What is a Literature Review? Why Are They Important?
A literature review is important because it presents the "state of the science" or accumulated knowledge on a specific topic. It summarizes, analyzes, and compares the available research, reporting study strengths and weaknesses, results, gaps in the research, conclusions, and authors’ interpretations.
Graphic used with permission: Torres, E. Librarian, Hawai'i Pacific University
1. Choose a topic and define your research question
- Try to choose a topic of interest. You will be working with this subject for several weeks to months.
- Ideas for topics can be found by scanning medical news sources, journals / magazines, work experiences, interesting patient cases, or family or personal health issues.
- Do a bit of background reading on topic ideas to familiarize yourself with terminology and issues. Note the words and terms that are used.
- Develop a focused research question using PICO(T) or other framework to help guide you.
- Run a few sample database searches to make sure your research question is not too broad or too narrow.
- If possible, discuss your topic with your professor.
2. Determine the scope of your review
The scope of your review will be determined by your professor. Check your assignment requirements for parameters for the Literature Review.
- How many studies will you need to include?
- How many years should it cover?
- For the nurses, are you required to limit to nursing literature?
3. Develop a search plan
- Determine which databases to search. This will depend on your topic.
- Create an initial search string using the main concepts from your research (PICO, etc) question. Include synonyms and related words connected by Boolean operators (OR AND NOT).
4. Conduct searches and find relevant literature
- Keep notes as you search - tracking keywords and search strings used in each database..
- Read abstracts and write down new terms to search as you find them
- Check MeSH or other subject headings listed in relevant articles for additional search terms.
- Scan author provided keywords if available.
- Check the references of relevant articles looking for other useful articles.
- Check articles that have cited your relevant article for more useful articles. This is the 'cited by' feature.
- Revise the search to broaden or narrow your topic focus as you peruse the available literature.
- Conducting a literature search is a repetitive process. Searches can be revised and re-run multiple times during the process.
- Track the citations for your relevant articles in a software citation manager such as Zotero, or Google Scholar.
5. Review the literature
- Read the full articles. Do not rely solely on the abstracts. Authors frequently cannot include all results within the confines of an abstract. Exclude articles that do not address your research question.
- While reading, note research findings relevant to your project and summarize. Are the findings conflicting?
- Critique / evaluate the quality of the articles, and record your findings in your matrix or summary table. Tools are available to prompt you what to look for.
- You may need to revise your search and re-run it based on your findings.
6. Organize and synthesize
- Compile the findings and analysis from each resource into a single narrative.
- Using an outline can be helpful. Start broad, addressing the overall findings and then narrow, discussing each resource and how it relates to your question and to the other resources.
- Cite as you write to keep sources organized.
- Write in structured paragraphs using topic sentences and transition words to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.
- Don't present one study after another, but rather relate one study's findings to another. Speak to how the studies are connected and how they relate to your work.
