Many students think I write article like these because I did not have a good advisor. However, I want you to know that I had a wonderful advisor. He was a tenured professor and well respected in my academic department. He wasn’t my best friend; my friend Elsie had fulfilled that role a long time ago. He was intelligent, well respected in the field, and had the reputation of being an advocate for his student advisees. I chose him because he was reliable and a great advocate for me. While some faculty members might be able to serve as mentors, you need an advisor who has power and respect in the department.
Selecting an advisor requires you to make an honest assessment of your working style. What type of working environment maximizes your true potential? Do you need someone to micro-manage every aspect of your thesis or dissertation project? Do you flourish when you are given a task and allowed to work at your own pace? Do you excel when you are allowed to figure things out by yourself? Are you willing to ask for help when you need it? To successfully complete your thesis or dissertation, you need an advisor who complements your working style.
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A Literature Review is a study of the original and primary scholarship on a particular topic. It does not study the topic itself, just the research that has been conducted on that topic. The aim of a Literature Review is to review, analysis and evaluate these sources to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and to identify a gap in the current literature that the thesis aims to fill. The Literature Review provides the background to and justification for the research.
A review of the relevant literature on a particular topic is a vital component of all research degrees. There are many reasons why a review of the current literature should be conducted before beginning a research project. These include:
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With increasing frequency, colleges and universities are making use of Web-based plagiarism checking services to scan papers for stolen material. And the consequences can be dire: at one end of the spectrum, a failing grade for the assignment; at the other end, dismissal from an academic program. If you are intentionally plagiarizing in your paper, thesis, or dissertation, this should give you pause. But if you are not intentionally plagiarizing, there could still be reason for concern. Plagiarism checking software catches an ever-growing amount of appropriated material–and sometimes the student has not even meant to do anything wrong! In what follows, I’d like to offer some simple tips for avoiding plagiarism of the unintentional variety.
1. Know what constitutes plagiarism. Simply put, plagiarism is the use of the words or ideas of another person without giving credit to the person from whom they are borrowed. Right off the bat, this tells us something important: you can’t simply change a few words of a borrowed text (so that the passage is no longer a direct quotation) and think that you are out of danger. Unless the material is “common knowledge,” a citation is needed for any material you borrow–whether it is a direction quotation, a paraphrase, or even just an idea.
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