Assignment task:
1. Describe how your colleague's techniques may help you.
2. Offer a helpful technique to your colleague.
Organizing your materials for a literature review is important for several reasons. First, having a research question that clearly defines the topic and intended audience is imperative. Marshall (2010) suggests using a three-stage process to develop an effective literature review: searching, critiquing, and synthesizing. The searching stage is where having organized materials will help with the other two stages in the process. Researchers should take detailed notes while reading and re-reading the articles (Baker, 2016). The purpose of organizing the materials will also allow others to be able to follow or replicate the search processes used and understand how and why the literature was selected (Baker, 2016).