Purpose of a Literature Review
A literature review:
- Helps you to discover the research that has been conducted on a topic already & identifies gaps in current knowledge
- Increases the breadth of your knowledge in your area of research
- Helps you identify seminal works in your area
- Allows you to provide the intellectual context for your work & position your research with other, related research
- Provides you with opposing viewpoints
- Helps you to discover research methods that may be applicable to your work
Although written with a broad audience in mind, the quote above from Greenfield is just as applicable to the health sciences. Answering a clinical question with implications for patient care should be based on evidence and that evidence can be found by doing a literature search.
The comprehensiveness of that search may vary depending on your needs but there are skills associated with it that will be useful in a myriad of contexts from point-of-care to academic medicine. This guide will demonstrate many of those skills but being able to effectively search the literature comes with time and practice. No search is ever perfect the first time it is run and the ability to learn from failed searches is vital.
Below are links to two articles that discuss the basic steps of a lit review and the many different types of review publications available.
