Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences

Writing a literature review will take time to gather and analyze the research relevant to your topic along with developing a well thought out research question.

The process of writing a literature review usually covers the following steps:

1. Formulating your Research question
2. Search the Literature
3. Screening the Results
4. Analyze the material you’ve found
5. Managing the results of your research
6. Writing your Review

Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you begin your planning process:​

• ​Focus: What is the specific thesis, problem, or research question that my literature review is responding to or defining?​
• Type: What type of review am I conducting? Will my review emphasize theory, methodology, policy, or qualitative or quantitative studies?​
• ​Scope: What is the scope of material I will include in terms of date, discipline, forms, etc.? What type of sources will I be using?​
• ​Discipline: What academic discipline(s) will be included (e.g. Nursing, Psychology, Sociology, Medicine)? Remember interdisciplinary work has to account for the fact that each discipline has its own methods of research. What you think is the best source, for example, may not be what another discipline thinks as the best source.

You need a topic or question to focus your research so that you can write the literature review. For a medical literature review, it is especially important to have a focused question that can help direct your searching.​

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review. The topic must at least be:

1.Interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary)
2. An important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it)
3. A well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered, but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions.

Pautasso M. Ten simple rules for writing a literature review. PLoS Comput Biol. 2013;9(7):e1003149. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149. Epub 2013 Jul 18. PMID: 23874189; PMCID: PMC3715443.

Formatting your question as a PICO question isn't necessary for a literature review, but PICO questions are a great model to use for searching literature.

• P: Patient/Problem
• I: Intervention
• C: Comparison
• O: Outcome

Sample PICO question:

In (P) patients of color, does the use of (I) glycolic acid peels (C) reduce the (O) severity of melasma?

Articles about forming and using PICO questions in research:

Books:

Articles: