There are many preliminary questions you can ask youself and your team before you set out looking for sources. This prework can help the process run more smoothly.
Research Question
Scope of the Literature Review? It depends.
Throw out a wide net
While the specific resource types can vary depending upon your particular area of focus and project mandate, most capstone projects rely on a number of different source types.
Books: Great for getting background information, understanding the main themes and sub-groups of study for a particular policy area as well as becoming acquainted with important researchers in the field and specialized nomenclature that will assist in your more refined search later. Find out more about searching for books in our guide to searching the NYU catalog.
Tip: Many of the more current books on policy and related social sciences are ebooks. These offer excellent in-book search capabilities to quickly vet the resource for relevance, as well as allow you to pinpoint the chapters that are of use to you.
Articles: Academic articles tend to cover very specific topics. Due to this focus, articles are a good second source type once you have gained some more general, background knowledge. For Wagner capstone literature reviews, very often there are additional, non-academic articles that can contribute to an understanding of current policy issues and practices. For this reason, the resources suggested on the Capstone page of this guide vary from large, multi-discipline databases with sources from academic journals as well as other periodicals, to very focused, policy databases that draw from think tanks, NGOs and government agencies.