Exercise for the Research Skills Programme 1 – Literature review

Objective: This exercise aims at equipping you with the essential skills to complete a literature review. We will focus on reading "RSP1: The research cycle" and "RSP2: Literature review." This exercise is a requirement for the course, and is designed to go through what is needed to complete the literature review.

Part I: Refining your Research Topic

1) What was the research problem you identified in the first section ‘Identify your public health problem’?

1. How did you find the references for the assignment?

2. Are you confident about how to refine the public health problem that you identified and turn it into a research question for the literature review?

3. Could you phrase your research question in a PICO(T) format? If you think that PICO(T) does not fit your topic, could you think of an alternative format? [Hint: What study design you are proposing? Is "I" (Intervention) the right criterion for all study designs, or would “E” (Exposure) fit better for yours?]

Part II: Search Strategies

• This video will show how may you develop your search strategies by starting with MESH terms search - see the "MEDLINE via PubMed" section and view the video in https://guides.library.cornell.edu/systematic_reviews/translate.

• There are over 2,000 journal databases. We suggest that you use MEDLINE (perhaps via its most popular interface, PubMed), and use one grey literature database, e.g., google scholar. If time permits you may use one more database specialised in your research topic.

• Let us suppose that we are interested in the evidence for the association between maternal knowledge and vaccination.

• Let us suppose that the paper https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-11-239 (Owais et al., 2017) is a key baseline paper for developing your literature review.

1) What is the public health problem that the paper is attempting to tackle?

2) Can you find the MeSH terms that would bring you to find the paper by Owais et al., through searching for the proposed topic?

1. Please do a search for each term individually by using the approach mentioned in the video in the Cornell library site. The approach is also stated under the "MEDLINE via PubMed" section in the same site https://guides.library.cornell.edu/systematic_reviews/translate (the first two points) [Hint: you might find it useful to only use the terms about "P" and "I"].

2. Please use a syntax similar to the one stated in the third line of the table of the "MEDLINE via PubMed" section to combine the results obtained from each term? This procedure checks your understanding about boolean operators (a simple AND or OR syntax or a nested search syntax).

3. Please repeat this process by using the free text terms with the [tiab] tag (point 4 under "MEDLINE via PubMed") [Hint: What terms in that article caught your attention, but are not MeSH terms?].

4. Please combine the search results of 2b) and 2c) – ie obtained by using MESH and non-MESH search terms.

5. Please share the screen shot of your search process in the forum.

N.B. You can more or less apply this process with many databases including Cochrane Library. Do please look at the help section of each database. You may also experiment with the MeSH tree to learn more about the definition of your search.

Part III: PRISMA in Action

• We proceed to critical appraise a paper with the help of a CASP checklist by using the PRISMA standard (Mohr et al., 2015) mentioned in the RSP2 document [Hint: You many not need to read Mohr et al., (2015) if you understand Figure 1 and Table 1 in the RSP2 document ‘Literature Review’.]

• By proceeding to this stage, we assume that:

1. You have conducted the search with at least two journal databases.

2. Don't forget to jot down the days you access the databases. You have to report the access days in your literature review.

3. Do jot down how may papers you retrieve from each database.

4. Use some journal database manager to help you eliminate the redundant papers.

5. You should now have the information to let you draw the first two levels of PRISMA chart presented in the "RSP2" paper (Figure 1 on p.8) (i.e., identification and the first step of the screening).

1) Suppose that after eliminating the duplicated papers, Owais et al., is still in your database of papers to be reviewed

1. Would you filter it out if you are also interested in the evidence in the context of your country, and that country is not Pakistan? [Hint: We have a different "P" now. Does the title fit the new PICO(T) definition well?]

2. How would you refine your search terms to retrieve papers that match any additional search criteria from 1a)? You might want to take a screenshot of your PubMed/MEDLINE search, and post it to the discussion forum.

2) Let’s imagine that you decided to review the Owais paper (In practice, you should complement the PRISMA approach with a hand search approach by reviewing the references lists of certain papers, etc by a team. So, we are taking a reductionist approach).

• Could you review the paper by answering the rest of questions in the CASP RCT checklist (2-11) (PubMed identifies this paper as a clinical trial paper) [Hint: You may use GATE frame to help in judging the content of this paper]?

3) Could you produce the information about this paper looking like Table 2 of the RSP2 document (p.13)? This Table is going to form the basis of your summary of the papers you have included in your review, so it is a good idea to practice it here.

N.B.: This exercise is for you to work through. If you have questions, or want to test out your results, please post to the Discussion forum and we will help you. You should also discuss any questions with your supervisor.