Literature Review Guide PDF

What is a literature review? A literature review is an integrated analysis\-- not just a summary\-- of scholarly writings and other relevant evidence related directly to your research question.  That is, it represents a synthesis of the evidence that provides background information on your topic an...

What is a literature review? A literature review is an integrated analysis\-- not just a summary\-- of scholarly writings and other relevant evidence related directly to your research question.  That is, it represents a synthesis of the evidence that provides background information on your topic and shows an association between the evidence and your research question. A literature review may be a stand-alone work or the introduction to a larger research paper, depending on the assignment.  Rely heavily on the guidelines your instructor has given you. Why is it important? 1.A literature review is important because it: - - - - - - 2\. Decide on the scope of your review How many studies do you need to look at? How comprehensive should it be? How many years should it cover?  Tip: This may depend on your assignment.  How many sources does the assignment require? 3\. Select the databases you will use to conduct your searches. Make a list of the databases you will search.  Where to find databases: use the tabs on this guide. Find other databases on the [Nursing Information Resources](https://library.medicine.yale.edu/nursing) web page More on the [Medical Library ](https://library.medicine.yale.edu/find/title)web page and more on the open database. Conduct your searches to find the evidence. Keep track of your searches. Use the keywords in your question, as well as synonyms for those words, as terms in your search. Use the [database tutorials](https://library.medicine.yale.edu/tutorials/) for help. Save the searches in the databases. This saves time when you want to redo, or modify, the searches. It is also helpful to use as a guide if the searches are not finding useful results. Review the abstracts of research studies carefully. This will save you time. Use the bibliographies and references of research studies you find to locate others. Check with your professor, or a subject expert in the field, if you are missing any key works. Ask your librarian for help at any time. Use a citation manager, such as EndNote as the repository for your citations. See the [EndNote tutorials](https://library.medicine.yale.edu/tutorials/subjects/endnote-help) for help. Review the literature, and some questions to help you analyze the research: What was the research question of the study you are reviewing? What were the authors trying to discover? Was the research funded by a source that could influence the findings? What were the research methodologies? Analyze its literature review, the samples and variables used, the results, and the conclusions. Does the research seem to be complete? Could it have been conducted more soundly? What further questions does it raise? If there are conflicting studies, why do you think that is? How are the authors viewed in the field? Has this study been cited? If so, how has it been analyzed? Tips:  Review the abstracts carefully.   Keep careful notes so that you may track your thought processes during the research process. Create a matrix of the studies for easy analysis, and synthesis, across all of the studies. **Information Sources** Information sources are often classified as physical (print, analog) versus online (electronic, digital,) text versus audio-video and book versus journal. Here are some common information source types with descriptions of how current their information usually is, what kind of information is contained in them, and where to find them. Journal Articles Screenshot of the front page of an article in the European Journal of Political Research. Current: Current within a few months to a few years of publication. Look at the list of references used. What is the most recent date you can find? That should tell you when they stopped researching and started writing. But bear in mind that experimental/observational data they gathered may be a year or two older than that. Type of Information: Most recent research within the subject of the journal. Scholarly journal articles are important in all academic subject areas, but especially in the sciences, where most researchers do not write books. Where to Find: Print journals are delivered to subscribers and libraries. Some journals are Open Access and make all their content online for free. Some journals allow authors to keep a copy of their articles online in a repository and you can usually find these through Google Scholar. Libraries subscribe to article databases. Those subscriptions make millions of articles available to users at those institutions. Magazine Articles  Current: News magazine articles should be current within a few days to a few months of publication. But many magazine articles are based on scholarly articles, so their information is not as new. Type of Information: Current events and editorials (news magazines). Non-scholarly articles about topics of interest within the subject of the magazine. Where to Find: Print magazines are delivered to homes and libraries. Some magazines have an online presence, but access to older articles may require a subscription. Some library databases have full-text articles from magazines. Newspaper Articles Screenshot of an article in the newspaper Austin American Statesman. Currennt: Current within a few minutes to a day of publication. Corrections made after the fact can change content later. Type of Information: Current events and editorials. Where to Find: Print newspapers are delivered to homes and libraries. Many newspapers have an online presence but access to older articles may require a subscription. Libraries can subscribe to newspaper databases. Monographs (a.k.a. Scholarly Books)  Current: Information may be two or three years old. Just like with journals, look for the most recent date in the bibliography, and that should tell you around when the author(s) were researching and writing. Bear in mind that experimental/observational data the author(s) gathered may be a year or two older than that. Type of Information: Scholarly research on a topic. Not as recent as a journal article, but may address a whole subject rather than just a piece of it. Monographs are very important in the humanities. Where to Find: Monographs are primarily available through academic libraries. Some are in print, some are e-books. These e-books are not available to consumers, but are generally meant to be read via a web browser or downloaded as a PDF.  Nonfiction Books Screenshot of a page of a non-scholarly nonfiction book. Current: Varies widely. Books on hot topics may be published within a few weeks but, as a result, they may contain errors. Other books take two or more years to get to print, and the research may be even older. Type of Information: Non-scholarly information and opinion.  Where to Find: Nonfiction books are found in bookstores and mainly public libraries. e-book versions may be available for consumers via Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc. Nonfiction books on academically relevant topics that are of reasonably high quality are also collected by academic libraries. Some of them may be available through academic libraries in formats that are read in web browsers or downloaded as PDF. Reference Resources  Current: Print reference resources often have annual updates, so the information in them should be only about a year old. Online reference resources may be updated continuously. Many statistical resources have older data because it takes a long time to organize it all. Historical resources summarize and synthesize established knowledge, rather than keeping up with the newest findings. The important thing is that reference resources usually tell you how old their information is.  Type of Information: Summary and synthesis of what is known about a topic. Materials to be referred to; for example, facts and figures, dates, names, measurements, statistics, quotations, instructions, equations, formulae, definitions, explanations, charts, graphs, diagrams, maps.  Where to Find: Traditionally, reference resources are available as books or series of books. They can be purchased by consumers but are often far too expensive. They can be found in the reference sections of public and academic libraries. Not all print reference sources are books; for example, there are also maps. More and more reference resources are available in online format, and as they go online, they become less and less linear, taking advantage of the ability to link and include multimedia. Online reference resources are available through specialized library databases, and there are also many of them on the web. Some are free and some require an individual subscription. Textbooks Screenshot of a page of a textbook. Current: Varies widely. Some textbook editors publish a new edition every year, and their information should be current within a year or two of the edition\'s publication date. Other textbooks in less time-sensitive disciplines may contain information that is more historical in nature. Type of Information: Information on a topic is arranged in such a way that a beginner can acquire knowledge about that topic systematically. Textbooks are meant to be used as part of taking a course but are usually written so that they are complete and understandable on their own. Textbooks may have supplemental materials like questions to guide your reading or self-quizzes as well as accompanying multimedia material. Some e-textbooks come with fully integrated multimedia.  Where to Find: In libraries that have a physical location and physical collection, some textbooks may be in stacks or held on reserve for short-term loan. Most textbook publishers do not make textbooks available as e-books for libraries. Instead, textbooks, whether print or e-book, must be purchased by the individual student. Some textbooks may also be rented for the duration of the course. Gray Literature Gray literature is a huge category that encompasses a wide variety of documents that have not been published in the traditional sense. Gray literature includes: Unpublished conference papers Unpublished theses and dissertations Presentations Working papers Notes and logs kept by researchers Academic courseware, professors\' teaching notes, students\' lecture notes Company annual reports Project and study reports Institutional reports Technical reports Reports put out by government agencies Data and statistics Unpublished letters and manuscripts Patents, technical standards Newsletters, product catalogs, and certain other types of ephemera with a strong informational value Preprints of articles And much more! Certain kinds of gray literature can be found in databases. Others are best found by searching the web. Sometimes it is difficult to ascertain the author or organization responsible for the information, which can make gray literature difficult to cite.   What about video? What about the Web? Neither is a source type; video is a format, and the Web is a delivery method. You can find a video format textbook. You can find a scholarly article on the web. It does not necessarily change what kind of information is contained in it, who is responsible for that information, what kind of quality control is behind it, or how current that information is. - Information Retrieval (IR) is finding material (usually documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text) that satisfies an information need from within large collections (usually stored on computers). - Information seeking, information retrieval, and library and information service activities are among the most common subjects studied, Descriptive research methodologies based on surveys and questionnaires predominate, Over the years, there has been a considerable increase in the array of research approaches used to explore library issues **[Tools for identifying literature (digital resources and print media)]** The face of research and publication is changing globally. Due to the intense competition in academia, there is immense pressure on scientists to publish at a fast pace. On the contrary, the journal publication process is slow and researchers scramble to establish scientific priority on their work to avoid getting scooped. The role of researchers is no longer restricted to conducting, writing, and publishing research; they are expected to collaborate across geographical boundaries, contribute to the research community as peer reviewers and journal editors, attend conferences to network with their peers, promote their research to the scientific and non-scientific community, and stay on top of new developments and innovations. Add to that the need to dodge predatory publishers and the numerous traps that abound in the academic publishing industry; researchers definitely have a lot to deal with! To help researchers juggle the multiple roles they have to play, the scholarly publishing community has been coming up with a diverse range of innovations. Since 2013, numerous digital tools have made their way into the scholarly world to facilitate literature search, research writing, reference management, journal selection, collaboration, networking, data sharing, and research promotion. Besides, there are tools that facilitate open science and open data, and others that aim to make science efficient by working towards standardization. [[Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer]](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/11/11/101-innovations-in-scholarly-communication/#author), librarians at Utrecht University Library are conducting a project called* '*[[Innovations in Scholarly Communication]](https://101innovations.wordpress.com/about-1/)*'* on the numerous tools and innovations that are appearing on the academic publishing scene. Currently, they have listed over 400 tools and are investigating their usage for different activities in the research workflow. This two-part article will take a look at some of the tools mentioned in the project that researchers can use at various stages of the research workflow. In this part, I will take you through some tools that can help you with literature search and reference management.   **Literature search** There are a host of available tools to help researchers explore the millions of articles that have been published to date. These can be search engines, curators, or databases where a researcher can find relevant and reliable sources for a literature review and help them stay on top of the literature in their field. Some databases have special features that make this easier. Here are a few examples: **[[Google Scholar]](https://scholar.google.com/):** This is one tool that most researchers already know about and use. It is a popular search engine that helps researchers find scholarly literature across disciplines using relevant keywords. **[[F1000Prime]](http://f1000.com/prime):** This is yet another search engine that identifies and recommends important articles in biology and medical research publications. The tool's USP is that articles are selected by a group of leading scientists and clinicians, who then rate them and explain their significance. **[[PubPeer]](https://pubpeer.com/):** Researchers can use this platform to search for publications using DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, keyword, or author. Apart from searching for relevant literature, researchers can also provide feedback on articles or start a conversation anonymously. **[[PubChase]](https://www.pubchase.com/):** Using the PubMed database, this tool helps biomedical researchers search and browse through abstracts of research papers and bookmark them to a personal PubChase library. The tool generates recommendations for papers based on the articles in the user's library. **[[Zotero]](https://www.zotero.org/):** It helps researchers collect, organize, cite, and share their research sources. Zotero automatically downloads and saves the PDF version of articles that the user is reading and extracts all bibliographic information. When writing a paper in Microsoft Word, Open Office or Google Docs, users can easily search for and add in-text citations, which automatically appear in the bibliography. Zotero lacks the ability to annotate the PDF itself, but the author can add separate notes files, which are searchable. **[[Mendeley]](http://www.mendeley.com/):** Mendeley is a platform comprising a social network, reference manager, and article visualization tools. The reference manager allows easy saving and storing of articles, has a Microsoft Word citation tool which allows users to seamlessly add references to their documents. Unlike Zotero, it allows users to view and annotate PDFs from within the Mendeley program. The platform's best feature is that it allows researchers to easily collaborate and share documents by creating private groups. **[[ReadCube]](https://www.readcube.com/):** A program for discovering, managing, annotating research papers, ReadCube provides an enhanced PDF reading experience in which the static PDFs offer interactive citations, integrated authorial information, access to supplementary data, related articles and a full-screen figure browser. **[[EndNote]](http://endnote.com/):** Owned by Clarivate Analytics, this software tool for publishing and managing bibliographies, citations, and references is extremely popular among researchers. Researchers can create their own reference library by adding references manually or importing them; organize and store references; create and edit citations using EndNote. EndNote can automatically format a citation into any of over 2,000 different styles that the user chooses. The tool also allows researchers to share their research and references, including full-text files and notes with other **Related reading:** - [[A young Researcher\'s guide to Digital Tools for project management and data sharing]](https://www.editage.com/insights/a-young-researchers-guide-to-digital-tools-for-project-management-and-data-sharing) - [[Writing in the cloud: tools for collaborative writing]](https://www.editage.com/insights/writing-in-the-cloud-tools-for-collaborative-writing) - [[The future of publishing: New tools to make the publication process smoother]](https://www.editage.com/insights/the-future-of-publishing-new-tools-to-make-the-publication-process-smoother) - [[What is the best citation tool?]](https://www.editage.com/insights/what-is-the-best-citation-tool)