Literature reviews may be part of a thesis, or may contribute to a larger work such as the introduction in a journal article. Literature reviews may also be selective such as those that form part of an assessment task, or they may be comprehensive reviews aimed to be published as standalone works.
A literature review for publication often seeks to answer a single research question, whereas a literature review for a thesis may seek to answer several questions.
Searching the literature is more effective when you are clear on what you need to find, your research topic is clearly understood and the various concepts within your topic are clearly delineated.
Doing some scoping searches are an essential step to help you understand the quantity of existing literature in your area of interest, and the terminology used in its discussion. This preliminary searching helps establish a basis for the subsequent development of a comprehensive search strategy.
Scoping searches usually involve a series of very targeted searches, perhaps looking for your main keywords in the article title. You might also look for examples of review articles on similar topics, as these might be useful for gaining an overview of a facet of your own topic. We can use a search engine such as Google Scholar, large inter-disciplinary databases such as Scopus or Proquest central, or a discipline-specific database that you are familiar with.
Our scoping searches will help us to understand whether our research question has the following elements:
Further to this, our scoping searches should enable us to locate a 'gold set' of relevant articles that we would expect to use in our review. These are important for testing the search strategy that we will later develop.
If you are having difficulty deciding on a topic for your review, consider the following:
Once you have your topic, put it into the format of a question or questions to be answered by the literature.
Essentially a research question puts forward an hypothesis about a relationship, such as the relationship between an intervention and an outcome. For example: In P (population group) does I (intervention) result in O (outcome)? or Will I perform better than C at achieving O in population P?
For an overview of five main steps to creating a good research question see the online library resources. See also this online video on YouTube.
The research question will guide the development of your search strategy so it's important that you take time to do some testing of your proposed question. Having done the preliminary scoping searches as noted above will be helpful in understanding the volume of the literature.
This guide will provide a sample search for a health/medical topic, as well as for an education/social science topic. Choose which section you would like to work through.