8.1 Overview

Your paper should include the level of detail you believe necessary to introduce the literature on your topic. Literature reviews should synthesize articles, not summarize them. Look at the way the articles you find handle this task, and model your papers on their approaches.

As for the rest of your paper, introductions and conclusions should be no more than 2-3 paragraphs in length. The data and methods section should provide clear, concise descriptions of the analytic process you used to gather data and perform your analyses. You should provide links to your StoryMap and your GitHub repository, and discuss how these contribute to the reproducibility and accessibility of your work in a paragraph in the data and methods section as well. The results and discussions sections should economically summarize your findings and the importance you attach to them.

I strongly recommend checking out Dr. Jessica Calarco’s guide for writing academic papers. It is aimed at qualitative work, but its tips on abstracts, introductions, and discussion/conclusion sections.

I have provided a sample manuscript (that is much longer than your assigned paper) to give you a sense of the formatting required for this assignment. It is available on Canvas.