, archival websites, library subscription news sources, archived broadcast/tv news, original audio-visual broadcasts, broadcast news transcripts, searching news sources methodically, how to do news content analysis, saving, exporting, and citing news from websites/databases, additional research help, related sfu resource guides.

Use this guide if you are conducting a literature review of news sources on a certain topic, and need help locating a sample of news sources for your analysis.  For example:

• BC newspaper articles covering RCMP sexual harassment claims over the past ten years
• Newspaper, online news website and TV news stories reporting on the marijuana 4/20 event in 2007 and later in 2017.

Ask yourself:

• Geography: Are there any geographic parameters to your news search (e.g., specific city or cities, provinces or countries of news sources)?
• Time frame: Are you searching within a specific time range, or at least before or after a particular day?
• News format: What news media types are you interested in (online news content, newspapers, etc.)?

A few things key things to keep in mind:

• Older newspaper content (1990s and earlier) may not be digitized yet.  A common exception is the digitization of much older newspaper content, such as the Globe and Mail Canada , which provides coverage from 1844. There is often a large digitization gap between the historical content and more recent news content. Alternative access may be available through SFU Library's microfilm collection.
• There are both free and library subscription news archives available. There is often overlapping coverage between the free and subscription sources.
• SFU library subscribes to several online news sources, also known as "subscription news sources", which may provide more reliable and comprehensive archival content.

Examples: CBC , Vancouver Sun , The Wall Street Journal

You can go directly to a commercial news website and search the site for its news archives.

A few things to note about general news websites:

• Archival content is limited and not comprehensive
• Extent of archival coverage is usually unknown/undocumented
• Links to older news stories may come and go, and older versions may have been edited
• Links may be unstable
• Bonus: Associated images are typically archived along with the article

Example: The Internet Archive

You may be able to obtain archival content through third party websites, which independently and intermittently scrape commercial web content for archiving.

Notes on archival websites:

• The Internet Archive scrapes a vast amount of web content for archiving (about 286 billion + web pages). Paste the newspaper's URL (e.g., http://vancouversun.com/) into the search bar to see which news web pages have been archived.
• Note that the Internet Archive only archives a sample of pages from news websites, and therefore does not provide complete historical coverage of a news source.
• View the  News & Public Affairs section of the Internet Archives for new collections by topic (e.g., "The Iraq War Collection"). Collections are primarily American.

Examples: Canadian Newsstream , CBCA , Factiva

SFU Library subscribes to a number of news databases which systematically archive news sources from both traditional print newspapers, and online and other media news sources. 

Notes on subscription news sources:

• Offers a much more comprehensive searching of backfiles; extent of historical coverage explicitly outlined
• Can search multiple news sources at once by various filters, for instance, all Canadian newspapers
• Smaller Canadian newspapers can be included in your search (e.g., Burnaby Now)
• Many of the articles found in these specialized databases will also show up in a general library catalogue search. However, going to the directly to the subscription database allows for much more targeted searching
• Some of these databases also archive scholarly journals, so be sure to set your search limiters so that newspapers are in your results
• Note: Original images as published in situ may be available in newspaper microform
• Note that you may find multiple versions of one article found across different news sources. This relates to how press releases are distributed, as well as how media conglomerations share and modify content.
• Some of these databases are more complicated to use , but offer a more powerful and robust search in exchange for your efforts

Examples: CTV National News, The National with Peter Mansbridge, PBS Newshour

• It is very challenging to find older, archived broadcast/TV news, as publicly available archival sources are limited.
• Some news archives focus on news originally broadcast through cable television , while others aim to capture news stories broadcast on the internet (" born digital ").
• Television companies may have their own private archives of news footage, not readily available to the public.
• SFU Library does not currently have a subscription to any broadcast news archives.

Some resources:

The  Internet Archive's TV News archive includes extensive archived video material, mostly from the US. Advanced search by news program and network is available. Keyword searching searches closed captions. Coverage begins around 2009.

CBC Archives incorporates news, images, and audio files from across Canada in its extensive archives. Select items are exhibited on a changing basis. Coverage may include news stories, such as 1993: World Trade Centre Bombed . Users can also explore the  CBC Archives Sales  website for items to purchase.

Vanderbilt News Archive is a searchable, private database of broadcast news, but is unfortunately not free nor available through SFU library. Materials may be loaned, arriving through the mail in a hardcopy format.

YouTube It's possible a particular news broadcast was uploaded to YouTube.

Transcripts may be available from prior broadcast news stories. These are a possible alternative to finding the original broadcast in audio-visual format.

The following SFU databases contain some transcripts.

Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database Under "Document type", select "transcript". Run a search and then narrow by source and add keywords. Extensive transcripts are available for The National (CBC television), Canada AM (CTV television), and others.

Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text

Canadian Newsstream Under "Document type", select "transcript". Run a search and then narrow by source and add keywords. Extensive transcripts are available for The National (CBC television), Canada AM (CTV television), and others.

​Nexis Uni Includes transcripts from about 123 (mostly American) news broadcasts such as ABC, BBC, NPR, Fox News Network, and CNN.

Factiva (see image below for search instructions) An international collection of news broadcast transcripts in a variety of languages.

Finding transcripts in Factiva:

• 1. Expand the option of searching Sources , by clicking on the small arrow next to that word. This will open up a drop-down menu with the option to select source category By Type . Choose this option. 2. Transcripts will appear as an option. Expand this category to see the option of Transcripts: Broadcast.

Google News  will find articles related to your topic from a variety of sources.

• The scope of Google's news coverage, while appealingly very broad , is also very unknown . This significantly limits efforts toward systematic searching.
• Advanced search allows you to search by particular news source or web domain . For instance, you can run a search for Vancouver Sun or site:vancouversun.com for the web site
• News trends can be found under the "Top Stories" section. 

It's effective to plan your search before you tackle the databases and to track the databases you search, as well as the terms that you use. Follow these steps for effective research;

Write down a sentence describing the topic of your search

​ Compared to corporate media, alternative media offers vastly different frames on the impact climate change has on jobs within the petroleum industry.

Identify the key concepts in your topic

Compared to corporate media, alternative media offers vastly different frames on the impact climate change has on jobs within the petroleum industry .

Brainstorm synonyms or related terms for these key concepts

• You may need to do some background reading to identify pertinent terminology.
• Group the terms that relate to one of your key concepts. Your key concepts can be as specific as corporate names or as broad as the industry. Keep adding or deleting key concepts as you search.

Track research: search terms, search expressions, databases

Track the terms that you use to search, using an Excel spreadsheet or other record, grouping them by concept, noting definitions. As you find literature, you will add to this list of terms.

Select an appropriate database for your search

• Are you researching coverage in "mainstream" sources? Or are you looking for coverage from an "alternative" perspective?
• What is the scope of the specific news database? Does it provide geographical and chronological coverage suitable for your search? Do all the news source have to be Canadian? If YES, you might consider whether you should limit at the outset or when evaluating your results.
• Many databases enable you to include a publication date range, in order to focus your search on a specific time period.

Review your search results

• Analyze your results in order to assess and modify your search terms or search statement.
• You can use the database limiters to scope your results according to subject, publication, etc. For example, focus on the news before and after a pivotal event, by time period, by figuring out the correct terminology, and so on.

Consider whether you need to focus your search, by date, by publication, or other parameters

• TIP: If you are receiving too many off-topic results, try searching for your keywords in just the article title field.
• Similarly, consider whether your research would be improved by concentrating on particular types of news stories, such as editorials, opinion, columns, sports, etc.

Capture your results, either by emailing them to yourself or saving to a file

You will need to support your nomination with documentation of your research.

And, of course, watch out for signs of fake news.

• The content analysis guidebook
• Newswatcher's guide to content analysis
• Sage Research Methods Online. A vast research portal on research methodology. 

There are a number of free citation management software and tools available for students through SFU. Use one of the citation managers  to export and save articles. When you are looking at articles found through the SFU database, there will be options to "save" the article through citation managers such as Mendeley or Zotero.

Depending on which citation style you are using, the SFU citation & style guides explain how to cite news articles and other document types.

Ask a Librarian

See News resources: Finding newspaper articles and newspapers  to help find newspaper articles and newspapers.

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• Knowledge Base

Methodology

• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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See an example

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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McCombes, S. (2023, September 11). How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved August 12, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/

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