undertaking a literature review a step by step approach pdf

Undertaking a literature review: a step-by-step approach

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Undertaking a literature review: a step-by-step approach

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• 1 School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Dublin,Trinity College, Dublin.
• PMID: 18399395
• DOI: 10.12968/bjon.2008.17.1.28059

Nowadays, most nurses, pre- and post-qualification, will be required to undertake a literature review at some point, either as part of a course of study, as a key step in the research process, or as part of clinical practice development or policy. For student nurses and novice researchers it is often seen as a difficult undertaking. It demands a complex range of skills, such as learning how to define topics for exploration, acquiring skills of literature searching and retrieval, developing the ability to analyse and synthesize data as well as becoming adept at writing and reporting, often within a limited time scale. The purpose of this article is to present a step-by-step guide to facilitate understanding by presenting the critical elements of the literature review process. While reference is made to different types of literature reviews, the focus is on the traditional or narrative review that is undertaken, usually either as an academic assignment or part of the research process.

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Literature Reviews

Steps in the literature review process.

• What is a literature review?
• Define your research question
• Determine inclusion and exclusion criteria
• Choose databases and search
• Review Results
• Synthesize Results
• Analyze Results
• Librarian Support
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools
• You may need to some exploratory searching of the literature to get a sense of scope, to determine whether you need to narrow or broaden your focus
• Identify databases that provide the most relevant sources, and identify relevant terms (controlled vocabularies) to add to your search strategy
• Finalize your research question
• Think about relevant dates, geographies (and languages), methods, and conflicting points of view
• Conduct searches in the published literature via the identified databases
• Check to see if this topic has been covered in other discipline's databases
• Examine the citations of on-point articles for keywords, authors, and previous research (via references) and cited reference searching.
• Save your search results in a citation management tool (such as Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote)
• De-duplicate your search results
• Make sure that you've found the seminal pieces -- they have been cited many times, and their work is considered foundational 
• Check with your professor or a librarian to make sure your search has been comprehensive
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of individual sources and evaluate for bias, methodologies, and thoroughness
• Group your results in to an organizational structure that will support why your research needs to be done, or that provides the answer to your research question  
• Develop your conclusions
• Are there gaps in the literature?
• Where has significant research taken place, and who has done it?
• Is there consensus or debate on this topic?
• Which methodological approaches work best?
• For example: Background, Current Practices, Critics and Proponents, Where/How this study will fit in 
• Organize your citations and focus on your research question and pertinent studies
• Compile your bibliography

Note: The first four steps are the best points at which to contact a librarian. Your librarian can help you determine the best databases to use for your topic, assess scope, and formulate a search strategy.

Videos Tutorials about Literature Reviews

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• Last Updated: Aug 26, 2024 5:59 AM
• URL: https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/literaturereviews

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Undertaking a literature review: a step-by-step approach

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Background: Literature reviews play a significant role in healthcare practice. There are different types of reviews available depending on the nature of the research question and the extent of reviewing that is conducted. In this article, we have summarized the major types of literature reviews, their strength and weakness, and provide representative examples. Methods: We have examined the different types of common reviews that have been used in the health research literature. We collected the information on these review types and have summarized them with providing corresponding examples. Results: We have discussed the major types of reviews: literature review, critical review, scoping review, systematic review, meta-analysis, qualitative systematic review, realist review, and review of reviews. We have mentioned the usability, strengths and weaknesses, utilizing the Search, Appraisal, Synthesis, Analysis (SALSA) framework, and have provided corresponding examples for each of these types of reviews in different tables. Conclusion: This article is a summary of different types of reviews and their implication in practice. This paper is thus intended for beginners who want to know about literature reviews. Introduction Literature reviews are becoming more and more important and favoured in the evidencebased practice (EBP) of health and social care 1. Healthcare professionals require updated information regarding research and development to inform their practice. However, with such large amounts of materials being published, it is impossible for anyone to cover every single piece of information or evidence on any given topic. A literature review thus gives audiences the opportunity to have summarized information on any topic without reading all of the evidence published in that specific area. Although the culture of the review article began more than two centuries ago, it wasn't until the 20th century that an explicit method was devised to carry out review research 2. In addition, the emergence of EBP instigated more rigorous and quality controlled approaches of review articles so that the synthesized summary results could be utilized with confidence 3 .

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• DOI: 10.12968/BJON.2008.17.1.28059
• Corpus ID: 17263931

Undertaking a literature review: a step-by-step approach.

• P. Cronin , F. Ryan , M. Coughlan

Published in British Journal of Nursing 2008

• Education, Medicine

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