You should:
• Attempt to answer a specific question (in this case, how does light pollution affect the
behavior of birds?).
• Provide a brief introduction to the topic of the literature review, to place it in context.
• Include a methodology/protocol (e.g. details of how you selected studies for inclusion in the
review).
• Include tables as appropriate (i.e. to help you summaries/synthesis the results of different
studies).
• Use 10-20 research papers in your review.
• Synthesis the main results/findings of the research papers that you included in your review,
to identify patterns and direction in the findings of individual studies, and to integrate the
results of those studies to draw some overall conclusions (in the context of the specific
question(s) that you were attempting to answer with your review). This should be a narrative
synthesis (with some tabulation of results to aid understanding). A meta-analytical synthesis
is not required. Refer to the Lectures on Literature Reviews if you need a refresher on
synthesising the literature. Note that the synthesis of the individual research papers is the
major part of this assignment (refer to the marking scheme provided) and it should therefore
make up the majority of the text of your submission.
Indicative word count: 2000, not including Tables and Bibliography
Submission: The submission deadline is Friday 25th August 2023. Please submit your work by
uploading it to Moodle.
Note: All submissions will be checked for plagiarism using plagiarism detection software. Plagiarism
is a very serious offence, and evidence of copying/plagiarism may result in a mark of zero being
awarded with no chance to resubmit, will be referred to the Head of Department, and may be
referred to the Disciplinary Committee.

Assignment 2: General Advice
• You should have a definite question that you are planning to address in your Literature Review, and it
should be clear what that question is and why you are addressing it (i.e. make sure you provide context
for your question at the start of the Literature Review by providing some relevant background information
about the topic).
• Be as clear as possible in your writing. Ask yourself if someone unfamiliar with the topic would understand
the points that you are trying to make. If the answer is no, then edit your text to make it clearer (and more
logically structured) and/or to provide more details (e.g. examples to illustrate your statements, additional
sentences to clearly link paragraphs together).
• You also need to balance being comprehensive enough to fully explain your thoughts/ideas with being
concise enough to stay within the word limit. I will not be concerned if you are 200-300 words above or
below the word limit. However, if you are more than 300 words above the word limit then you need to
edit what you have written so that you are expressing your ideas/thoughts more concisely, and if you
are more than 300 words below the word limit you need to consider whether you have explained things
fully/clearly enough in all cases (but note that quality is more important than quantity, so don’t add
superfluous words/sentences to your document just to increase your word count).
• Provide a clear methodology/protocol, which should provide clear details about how studies were
selected for inclusion in the review, as well as your search strategy (similar to what you did for Assignment
1, but you are now designing a protocol for your own literature review, and then implementing it). Your
protocol should be clear and explicit enough so that I could carry out your search and selection in the same
way.
• Make sure that you use some Tables to help you summaries the most relevant results/patterns from the
papers that you included in your review. You should refer to these Tables in the text of the document (i.e.
you should use them to help you summaries/highlight some results/patterns in the papers that you have
included in your review).
• Make sure that you write everything in your own words. If you are not 100% clear on what plagiarism is
then consult the documents that I uploaded to Moodle, complete the short Plagiarism Quiz that I provided
a link to on Moodle, and then check the answers to the quiz (also uploaded to Moodle).
• Cite all of the studies that you use in the Literature Review and then include full references in a
Bibliography section at the end of the document (following standard scientific conventions – see the
relevant information guide from the Library if you are not sure how to do this, or follow the format used
in any of the papers that you have read)