Congratulations on choosing to write a senior thesis! This guide brings together resources and information to help you as you work though the thesis research and writing process.
Handbooks are a stock-in-trade for academic researchers. Typically, they're edited volumes, with chapters written by authorities -- or recognized experts, and they synthesize current "consensus" thinking around a particular topic, the most widely accepted perspectives on a topic They usually contain extensive bibliographies which you can mine as well.
Literature reviews are essays that help you easily understand—and contextualize—the principal contributions that have been made in your field. They not only track trends over time in the scholarly discussions of a topic, but also synthesize and connect related work. They cite the trailblazers and sometimes the outliers, and they even root out errors of fact or concept. Typically, they include a final section that identifies remaining questions or future directions research might take.
Among the databases for finding literature reviews, we recommend you start with: