If you've written research papers for a composition class, or for a course in history or the social sciences, you have valuable preparation for this project, but literary research papers are distinctive in a number of ways. It helps to think about several different kinds of research papers in order to understand what this project is all about.

Research Reports gather existing information about a work or an author—facts about an author's life, about the performance history of a play, about the publication of a book or poem. Research reports ask a student to gather information from a number of sources and rewrite it for a specific audience and purpose. These kinds of simple reports are rarely required in literature classes.

Literature surveys aim to represent the existing state of knowledge on a given topic. More common in the sciences and social sciences than in the humanities, literature surveys serve an important function of offering a brief but comprehensive view of what the academic community knows about a given topic. Sometimes literature surveys will be assigned as a first step in a longer research project, requiring the student to find out what is known (and perhaps what is not known) about a work or an author before the student sets out to add something new to this body of knowledge. As stand-alone projects, literature surveys are rarely required in literature classes.

Interpretive research essays require a student to set his or her own interpretation of a work in the context of what previous scholars or critics have written about it. This is the most common kind of research paper assignment in college literature classes. These interpretive research essays (or "documented essays") can be of several types:

• Studies of an individual work can focus on historical or cultural backgrounds, or can examine the ways your own interpretation compare and contrast to the interpretations published by previous readers.
• Theoretical approaches can apply a particular form of literary theory—feminism or deconstruction or psychoanalytic criticism, for example—to a text or group of texts.
• Author studies can explore the recurring themes and methods an author uses in a series of works—a collection of poems, a group of short stories, or a number of plays or novels.