Should I restructure my literature review draft using primary sources?

You should definitely restructure your draft around primary sources, but not by just dropping more historical quotes into your existing paragraphs. The main reason your draft feels disjointed right now is that you are likely using secondary sources as the structural framework while trying to stitch primary evidence into someone else’s narrative. When you let secondary scholars dictate your paragraph topics, your own paper becomes a patchwork of summaries rather than an original synthesis. By shifting primary sources to the center of your analysis, you give your literature review a clear, chronological, or thematic anchor that you control. Secondary sources then naturally fall into place as tools to help you interpret, contextualize, or debate those primary materials, which will immediately improve the logical flow of your writing. A common misconception among students, especially when working in a second language, is that a literature review is just a summary of what experts have published on a topic. In history of science, however, a great literature review shows how past scholars have interpreted original evidence and where those interpretations fall short or disagree. If you simply move quotations around without changing the underlying focus of each paragraph, the prose will inevitably sound choppy because the connective tissue between ideas is missing. For example, imagine you are writing about the reception of early vaccination methods in the eighteenth century. If your paragraph starts with a secondary historian's opinion, then jumps to a brief quote from an 1720s medical pamphlet, and ends with another modern scholar's summary, the reader loses track of who is speaking and why. Instead, start the paragraph by introducing the 1720s pamphlet itself as the primary object of study, explain what it reveals about public fear, and then bring in the modern historians to show how academic opinions on that pamphlet have evolved over time. This structural shift will also resolve your issues with citation consistency and academic style. When you organize by primary evidence, your use of APA 7 becomes much simpler because you establish a clear pattern: you introduce the historical actor or document in the narrative, cite the primary source material, and then weave in the parenthetical citations for the secondary commentators who analyze it. As an ESL student, you might worry that taking the lead with primary sources requires complex vocabulary, but it actually simplifies your writing. It allows you to use straightforward, active verbs to describe what the historical texts show and how modern researchers interpret them. Your exact approach will ultimately depend on whether your professor expects a purely thematic review or a chronological one, so take a moment to look at your assignment prompt to see how much weight primary evidence should carry compared to secondary historiography. Rebuilding your outline around three or four key primary sources will give your draft the cohesive backbone it needs to succeed.