By the end of this section, students should be able to:
- Describe the role of the literature in research
- Identify appropriate sources of literature
- Conduct searches using keywords
- Conduct a basic analysis of research articles
- Manage articles
- Draft an outline for a literature review
A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It’s usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. You are not trying to list all the material published, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question.
Taylor (n.d.)
What is a literature review for?
Before beginning your literature review, it’s important to know why you’re doing one. It’s all too common to simply start reading articles that you found after a Google search, but until you know what the aim of the review is, you’re probably going to just end up wasting a lot of time. So here are some of the reasons for doing a review of the literature:
- To justify the choices that you’re going to make later with respect to your research question, theoretical framework, and methodology
- To establish the importance or relevance of your topic in a historical context, explaining why your research is important at this moment in time
- To provide background information that the reader needs to understand your study
- To establish your own credibility in a particular domain of knowledge; you want the reader to trust that you know what you’re talking about
- To present your own work in the context of a larger body of work; this is for researchers who are building a current project on work that they’ve previously published
Once you’re decided which of the following purposes your review has (see the list above), you should start planning how you’re going to go about it. Here are some basic steps that you would consider when starting a literature review:
- Define the topic and identify the boundaries – or scope – of the review
- Identify the sources you will use to find information
- Describe the main issues
- Conduct searches (related to developing a research question)
- Evaluate the results of the search (see critical appraisal)
- At all times, keep track of the references you use
Conducting the search
It is important to note that the “literature” does not only include research articles published in peer review journals – although that is the primary source of information you will use in your project. In addition to research papers, the “literature” can also include items from the following wide variety of sources that are relevant for academic work:
- Monographs and books
- Conference proceedings and presentations
- Theses and dissertations
- Government reports
- Historical records
- Increasingly, social media e.g. Blogs, Twitter
You should also be aware that the literature can be divided according to where they come from (i.e. the sources used to gather the data):
- Primary – original research
- Secondary – descriptions of original research (e.g. systematic or scoping reviews)
- Opinion pieces (sometimes called “position papers” when published in a peer reviewed journal)
- Anecdotes and personal communication
The following can be considered to be appropriate sources of information with respect to finding articles that have been published in academic journals. You may have more luck using these resources rather than a public search engine like Google Scholar. Usually, academics would begin their searches using databases like the ones below, and then use Google Scholar to ensure that no grey literature has been missed.
- CINAHL – Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature
- MEDLINE – Medical literature Online
- PsychINFO – Psychology information Online
- AIDSLINE – Aids information Online
- CancerLit – Cancer Literature
- HealthSTAR – Health Services, Technology, Administration and Research
- CHID – Combined Health Information Database
- Ebscohost
- Sage
Group activity
Now that you’ve decided what your literature is for (i.e. what purpose it will serve), as well as what kind of papers you’re going to look for, you need to think about how your study fits into a larger research context. Take a few minutes to work in groups and try to answer the following questions:
- What has been done in the field by others?
- What principles should I be using to refine my searches and selections?
- What contributions have others offered? This, and the following questions, will most likely only make sense after you have started identifying key papers in the domain.
- How do previous studies relate to each other? To my own work?
- Are there limitations to the work that others have done?
- How does my own work fit into this context?
Critical appraisal (or, Analysing what you read)
You’ve planned your search strategy and started finding articles that seem relevant for your study. But before you can start citing those papers in your own research project, you need to get a sense of how trustworthy they are. How do you know what a “good” article looks like? How do you make decisions about what evidence to use in support of your argument? What steps can you take to reduce your own biased perspective from influencing the outcome of your review? In order to achieve that, here are some questions you can use to try and make decisions about whether or not it is advisable to include a certain paper in your review:
- What is the aim of the study / article?
- How did the researchers / authors go about achieving this aim i.e. what were the methods?
- What were the findings i.e. the results?
- What conclusions were reached?
- How can you apply the findings in your current clinical setting?
Writing the review
The way you structure your review depends mainly how how you want to move towards your own study. In general, it’s reasonable to adapt an approach where you move from a global to a local perspective, or from broad to narrow, or to use time as an organising principles (historical to contemporary, or vice versa).
As with any essay, the review should have
- An introduction should provide the reader with the scale and structure of the rest of the review.
- A body will depend on how you have organised the key points (see opening paragraph above)
- A conclusion will sum up the main findings of your research, taking care not to simply repeat important points
The length of each section depends on your writing context. If the literature review is an opening to a project proposal, it may only be a few pages while if it is a chapter in a thesis it could be as long as 15-20.
Managing your articles
As you begin to gather larger and larger collections of articles, it’s very important that you start managing them appropriately. It’s all too easy to start losing track of what ideas you found in what papers, and you may end up wasting a lot of valuable time simply trying to find citation information, for example, that would take seconds if your papers were organised correctly. Here are a few suggestions of software that can be used to manage your PDFs and other resources:
- Mendeley (www.mendeley.com)
- Zotero (www.zotero.org)
- Papers (www.papersapp.com/)
- Endnote (http://endnote.com/)
Activity for the week
- Search for 5 articles that are related to your topic, read and annotate them,
- Write a summary of all 5 articles and share your summary with another group, explaining how they are useful for your research topic
- Read each others summary and comment on them, providing feedback to the group on how to improve it
- Your summary and comments will be marked
Resources and readings
Creating the literature review: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Greenhalgh, T. (1997). How to read a paper: Assessing the methodological quality of published papers. BMJ, 315. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.315.7103.305
Greenhalgh, T. (1997). How to read a paper: Getting your bearings (deciding what the paper is about). BMJ, 315. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.315.7102.243
Khan, K. S., Kunz, R., Kleijnen, J., & Antes, G. (2003). Five steps to conducting a systematic review. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 96, 118–121.
Oxman, A. D., & Guyatt, G. H. (1988). Guidelines for reading literature reviews. CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal, 138, 697–703.
Taylor, D. (n.d.). The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It | Writing Advice. Advice. University of Toronto.
Thomson, P. (2014). Planning v creativity in academic writing. patter.
N.a (n.d.). Review of Literature. UW-Madison Writing Center Writer’s Handbook.
