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Basic Requirements for Writing Good APA Literature Reviews

APA literature review basics

Writing a research paper or even a whole dissertation, you will definitely have to get busy with developing a literature review section to it. If your paper requires the APA format, you will have to write an APA literature review. What does it presuppose? Is it difficult to develop an APA literature review? Read further to get all the answers.

APA literature review peculiarities

The main peculiarity of the APA literature review is the fact that the APA formatting style can require your literature review to be either a part of a larger work or a separate document containing a title page, contents table, page numbers, and the References page. In any case, the peculiarities of the APA literature review include:

• Use of headings;
• Author-date format for indirect citations;
• Author-date-page number citation format for direct quotes;
• Page numbers usually placed in the upper right corner of the page.

APA literature review requirements

Among other requirements that the American Psychological Association has for the APA literature reviews, such ones should be noticed as the desired use of the Present Perfect Tense while citing an author:

E.g. Jones (2009) has noticed that…

As well, the APA literature review presupposes an in-depth analysis of the presented scholarly works. In other words, the author of the APA literature review should not only enumerate the arguments that a certain scholar has presented, but also show the implications of those arguments for the topic of the whole work. The commitment to follow all the above discussed requirements is effective in creating a professional APA literature review for any purpose.