Conducting Your Literature Review

This book is a step-by-step guide to writing a literature review, and includes tips for modifying the process as needed depending on your audience, purpose, and goals. The lessons in this book can be applied to writing the background section for a thesis or an original research publication.

Literature reviews are now much more challenging to compile today than they used to be. You need a structured approach to handle the sheer volume of published research available. This book will help you formulate a strategy for making decisions about what to include and not include in your review, and produce a reliable and unbiased summary of the existing research. You will learn skills for defining research questions, using search tools and managing citations.

This book is part of APA's Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research series. Aimed at undergraduate students in research methods courses or others with a lab or research project, each book describes a key stage in the research process. Collectively, these books provide a solid grounding in research from start to finish.

Series Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. What to Achieve: Clarifying the Goal of Your Literature Review
2. Where to Look: Choosing Databases and Other Sources of Literature
3. How to Look: Developing Search Strategies
4. What to Look For: Deciding What Literature to Include
5. How to Organize: Managing Your Material
6. How to Abstract: Extracting Key Information From the Literature
7. How to Assess: Critically Appraising Your Material
8. How to Synthesize: Determining What to Say About the Literature
9. How to Document: Writing Up Your Literature Review

Further Reading

Index

About the Author

About the Series Editor

Susanne Hempel, PhD, is a psychologist directing the Southern California Evidence-Based Practice Center, a center that produces literature reviews for federal funding agencies. She is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND, a professor of social science at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, a professor of research preventive medicine at the University of Southern California (USC), and a faculty member at the Gehr Center for Health Systems Science at USC.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, teenaged twins, and many animals.

Anyone contemplating or engaged in health-related research should read this book. The first step in research is to learn what came before, a step that is ever more challenging as knowledge expands. Hempel distills methods for carrying out comprehensive, unbiased, and valid literature reviews, and applies them to common review tasks. This book is the best I have seen for introducing readers clearly and succinctly to the discipline of systematic evidence review.
—Lisa V. Rubenstein, MD, MSPH, FACP
Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Public Health, UCLA, and Senior Scientist, RAND, Los Angeles, CA

This book provides an excellent introduction to different kinds of literature reviews and guides readers through the steps involved in systematic reviews. Practical aspects are illustrated by examples of fictional students working on a literature review. This approach, benefitting from Hempel’s wealth of experience, makes this a highly recommended book for anyone considering to prepare a literature review.
—Jos Kleijnen, MD, PhD,
Professor of Systematic Reviews in Health Care, Maastricht University, The Netherlands