Begin research on your question identifying at least 10 peer-reviewed academic journals in areas such as applied psychology, organizational, consumer or other social science journals you believe are pertinent. As you review articles, ask yourself if they help you to refine and/or answer your question. If no, consider finding different articles that may be more helpful. You may take detours to read other articles as well; for example, to follow an interesting path to look up a reference cited. You may also find that your questions become increasingly focused as you read and learn more about the subject areas.
It is important that you choose primary sources, reading actual studies rather than summaries offered by other authors. You may also find articles from business/trade presses (such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and others) that make the case that this question is of interest in the contemporary business world. If you are to include these, identify them in your bibliography and do not count them as part of your 10-article requirement.
Step 3: Prepare an annotated reference list of these 10 articles. For the annotation, 1) write one paragraph per article summarizing the study and 2) its relevance to your research question.
Use APA reference format. The Purdue online writing lab is an excellent resource for structuring APA style formatting.