Reflection on your literature review

This is to encourage you to reflect on how you would perform a literature review. You might want to consider if you can perform the following tasks on a review:

Develop a protocol for the review which has the following features:

• a clear research question and framework, such as PICOT, with all terms defined and key aspects of PRISMA and CASP guidelines incorporated.

Perform the literature review with the following features:

• Several sources explored (eg medical literature databases, appropriate non-medical databases, grey literature, specific journals).
• Varied search strategy for each database as needed. Use of MeSH on non-MeSH headings or combination as needed.
• Use of filters as required.
• Save and list searches and search strategies by source.

Sort citations:

• Exclude duplicates.
• Separate full-text and non-full text.
• Exclude non-relevant papers (and give reasons).
• Prioritise remaining papers (and give reasons).
• Group remaining papers into meaningful sub-topics.
• Create a flow-chart which summarises results (numbers/types of study).
• Organise citations (using traditional citation rules) and create list of references.

Read and critically review each paper.

• Identify evidence type (where relevant) and create table summarising study designs of included articles.
• Assess the quality of the studies and identify biases or other factors.
• Extract relevant statistics from relevant papers.
• Create summary tables (by sub-topics, include all articles in the review, cite first author, year, country, type of study, sample size, main results and critical comments, and relevance to your proposed study population.

Summarise and synthesise.

• Summarise critically.
• Synthesise the evidence (by study type, source and conclusions if relevant).
• Draw conclusions of the relevance to your research topic.

Identify gaps in knowledge.

• What gaps remain following the review.
• How can these gaps lead to the project you plan to conduct.

Identify clear research question for your project, informed by the literature review.

• Is there a plausible hypothesis.
• Can you quantify an expected result.
• Can you identify a study population and a proposed intervention or study factor.