PSY 3430: Psychopharmacology

The purpose of your review paper is to review the recent progress in a particular topic related to psychopharmacology. Overall, your review should summarize what is currently known about your topic by discussing the findings of recent research articles.

Your review will primarily include primary source research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Keep reading to learn how to locate your articles, find tips for reading articles effectively, and find tools for formatting your citations.

Literature reviews are often included in the intro section of research articles, but they can also be published as full-length, stand-alone articles. Systematic reviews are another type of full-length article that compiles published literature on a topic and compares and analyzes the results from the included studies. Looking at published literature reviews or systematic reviews can help you learn how to organize this type of work, and they can also be a gold mine of potential articles you could include in your own paper! However, you cannot include literature review articles as an actual source in your paper.

The following are examples of full-length literature review articles. You can look for more in the library databases by adding AND "literature review" or AND "systematic review" after your search terms related to your topic. For example: anxiety AND psychopharmacology AND "literature review"

• Start a document for your paper where you'll keep track of your sources. Use that document to save APA citations for the sources and take notes on the main ideas from each source. If you take notes as you're reading, that will help you remember which source various concepts came from and make citing your sources much easier when you start writing the actual paper.
• When reading your articles, it's OK to skim rather than read each article from beginning to end! Skimming is encouraged and is a useful skill when choosing articles.
  • Read the Abstracts, Introductions, Discussions, and Conclusions, then circle back and skim the Methods and Results. Highlight and take notes on important findings, main ideas and arguments, and references to previous studies and theories.
• Create an outline that organizes your sources into an order (topical, chronological, etc.) for you to follow in your review.
• Write paragraphs that summarize the findings found in the literature. Each paragraph should address one major idea and may cite more than one of your sources. Similar sources can be summarized together in statements like, "Most researchers agree that..." or "Current trends in the literature are..."
• Use direct quotations sparingly—you should be summarizing and paraphrasing in your own words as much as possible. Remember to cite your sources using in-text citations when you refer to an idea from a specific source, whether you're paraphrasing or using a direct quotation.
• At the end of your paper, include a reference list with APA citations for all of your sources, in alphabetical order. All of the sources in the references list should be cited in your paper, and all of the sources you quoted, paraphrased, or mentioned in your paper should be included in the references list. See the APA Citations page for more details.
• The UVU Writing Center is a great resource for helping you structure your paper or for help with grammar and citations questions.

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