the important of literature review in research

Why is it important to do a literature review in research?

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 “A substantive, thorough, sophisticated literature review is a precondition for doing substantive, thorough, sophisticated research”. Boote and Baile 2005

Authors of manuscripts treat writing a literature review as a routine work or a mere formality. But a seasoned one knows the purpose and importance of a well-written literature review.  Since it is one of the basic needs for researches at any level, they have to be done vigilantly. Only then the reader will know that the basics of research have not been neglected.

The aim of any literature review is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of existing knowledge in a particular field without adding any new contributions.   Being built on existing knowledge they help the researcher to even turn the wheels of the topic of research.  It is possible only with profound knowledge of what is wrong in the existing findings in detail to overpower them.  For other researches, the literature review gives the direction to be headed for its success. 

The common perception of literature review and reality:

As per the common belief, literature reviews are only a summary of the sources related to the research. And many authors of scientific manuscripts believe that they are only surveys of what are the researches are done on the chosen topic.  But on the contrary, it uses published information from pertinent and relevant sources like

• Scholarly books
• Scientific papers
• Latest studies in the field
• Established school of thoughts
• Relevant articles from renowned scientific journals

and many more for a field of study or theory or a particular problem to do the following:

• Summarize into a brief account of all information
• Synthesize the information by restructuring and reorganizing
• Critical evaluation of a concept or a school of thought or ideas
• Familiarize the authors to the extent of knowledge in the particular field
• Encapsulate
• Compare & contrast

By doing the above on the relevant information, it provides the reader of the scientific manuscript with the following for a better understanding of it:

• It establishes the authors’  in-depth understanding and knowledge of their field subject
• It gives the background of the research
• Portrays the scientific manuscript plan of examining the research result
• Illuminates on how the knowledge has changed within the field
• Highlights what has already been done in a particular field
• Information of the generally accepted facts, emerging and current state of the topic of research
• Identifies the research gap that is still unexplored or under-researched fields
• Demonstrates how the research fits within a larger field of study
• Provides an overview of the sources explored during the research of a particular topic

Importance of literature review in research:

The importance of literature review in scientific manuscripts can be condensed into an analytical feature to enable the multifold reach of its significance.  It adds value to the legitimacy of the research in many ways:

• Provides the interpretation of existing literature in light of updated developments in the field to help in establishing the consistency in knowledge and relevancy of existing materials
• It helps in calculating the impact of the latest information in the field by mapping their progress of knowledge.
• It brings out the dialects of contradictions between various thoughts within the field to establish facts
• The research gaps scrutinized initially are further explored to establish the latest facts of theories to add value to the field
• Indicates the current research place in the schema of a particular field
• Provides information for relevancy and coherency to check the research
• Apart from elucidating the continuance of knowledge, it also points out areas that require further investigation and thus aid as a starting point of any future research
• Justifies the research and sets up the research question
• Sets up a theoretical framework comprising the concepts and theories of the research upon which its success can be judged
• Helps to adopt a more appropriate methodology for the research by examining the strengths and weaknesses of existing research in the same field
• Increases the significance of the results by comparing it with the existing literature
• Provides a point of reference by writing the findings in the scientific manuscript
• Helps to get the due credit from the audience for having done the fact-finding and fact-checking mission in the scientific manuscripts
• The more the reference of relevant sources of it could increase more of its trustworthiness with the readers
• Helps to prevent plagiarism by tailoring and uniquely tweaking the scientific manuscript not to repeat other’s original idea
• By preventing plagiarism , it saves the scientific manuscript from rejection and thus also saves a lot of time and money
• Helps to evaluate, condense and synthesize gist in the author’s own words to sharpen the research focus
• Helps to compare and contrast to  show the originality and uniqueness of the research than that of the existing other researches
• Rationalizes the need for conducting the particular research in a specified field
• Helps to collect data accurately for allowing any new methodology of research than the existing ones
• Enables the readers of the manuscript to answer the following questions of its readers for its better chances for publication
• What do the researchers know?
• What do they not know?
• Is the scientific manuscript reliable and trustworthy?
• What are the knowledge gaps of the researcher?

22. It helps the readers to identify the following for further reading of the scientific manuscript:

• What has been already established, discredited and accepted in the particular field of research
• Areas of controversy and conflicts among different schools of thought
• Unsolved problems and issues in the connected field of research
• The emerging trends and approaches
• How the research extends, builds upon and leaves behind from the previous research

A profound literature review with many relevant sources of reference will enhance the chances of the scientific manuscript publication in renowned and reputed scientific journals .

References:

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• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

• An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
• A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
• Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
• Summarize and synthesize: Give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: Don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically Evaluate: Mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: Use transition words and topic sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

• Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
• Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

• Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
• Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
• Qualitative versus quantitative research
• Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
• Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

• It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
• Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
• Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
• Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

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• Writing Tips

What is the Purpose of a Literature Review?

4-minute read

• 23rd October 2023

If you’re writing a research paper or dissertation , then you’ll most likely need to include a comprehensive literature review . In this post, we’ll review the purpose of literature reviews, why they are so significant, and the specific elements to include in one. Literature reviews can:

1. Provide a foundation for current research.

2. Define key concepts and theories.

3. Demonstrate critical evaluation.

4. Show how research and methodologies have evolved.

5. Identify gaps in existing research.

6. Support your argument.

Keep reading to enter the exciting world of literature reviews!

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a critical summary and evaluation of the existing research (e.g., academic journal articles and books) on a specific topic. It is typically included as a separate section or chapter of a research paper or dissertation, serving as a contextual framework for a study. Literature reviews can vary in length depending on the subject and nature of the study, with most being about equal length to other sections or chapters included in the paper. Essentially, the literature review highlights previous studies in the context of your research and summarizes your insights in a structured, organized format. Next, let’s look at the overall purpose of a literature review.

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Literature reviews are considered an integral part of research across most academic subjects and fields. The primary purpose of a literature review in your study is to:

Provide a Foundation for Current Research

Since the literature review provides a comprehensive evaluation of the existing research, it serves as a solid foundation for your current study. It’s a way to contextualize your work and show how your research fits into the broader landscape of your specific area of study.  

Define Key Concepts and Theories

The literature review highlights the central theories and concepts that have arisen from previous research on your chosen topic. It gives your readers a more thorough understanding of the background of your study and why your research is particularly significant .

Demonstrate Critical Evaluation 

A comprehensive literature review shows your ability to critically analyze and evaluate a broad range of source material. And since you’re considering and acknowledging the contribution of key scholars alongside your own, it establishes your own credibility and knowledge.

Show How Research and Methodologies Have Evolved

Another purpose of literature reviews is to provide a historical perspective and demonstrate how research and methodologies have changed over time, especially as data collection methods and technology have advanced. And studying past methodologies allows you, as the researcher, to understand what did and did not work and apply that knowledge to your own research.  

Identify Gaps in Existing Research

Besides discussing current research and methodologies, the literature review should also address areas that are lacking in the existing literature. This helps further demonstrate the relevance of your own research by explaining why your study is necessary to fill the gaps.

Support Your Argument

A good literature review should provide evidence that supports your research questions and hypothesis. For example, your study may show that your research supports existing theories or builds on them in some way. Referencing previous related studies shows your work is grounded in established research and will ultimately be a contribution to the field.  

Literature Review Editing Services 

Ensure your literature review is polished and ready for submission by having it professionally proofread and edited by our expert team. Our literature review editing services will help your research stand out and make an impact. Not convinced yet? Send in your free sample today and see for yourself! 

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Literature Reviews

• What is a literature review?
• Steps in the Literature Review Process
• Define your research question
• Determine inclusion and exclusion criteria
• Choose databases and search
• Review Results
• Synthesize Results
• Analyze Results
• Librarian Support

What is a Literature Review?

A literature or narrative review is a comprehensive review and analysis of the published literature on a specific topic or research question. The literature that is reviewed contains: books, articles, academic articles, conference proceedings, association papers, and dissertations. It contains the most pertinent studies and points to important past and current research and practices. It provides background and context, and shows how your research will contribute to the field. 

A literature review should: 

• Provide a comprehensive and updated review of the literature;
• Explain why this review has taken place;
• Articulate a position or hypothesis;
• Acknowledge and account for conflicting and corroborating points of view

From  S age Research Methods

Purpose of a Literature Review

A literature review can be written as an introduction to a study to:

• Demonstrate how a study fills a gap in research
• Compare a study with other research that's been done

Or it can be a separate work (a research article on its own) which:

• Organizes or describes a topic
• Describes variables within a particular issue/problem

Limitations of a Literature Review

Some of the limitations of a literature review are:

• It's a snapshot in time. Unlike other reviews, this one has beginning, a middle and an end. There may be future developments that could make your work less relevant.
• It may be too focused. Some niche studies may miss the bigger picture.
• It can be difficult to be comprehensive. There is no way to make sure all the literature on a topic was considered.
• It is easy to be biased if you stick to top tier journals. There may be other places where people are publishing exemplary research. Look to open access publications and conferences to reflect a more inclusive collection. Also, make sure to include opposing views (and not just supporting evidence).

Source: Grant, Maria J., and Andrew Booth. “A Typology of Reviews: An Analysis of 14 Review Types and Associated Methodologies.” Health Information & Libraries Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 91–108. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/j.1471-1842.2009.00848.x.

Meryl Brodsky : Communication and Information Studies

Hannah Chapman Tripp : Biology, Neuroscience

Carolyn Cunningham : Human Development & Family Sciences, Psychology, Sociology

Larayne Dallas : Engineering

Janelle Hedstrom : Special Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Ed Leadership & Policy ​

Susan Macicak : Linguistics

Imelda Vetter : Dell Medical School

For help in other subject areas, please see the guide to library specialists by subject .

Periodically, UT Libraries runs a workshop covering the basics and library support for literature reviews. While we try to offer these once per academic year, we find providing the recording to be helpful to community members who have missed the session. Following is the most recent recording of the workshop, Conducting a Literature Review. To view the recording, a UT login is required.

• October 26, 2022 recording
• Last Updated: Oct 26, 2022 2:49 PM
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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 a 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?

A literature review is important because it:

• Explains the background of research on a topic.
• Demonstrates why a topic is significant to a subject area.
• Discovers relationships between research studies/ideas.
• Identifies major themes, concepts, and researchers on a topic.
• Identifies critical gaps and points of disagreement.
• Discusses further research questions that logically come out of the previous studies.

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1. Choose a topic. Define your research question.

Your literature review should be guided by your central research question.  The literature represents background and research developments related to a specific research question, interpreted and analyzed by you in a synthesized way.

• Make sure your research question is not too broad or too narrow.  Is it manageable?
• Begin writing down terms that are related to your question. These will be useful for searches later.
• If you have the opportunity, discuss your topic with your professor and your class mates.

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? 

• 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 in the Nursing Information Resources web page
• More on the Medical Library web page
• ... and more on the Yale University Library web page

4. Conduct your searches to find the evidence. Keep track of your searches.

• Use the key words in your question, as well as synonyms for those words, as terms in your search. Use the database 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 is the searches are not finding any 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 in the field.
• 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 for help.

Review the literature

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.
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Literature reviews, what is a literature review, learning more about how to do a literature review.

• Planning the Review
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A literature review is a review and synthesis of existing research on a topic or research question. A literature review is meant to analyze the scholarly literature, make connections across writings and identify strengths, weaknesses, trends, and missing conversations. A literature review should address different aspects of a topic as it relates to your research question. A literature review goes beyond a description or summary of the literature you have read. 

• Sage Research Methods Core Collection This link opens in a new window SAGE Research Methods supports research at all levels by providing material to guide users through every step of the research process. SAGE Research Methods is the ultimate methods library with more than 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, and instructional videos by world-leading academics from across the social sciences, including the largest collection of qualitative methods books available online from any scholarly publisher. – Publisher

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What are Literature Reviews?

So, what is a literature review? "A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries." Taylor, D.  The literature review: A few tips on conducting it . University of Toronto Health Sciences Writing Centre.

Goals of Literature Reviews

What are the goals of creating a Literature Review?  A literature could be written to accomplish different aims:

• To develop a theory or evaluate an existing theory
• To summarize the historical or existing state of a research topic
• Identify a problem in a field of research 

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1997). Writing narrative literature reviews .  Review of General Psychology , 1 (3), 311-320.

What kinds of sources require a Literature Review?

• A research paper assigned in a course
• A thesis or dissertation
• A grant proposal
• An article intended for publication in a journal

All these instances require you to collect what has been written about your research topic so that you can demonstrate how your own research sheds new light on the topic.

Types of Literature Reviews

What kinds of literature reviews are written?

Narrative review: The purpose of this type of review is to describe the current state of the research on a specific topic/research and to offer a critical analysis of the literature reviewed. Studies are grouped by research/theoretical categories, and themes and trends, strengths and weakness, and gaps are identified. The review ends with a conclusion section which summarizes the findings regarding the state of the research of the specific study, the gaps identify and if applicable, explains how the author's research will address gaps identify in the review and expand the knowledge on the topic reviewed.

• Example : Predictors and Outcomes of U.S. Quality Maternity Leave: A Review and Conceptual Framework:  10.1177/08948453211037398  

Systematic review : "The authors of a systematic review use a specific procedure to search the research literature, select the studies to include in their review, and critically evaluate the studies they find." (p. 139). Nelson, L. K. (2013). Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders . Plural Publishing.

• Example : The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review:  10.1057/s41599-022-01270-w

Meta-analysis : "Meta-analysis is a method of reviewing research findings in a quantitative fashion by transforming the data from individual studies into what is called an effect size and then pooling and analyzing this information. The basic goal in meta-analysis is to explain why different outcomes have occurred in different studies." (p. 197). Roberts, M. C., & Ilardi, S. S. (2003). Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology . Blackwell Publishing.

• Example : Employment Instability and Fertility in Europe: A Meta-Analysis:  10.1215/00703370-9164737

Meta-synthesis : "Qualitative meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative study that uses as data the findings from other qualitative studies linked by the same or related topic." (p.312). Zimmer, L. (2006). Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts .  Journal of Advanced Nursing , 53 (3), 311-318.

• Example : Women’s perspectives on career successes and barriers: A qualitative meta-synthesis:  10.1177/05390184221113735

Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences

• UConn Health subject guide on systematic reviews Explanation of the different review types used in health sciences literature as well as tools to help you find the right review type
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A Guide to Literature Reviews

Importance of a good literature review.

• Conducting the Literature Review
• Structure and Writing Style
• Types of Literature Reviews
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A literature review is not only a summary of key sources, but  has an organizational pattern which combines both summary and synthesis, often within specific conceptual categories . A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information in a way that informs how you are planning to investigate a research problem. The analytical features of a literature review might:

• Give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations,
• Trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates,
• Depending on the situation, evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant research, or
• Usually in the conclusion of a literature review, identify where gaps exist in how a problem has been researched to date.

The purpose of a literature review is to:

• Place each work in the context of its contribution to understanding the research problem being studied.
• Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration.
• Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
• Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature.
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies.
• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.
• Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research.
• Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important].
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Conducting a literature review: why do a literature review, why do a literature review.

• How To Find "The Literature"
• Found it -- Now What?

Besides the obvious reason for students -- because it is assigned! -- a literature review helps you explore the research that has come before you, to see how your research question has (or has not) already been addressed.

You identify:

• core research in the field
• experts in the subject area
• methodology you may want to use (or avoid)
• gaps in knowledge -- or where your research would fit in

It Also Helps You:

• Publish and share your findings
• Justify requests for grants and other funding
• Identify best practices to inform practice
• Set wider context for a program evaluation
• Compile information to support community organizing

Great brief overview, from NCSU

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A literature review surveys prior research published in books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by so doing, provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem being investigated. Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have used in researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within existing scholarship about the topic.

Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . Fourth edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2014.

Importance of a Good Literature Review

A literature review may consist of simply a summary of key sources, but in the social sciences, a literature review usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis, often within specific conceptual categories . A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information in a way that informs how you are planning to investigate a research problem. The analytical features of a literature review might:

• Give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations,
• Trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates,
• Depending on the situation, evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant research, or
• Usually in the conclusion of a literature review, identify where gaps exist in how a problem has been researched to date.

Given this, the purpose of a literature review is to:

• Place each work in the context of its contribution to understanding the research problem being studied.
• Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration.
• Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
• Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature.
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies.
• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort.
• Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research.
• Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important].

Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Jesson, Jill. Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2011; Knopf, Jeffrey W. "Doing a Literature Review." PS: Political Science and Politics 39 (January 2006): 127-132; Ridley, Diana. The Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide for Students . 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2012.

Types of Literature Reviews

It is important to think of knowledge in a given field as consisting of three layers. First, there are the primary studies that researchers conduct and publish. Second are the reviews of those studies that summarize and offer new interpretations built from and often extending beyond the primary studies. Third, there are the perceptions, conclusions, opinion, and interpretations that are shared informally among scholars that become part of the body of epistemological traditions within the field.

In composing a literature review, it is important to note that it is often this third layer of knowledge that is cited as "true" even though it often has only a loose relationship to the primary studies and secondary literature reviews. Given this, while literature reviews are designed to provide an overview and synthesis of pertinent sources you have explored, there are a number of approaches you could adopt depending upon the type of analysis underpinning your study.

Argumentative Review This form examines literature selectively in order to support or refute an argument, deeply embedded assumption, or philosophical problem already established in the literature. The purpose is to develop a body of literature that establishes a contrarian viewpoint. Given the value-laden nature of some social science research [e.g., educational reform; immigration control], argumentative approaches to analyzing the literature can be a legitimate and important form of discourse. However, note that they can also introduce problems of bias when they are used to make summary claims of the sort found in systematic reviews [see below].

Integrative Review Considered a form of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated. The body of literature includes all studies that address related or identical hypotheses or research problems. A well-done integrative review meets the same standards as primary research in regard to clarity, rigor, and replication. This is the most common form of review in the social sciences.

Historical Review Few things rest in isolation from historical precedent. Historical literature reviews focus on examining research throughout a period of time, often starting with the first time an issue, concept, theory, phenomena emerged in the literature, then tracing its evolution within the scholarship of a discipline. The purpose is to place research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the-art developments and to identify the likely directions for future research.

Methodological Review A review does not always focus on what someone said [findings], but how they came about saying what they say [method of analysis]. Reviewing methods of analysis provides a framework of understanding at different levels [i.e. those of theory, substantive fields, research approaches, and data collection and analysis techniques], how researchers draw upon a wide variety of knowledge ranging from the conceptual level to practical documents for use in fieldwork in the areas of ontological and epistemological consideration, quantitative and qualitative integration, sampling, interviewing, data collection, and data analysis. This approach helps highlight ethical issues which you should be aware of and consider as you go through your own study.

Systematic Review This form consists of an overview of existing evidence pertinent to a clearly formulated research question, which uses pre-specified and standardized methods to identify and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect, report, and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review. The goal is to deliberately document, critically evaluate, and summarize scientifically all of the research about a clearly defined research problem . Typically it focuses on a very specific empirical question, often posed in a cause-and-effect form, such as "To what extent does A contribute to B?" This type of literature review is primarily applied to examining prior research studies in clinical medicine and allied health fields, but it is increasingly being used in the social sciences.

Theoretical Review The purpose of this form is to examine the corpus of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue, concept, theory, phenomena. The theoretical literature review helps to establish what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what degree the existing theories have been investigated, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested. Often this form is used to help establish a lack of appropriate theories or reveal that current theories are inadequate for explaining new or emerging research problems. The unit of analysis can focus on a theoretical concept or a whole theory or framework.

NOTE : Most often the literature review will incorporate some combination of types. For example, a review that examines literature supporting or refuting an argument, assumption, or philosophical problem related to the research problem will also need to include writing supported by sources that establish the history of these arguments in the literature.

Baumeister, Roy F. and Mark R. Leary. "Writing Narrative Literature Reviews."  Review of General Psychology 1 (September 1997): 311-320; Mark R. Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Kennedy, Mary M. "Defining a Literature." Educational Researcher 36 (April 2007): 139-147; Petticrew, Mark and Helen Roberts. Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006; Torracro, Richard. "Writing Integrative Literature Reviews: Guidelines and Examples." Human Resource Development Review 4 (September 2005): 356-367; Rocco, Tonette S. and Maria S. Plakhotnik. "Literature Reviews, Conceptual Frameworks, and Theoretical Frameworks: Terms, Functions, and Distinctions." Human Ressource Development Review 8 (March 2008): 120-130; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016.

Structure and Writing Style

I.  Thinking About Your Literature Review

The structure of a literature review should include the following in support of understanding the research problem :

• An overview of the subject, issue, or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review,
• Division of works under review into themes or categories [e.g. works that support a particular position, those against, and those offering alternative approaches entirely],
• An explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others,
• Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research.

The critical evaluation of each work should consider :

• Provenance -- what are the author's credentials? Are the author's arguments supported by evidence [e.g. primary historical material, case studies, narratives, statistics, recent scientific findings]?
• Methodology -- were the techniques used to identify, gather, and analyze the data appropriate to addressing the research problem? Was the sample size appropriate? Were the results effectively interpreted and reported?
• Objectivity -- is the author's perspective even-handed or prejudicial? Is contrary data considered or is certain pertinent information ignored to prove the author's point?
• Persuasiveness -- which of the author's theses are most convincing or least convincing?
• Validity -- are the author's arguments and conclusions convincing? Does the work ultimately contribute in any significant way to an understanding of the subject?

II.  Development of the Literature Review

Four Basic Stages of Writing 1.  Problem formulation -- which topic or field is being examined and what are its component issues? 2.  Literature search -- finding materials relevant to the subject being explored. 3.  Data evaluation -- determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic. 4.  Analysis and interpretation -- discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature.

Consider the following issues before writing the literature review: Clarify If your assignment is not specific about what form your literature review should take, seek clarification from your professor by asking these questions: 1.  Roughly how many sources would be appropriate to include? 2.  What types of sources should I review (books, journal articles, websites; scholarly versus popular sources)? 3.  Should I summarize, synthesize, or critique sources by discussing a common theme or issue? 4.  Should I evaluate the sources in any way beyond evaluating how they relate to understanding the research problem? 5.  Should I provide subheadings and other background information, such as definitions and/or a history? Find Models Use the exercise of reviewing the literature to examine how authors in your discipline or area of interest have composed their literature review sections. Read them to get a sense of the types of themes you might want to look for in your own research or to identify ways to organize your final review. The bibliography or reference section of sources you've already read, such as required readings in the course syllabus, are also excellent entry points into your own research. Narrow the Topic The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to obtain a good survey of relevant resources. Your professor will probably not expect you to read everything that's available about the topic, but you'll make the act of reviewing easier if you first limit scope of the research problem. A good strategy is to begin by searching the USC Libraries Catalog for recent books about the topic and review the table of contents for chapters that focuses on specific issues. You can also review the indexes of books to find references to specific issues that can serve as the focus of your research. For example, a book surveying the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may include a chapter on the role Egypt has played in mediating the conflict, or look in the index for the pages where Egypt is mentioned in the text. Consider Whether Your Sources are Current Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. This is particularly true in disciplines in medicine and the sciences where research conducted becomes obsolete very quickly as new discoveries are made. However, when writing a review in the social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be required. In other words, a complete understanding the research problem requires you to deliberately examine how knowledge and perspectives have changed over time. Sort through other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to explore what is considered by scholars to be a "hot topic" and what is not.

III.  Ways to Organize Your Literature Review

Chronology of Events If your review follows the chronological method, you could write about the materials according to when they were published. This approach should only be followed if a clear path of research building on previous research can be identified and that these trends follow a clear chronological order of development. For example, a literature review that focuses on continuing research about the emergence of German economic power after the fall of the Soviet Union. By Publication Order your sources by publication chronology, then, only if the order demonstrates a more important trend. For instance, you could order a review of literature on environmental studies of brown fields if the progression revealed, for example, a change in the soil collection practices of the researchers who wrote and/or conducted the studies. Thematic [“conceptual categories”] A thematic literature review is the most common approach to summarizing prior research in the social and behavioral sciences. Thematic reviews are organized around a topic or issue, rather than the progression of time, although the progression of time may still be incorporated into a thematic review. For example, a review of the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics could focus on the development of online political satire. While the study focuses on one topic, the Internet’s impact on American presidential politics, it would still be organized chronologically reflecting technological developments in media. The difference in this example between a "chronological" and a "thematic" approach is what is emphasized the most: themes related to the role of the Internet in presidential politics. Note that more authentic thematic reviews tend to break away from chronological order. A review organized in this manner would shift between time periods within each section according to the point being made. Methodological A methodological approach focuses on the methods utilized by the researcher. For the Internet in American presidential politics project, one methodological approach would be to look at cultural differences between the portrayal of American presidents on American, British, and French websites. Or the review might focus on the fundraising impact of the Internet on a particular political party. A methodological scope will influence either the types of documents in the review or the way in which these documents are discussed.

Other Sections of Your Literature Review Once you've decided on the organizational method for your literature review, the sections you need to include in the paper should be easy to figure out because they arise from your organizational strategy. In other words, a chronological review would have subsections for each vital time period; a thematic review would have subtopics based upon factors that relate to the theme or issue. However, sometimes you may need to add additional sections that are necessary for your study, but do not fit in the organizational strategy of the body. What other sections you include in the body is up to you. However, only include what is necessary for the reader to locate your study within the larger scholarship about the research problem.

Here are examples of other sections, usually in the form of a single paragraph, you may need to include depending on the type of review you write:

• Current Situation : Information necessary to understand the current topic or focus of the literature review.
• Sources Used : Describes the methods and resources [e.g., databases] you used to identify the literature you reviewed.
• History : The chronological progression of the field, the research literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the body of the literature review is not already a chronology.
• Selection Methods : Criteria you used to select (and perhaps exclude) sources in your literature review. For instance, you might explain that your review includes only peer-reviewed [i.e., scholarly] sources.
• Standards : Description of the way in which you present your information.
• Questions for Further Research : What questions about the field has the review sparked? How will you further your research as a result of the review?

IV.  Writing Your Literature Review

Once you've settled on how to organize your literature review, you're ready to write each section. When writing your review, keep in mind these issues.

Use Evidence A literature review section is, in this sense, just like any other academic research paper. Your interpretation of the available sources must be backed up with evidence [citations] that demonstrates that what you are saying is valid. Be Selective Select only the most important points in each source to highlight in the review. The type of information you choose to mention should relate directly to the research problem, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological. Related items that provide additional information, but that are not key to understanding the research problem, can be included in a list of further readings . Use Quotes Sparingly Some short quotes are appropriate if you want to emphasize a point, or if what an author stated cannot be easily paraphrased. Sometimes you may need to quote certain terminology that was coined by the author, is not common knowledge, or taken directly from the study. Do not use extensive quotes as a substitute for using your own words in reviewing the literature. Summarize and Synthesize Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources within each thematic paragraph as well as throughout the review. Recapitulate important features of a research study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study's significance and relating it to your own work and the work of others. Keep Your Own Voice While the literature review presents others' ideas, your voice [the writer's] should remain front and center. For example, weave references to other sources into what you are writing but maintain your own voice by starting and ending the paragraph with your own ideas and wording. Use Caution When Paraphrasing When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be sure to represent the author's information or opinions accurately and in your own words. Even when paraphrasing an author’s work, you still must provide a citation to that work.

V.  Common Mistakes to Avoid

These are the most common mistakes made in reviewing social science research literature.

• Sources in your literature review do not clearly relate to the research problem;
• You do not take sufficient time to define and identify the most relevant sources to use in the literature review related to the research problem;
• Relies exclusively on secondary analytical sources rather than including relevant primary research studies or data;
• Uncritically accepts another researcher's findings and interpretations as valid, rather than examining critically all aspects of the research design and analysis;
• Does not describe the search procedures that were used in identifying the literature to review;
• Reports isolated statistical results rather than synthesizing them in chi-squared or meta-analytic methods; and,
• Only includes research that validates assumptions and does not consider contrary findings and alternative interpretations found in the literature.

Cook, Kathleen E. and Elise Murowchick. “Do Literature Review Skills Transfer from One Course to Another?” Psychology Learning and Teaching 13 (March 2014): 3-11; Fink, Arlene. Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998; Jesson, Jill. Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques . London: SAGE, 2011; Literature Review Handout. Online Writing Center. Liberty University; Literature Reviews. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J. and Rebecca Frels. Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2016; Ridley, Diana. The Literature Review: A Step-by-Step Guide for Students . 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2012; Randolph, Justus J. “A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review." Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation. vol. 14, June 2009; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016; Taylor, Dena. The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Writing a Literature Review. Academic Skills Centre. University of Canberra.

Writing Tip

Break Out of Your Disciplinary Box!

Thinking interdisciplinarily about a research problem can be a rewarding exercise in applying new ideas, theories, or concepts to an old problem. For example, what might cultural anthropologists say about the continuing conflict in the Middle East? In what ways might geographers view the need for better distribution of social service agencies in large cities than how social workers might study the issue? You don’t want to substitute a thorough review of core research literature in your discipline for studies conducted in other fields of study. However, particularly in the social sciences, thinking about research problems from multiple vectors is a key strategy for finding new solutions to a problem or gaining a new perspective. Consult with a librarian about identifying research databases in other disciplines; almost every field of study has at least one comprehensive database devoted to indexing its research literature.

Frodeman, Robert. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Another Writing Tip

Don't Just Review for Content!

While conducting a review of the literature, maximize the time you devote to writing this part of your paper by thinking broadly about what you should be looking for and evaluating. Review not just what scholars are saying, but how are they saying it. Some questions to ask:

• How are they organizing their ideas?
• What methods have they used to study the problem?
• What theories have been used to explain, predict, or understand their research problem?
• What sources have they cited to support their conclusions?
• How have they used non-textual elements [e.g., charts, graphs, figures, etc.] to illustrate key points?

When you begin to write your literature review section, you'll be glad you dug deeper into how the research was designed and constructed because it establishes a means for developing more substantial analysis and interpretation of the research problem.

Hart, Chris. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1 998.

Yet Another Writing Tip

When Do I Know I Can Stop Looking and Move On?

Here are several strategies you can utilize to assess whether you've thoroughly reviewed the literature:

• Look for repeating patterns in the research findings . If the same thing is being said, just by different people, then this likely demonstrates that the research problem has hit a conceptual dead end. At this point consider: Does your study extend current research?  Does it forge a new path? Or, does is merely add more of the same thing being said?
• Look at sources the authors cite to in their work . If you begin to see the same researchers cited again and again, then this is often an indication that no new ideas have been generated to address the research problem.
• Search Google Scholar to identify who has subsequently cited leading scholars already identified in your literature review [see next sub-tab]. This is called citation tracking and there are a number of sources that can help you identify who has cited whom, particularly scholars from outside of your discipline. Here again, if the same authors are being cited again and again, this may indicate no new literature has been written on the topic.

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J. and Rebecca Frels. Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach . Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2016; Sutton, Anthea. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review . Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2016.

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• Research Process

Literature Review in Research Writing

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Table of Contents

Research on research? If you find this idea rather peculiar, know that nowadays, with the huge amount of information produced daily all around the world, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep up to date with all of it. In addition to the sheer amount of research, there is also its origin. We are witnessing the economic and intellectual emergence of countries like China, Brazil, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates, for example, that are producing scholarly literature in their own languages. So, apart from the effort of gathering information, there must also be translators prepared to unify all of it in a single language to be the object of the literature survey. At Elsevier, our team of translators is ready to support researchers by delivering high-quality scientific translations , in several languages, to serve their research – no matter the topic.

What is a literature review?

A literature review is a study – or, more accurately, a survey – involving scholarly material, with the aim to discuss published information about a specific topic or research question. Therefore, to write a literature review, it is compulsory that you are a real expert in the object of study. The results and findings will be published and made available to the public, namely scientists working in the same area of research.

How to Write a Literature Review

First of all, don’t forget that writing a literature review is a great responsibility. It’s a document that is expected to be highly reliable, especially concerning its sources and findings. You have to feel intellectually comfortable in the area of study and highly proficient in the target language; misconceptions and errors do not have a place in a document as important as a literature review. In fact, you might want to consider text editing services, like those offered at Elsevier, to make sure your literature is following the highest standards of text quality. You want to make sure your literature review is memorable by its novelty and quality rather than language errors.

Writing a literature review requires expertise but also organization. We cannot teach you about your topic of research, but we can provide a few steps to guide you through conducting a literature review:

• Choose your topic or research question: It should not be too comprehensive or too limited. You have to complete your task within a feasible time frame.
• Set the scope: Define boundaries concerning the number of sources, time frame to be covered, geographical area, etc.
• Decide which databases you will use for your searches: In order to search the best viable sources for your literature review, use highly regarded, comprehensive databases to get a big picture of the literature related to your topic.
• Search, search, and search: Now you’ll start to investigate the research on your topic. It’s critical that you keep track of all the sources. Start by looking at research abstracts in detail to see if their respective studies relate to or are useful for your own work. Next, search for bibliographies and references that can help you broaden your list of resources. Choose the most relevant literature and remember to keep notes of their bibliographic references to be used later on.
• Review all the literature, appraising carefully it’s content: After reading the study’s abstract, pay attention to the rest of the content of the articles you deem the “most relevant.” Identify methodologies, the most important questions they address, if they are well-designed and executed, and if they are cited enough, etc.

If it’s the first time you’ve published a literature review, note that it is important to follow a special structure. Just like in a thesis, for example, it is expected that you have an introduction – giving the general idea of the central topic and organizational pattern – a body – which contains the actual discussion of the sources – and finally the conclusion or recommendations – where you bring forward whatever you have drawn from the reviewed literature. The conclusion may even suggest there are no agreeable findings and that the discussion should be continued.

Why are literature reviews important?

Literature reviews constantly feed new research, that constantly feeds literature reviews…and we could go on and on. The fact is, one acts like a force over the other and this is what makes science, as a global discipline, constantly develop and evolve. As a scientist, writing a literature review can be very beneficial to your career, and set you apart from the expert elite in your field of interest. But it also can be an overwhelming task, so don’t hesitate in contacting Elsevier for text editing services, either for profound edition or just a last revision. We guarantee the very highest standards. You can also save time by letting us suggest and make the necessary amendments to your manuscript, so that it fits the structural pattern of a literature review. Who knows how many worldwide researchers you will impact with your next perfectly written literature review.

Know more: How to Find a Gap in Research .

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Conducting a Literature Review

Benefits of conducting a literature review.

• Steps in Conducting a Literature Review
• Summary of the Process
• Additional Resources
• Literature Review Tutorial by American University Library
• The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It by University of Toronto
• Write a Literature Review by UC Santa Cruz University Library

While there might be many reasons for conducting a literature review, following are four key outcomes of doing the review.

Assessment of the current state of research on a topic . This is probably the most obvious value of the literature review. Once a researcher has determined an area to work with for a research project, a search of relevant information sources will help determine what is already known about the topic and how extensively the topic has already been researched.

Identification of the experts on a particular topic . One of the additional benefits derived from doing the literature review is that it will quickly reveal which researchers have written the most on a particular topic and are, therefore, probably the experts on the topic. Someone who has written twenty articles on a topic or on related topics is more than likely more knowledgeable than someone who has written a single article. This same writer will likely turn up as a reference in most of the other articles written on the same topic. From the number of articles written by the author and the number of times the writer has been cited by other authors, a researcher will be able to assume that the particular author is an expert in the area and, thus, a key resource for consultation in the current research to be undertaken.

Identification of key questions about a topic that need further research . In many cases a researcher may discover new angles that need further exploration by reviewing what has already been written on a topic. For example, research may suggest that listening to music while studying might lead to better retention of ideas, but the research might not have assessed whether a particular style of music is more beneficial than another. A researcher who is interested in pursuing this topic would then do well to follow up existing studies with a new study, based on previous research, that tries to identify which styles of music are most beneficial to retention.

Determination of methodologies used in past studies of the same or similar topics.  It is often useful to review the types of studies that previous researchers have launched as a means of determining what approaches might be of most benefit in further developing a topic. By the same token, a review of previously conducted studies might lend itself to researchers determining a new angle for approaching research.

Upon completion of the literature review, a researcher should have a solid foundation of knowledge in the area and a good feel for the direction any new research should take. Should any additional questions arise during the course of the research, the researcher will know which experts to consult in order to quickly clear up those questions.

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Research Methods

• Getting Started
• Literature Review Research
• Research Design
• Research Design By Discipline
• SAGE Research Methods
• Teaching with SAGE Research Methods

Literature Review

• What is a Literature Review?
• What is NOT a Literature Review?
• Purposes of a Literature Review
• Types of Literature Reviews
• Literature Reviews vs. Systematic Reviews
• Systematic vs. Meta-Analysis

Literature Review  is a comprehensive survey of the works published in a particular field of study or line of research, usually over a specific period of time, in the form of an in-depth, critical bibliographic essay or annotated list in which attention is drawn to the most significant works.

Also, we can define a literature review as the collected body of scholarly works related to a topic:

• Summarizes and analyzes previous research relevant to a topic
• Includes scholarly books and articles published in academic journals
• Can be an specific scholarly paper or a section in a research paper

The objective of a Literature Review is to find previous published scholarly works relevant to an specific topic

• Help gather ideas or information
• Keep up to date in current trends and findings
• Help develop new questions

A literature review is important because it:

• Explains the background of research on a topic.
• Demonstrates why a topic is significant to a subject area.
• Helps focus your own research questions or problems
• Discovers relationships between research studies/ideas.
• Suggests unexplored ideas or populations
• Identifies major themes, concepts, and researchers on a topic.
• Tests assumptions; may help counter preconceived ideas and remove unconscious bias.
• Identifies critical gaps, points of disagreement, or potentially flawed methodology or theoretical approaches.
• Indicates potential directions for future research.

All content in this section is from Literature Review Research from Old Dominion University 

Keep in mind the following, a literature review is NOT:

Not an essay 

Not an annotated bibliography  in which you summarize each article that you have reviewed.  A literature review goes beyond basic summarizing to focus on the critical analysis of the reviewed works and their relationship to your research question.

Not a research paper   where you select resources to support one side of an issue versus another.  A lit review should explain and consider all sides of an argument in order to avoid bias, and areas of agreement and disagreement should be highlighted.

A literature review serves several purposes. For example, it

• provides thorough knowledge of previous studies; introduces seminal works.
• helps focus one’s own research topic.
• identifies a conceptual framework for one’s own research questions or problems; indicates potential directions for future research.
• suggests previously unused or underused methodologies, designs, quantitative and qualitative strategies.
• identifies gaps in previous studies; identifies flawed methodologies and/or theoretical approaches; avoids replication of mistakes.
• helps the researcher avoid repetition of earlier research.
• suggests unexplored populations.
• determines whether past studies agree or disagree; identifies controversy in the literature.
• tests assumptions; may help counter preconceived ideas and remove unconscious bias.

As Kennedy (2007) notes*, it is important to think of knowledge in a given field as consisting of three layers. First, there are the primary studies that researchers conduct and publish. Second are the reviews of those studies that summarize and offer new interpretations built from and often extending beyond the original studies. Third, there are the perceptions, conclusions, opinion, and interpretations that are shared informally that become part of the lore of field. In composing a literature review, it is important to note that it is often this third layer of knowledge that is cited as "true" even though it often has only a loose relationship to the primary studies and secondary literature reviews.

Given this, while literature reviews are designed to provide an overview and synthesis of pertinent sources you have explored, there are several approaches to how they can be done, depending upon the type of analysis underpinning your study. Listed below are definitions of types of literature reviews:

Argumentative Review      This form examines literature selectively in order to support or refute an argument, deeply imbedded assumption, or philosophical problem already established in the literature. The purpose is to develop a body of literature that establishes a contrarian viewpoint. Given the value-laden nature of some social science research [e.g., educational reform; immigration control], argumentative approaches to analyzing the literature can be a legitimate and important form of discourse. However, note that they can also introduce problems of bias when they are used to to make summary claims of the sort found in systematic reviews.

Integrative Review      Considered a form of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesizes representative literature on a topic in an integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated. The body of literature includes all studies that address related or identical hypotheses. A well-done integrative review meets the same standards as primary research in regard to clarity, rigor, and replication.

Historical Review      Few things rest in isolation from historical precedent. Historical reviews are focused on examining research throughout a period of time, often starting with the first time an issue, concept, theory, phenomena emerged in the literature, then tracing its evolution within the scholarship of a discipline. The purpose is to place research in a historical context to show familiarity with state-of-the-art developments and to identify the likely directions for future research.

Methodological Review      A review does not always focus on what someone said [content], but how they said it [method of analysis]. This approach provides a framework of understanding at different levels (i.e. those of theory, substantive fields, research approaches and data collection and analysis techniques), enables researchers to draw on a wide variety of knowledge ranging from the conceptual level to practical documents for use in fieldwork in the areas of ontological and epistemological consideration, quantitative and qualitative integration, sampling, interviewing, data collection and data analysis, and helps highlight many ethical issues which we should be aware of and consider as we go through our study.

Systematic Review      This form consists of an overview of existing evidence pertinent to a clearly formulated research question, which uses pre-specified and standardized methods to identify and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect, report, and analyse data from the studies that are included in the review. Typically it focuses on a very specific empirical question, often posed in a cause-and-effect form, such as "To what extent does A contribute to B?"

Theoretical Review      The purpose of this form is to concretely examine the corpus of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue, concept, theory, phenomena. The theoretical literature review help establish what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what degree the existing theories have been investigated, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested. Often this form is used to help establish a lack of appropriate theories or reveal that current theories are inadequate for explaining new or emerging research problems. The unit of analysis can focus on a theoretical concept or a whole theory or framework.

* Kennedy, Mary M. "Defining a Literature."  Educational Researcher  36 (April 2007): 139-147.

All content in this section is from The Literature Review created by Dr. Robert Larabee USC

Robinson, P. and Lowe, J. (2015),  Literature reviews vs systematic reviews.  Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 39: 103-103. doi: 10.1111/1753-6405.12393

What's in the name? The difference between a Systematic Review and a Literature Review, and why it matters . By Lynn Kysh from University of Southern California

Systematic review or meta-analysis?

A  systematic review  answers a defined research question by collecting and summarizing all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria.

A  meta-analysis  is the use of statistical methods to summarize the results of these studies.

Systematic reviews, just like other research articles, can be of varying quality. They are a significant piece of work (the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at York estimates that a team will take 9-24 months), and to be useful to other researchers and practitioners they should have:

• clearly stated objectives with pre-defined eligibility criteria for studies
• explicit, reproducible methodology
• a systematic search that attempts to identify all studies
• assessment of the validity of the findings of the included studies (e.g. risk of bias)
• systematic presentation, and synthesis, of the characteristics and findings of the included studies

Not all systematic reviews contain meta-analysis. 

Meta-analysis is the use of statistical methods to summarize the results of independent studies. By combining information from all relevant studies, meta-analysis can provide more precise estimates of the effects of health care than those derived from the individual studies included within a review.  More information on meta-analyses can be found in  Cochrane Handbook, Chapter 9 .

A meta-analysis goes beyond critique and integration and conducts secondary statistical analysis on the outcomes of similar studies.  It is a systematic review that uses quantitative methods to synthesize and summarize the results.

An advantage of a meta-analysis is the ability to be completely objective in evaluating research findings.  Not all topics, however, have sufficient research evidence to allow a meta-analysis to be conducted.  In that case, an integrative review is an appropriate strategy. 

Some of the content in this section is from Systematic reviews and meta-analyses: step by step guide created by Kate McAllister.

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• Open access
• Published: 29 August 2022

Enhancing health and wellness by, for and with Indigenous youth in Canada: a scoping review

• Udoka Okpalauwaekwe 1 ,
• Clifford Ballantyne 2 ,
• Scott Tunison 3 &
• Vivian R. Ramsden 4  

BMC Public Health volume  22 , Article number:  1630 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Indigenous youth in Canada face profound health inequities which are shaped by the rippling effects of intergenerational trauma, caused by the historical and contemporary colonial policies that reinforce negative stereotypes regarding them. Moreover, wellness promotion strategies for these youth are replete with individualistic Western concepts that excludes avenues for them to access holistic practices grounded in their culture. Our scoping review explored strategies, approaches, and ways health and wellness can be enhanced by, for, and with Indigenous youth in Canada by identifying barriers/roadblocks and facilitators/strengths to enhancing wellness among Indigenous youth in Canada.

We applied a systematic approach to searching and critically reviewing peer-reviewed literature using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews [PRISMA-ScR] as a reporting guideline. Our search strategy focused on specific keywords and MeSH terms for three major areas: Indigenous youth, health, and Canada. We used these keywords, to systematically search the following electronic databases published in English between January 01, 2017, to May 22, 2021: Medline [Ovid], PubMed, ERIC, Web of Science, Scopus, and iportal. We also used hand-searching and snowballing methods to identify relevant articles. Data collected were analysed for contents and themes.

From an initial 1695 articles collated, 20 articles met inclusion criteria for this review. Key facilitators/strengths to enhancing health and wellness by, for, and with Indigenous youth that emerged from our review included: promoting culturally appropriate interventions to engage Indigenous youth; using strength-based approaches; reliance on the wisdom of community Elders; taking responsibility; and providing access to wellness supports. Key barriers/roadblocks included: lack of community support for wellness promotion activities among Indigenous youth; structural/organizational issues within Indigenous communities; discrimination and social exclusion; cultural illiteracy among youth; cultural discordance with mainstream health systems and services; and addictions and risky behaviours.

This scoping review extracted 20 relevant articles about ways to engage Indigenous youth in health and wellness enhancement. Our findings demonstrate the importance of promoting health by, and with Indigenous youth, by engaging them in activities reflexive of their cultural norms, rather than imposing control measures that are incompatible with their value systems.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

The term ‘Indigenous’ is internationally recognized to describe a distinct group of people that live within or are attached to geographically distinct ancestral territories [ 1 , 2 ]. In Canada, the term Indigenous is an inclusive term used to refer to the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, each of which has unique histories, cultural traditions, languages, and beliefs [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. Indigenous peoples are the fastest-growing population in Canada, with a population estimated at 1.8 million, which is 5.1% of the Canadian population [ 6 , 7 ]. Within this population, 63% identify as First Nation, 33% as Métis, and 4% as Inuit [ 6 , 7 ]. Indigenous youth are the youngest population in Canada, with over 50% of Indigenous youth under 25 years [ 7 ]. Projections of Indigenous peoples in Canada have estimated a 33.3 to 78.7% increase in Indigenous populations, with the youth making up the largest proportion of the Indigenous population by 2041 [ 6 , 7 ].

Before European contact in North America, Indigenous peoples in Canada lived and thrived with their cultures, languages, and distinct ways of knowing [ 2 ]. However, Indigenous peoples in Canada rank lower in almost every health determinant when compared with non-Indigenous Canadians [ 8 , 9 , 10 ]. A report on health disparities in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, described First Nations peoples to be “more likely to experience poor health outcomes in essentially every indicator possible” (page 27) [ 11 ]. This greater burden of ill health among Indigenous peoples in Canada has been attributed to systemic racism (associated with differences in power, resources, capacities, and opportunities) [ 9 , 10 , 12 , 13 ] and intergenerational trauma (stemming from the past and ongoing legacy of colonization such as experienced through the Indian residential and Day school systems, the Sixties Scoop, and the ongoing waves of Indigenous child and youth apprehensions seen in the foster and child care structures that remove Indigenous children from their family, community and traditional lands) [ 3 , 9 , 10 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. These traumatic historical events, along with ongoing inequities, such as: socioeconomic and environmental dispossession; loss of language; disruption of ties to Indigenous families, community, land and cultural traditions; have been reported to exacerbate drastically and cumulatively the physical, mental, social and spiritual health of Indigenous peoples in Canada, creating “soul wounds” (3 p.208) that require interventions beyond the Westernized biomedical models of health and healing [ 3 , 9 , 10 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ].

In the same way, Indigenous youth in Canada face some of the most profound health inequities when compared with non-Indigenous youth which can be further shaped by the rippling effects of intergenerational trauma caused by the historical and contemporary colonial policies that reinforce or legitimize negative stereotypes regarding Indigenous youth in Canada [ 2 , 10 , 14 , 20 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ]. When compared with their non-Indigenous peers, Indigenous youth in Canada have been reported to be more likely to have higher rates of chronic conditions [e.g., diabetes, obesity, chronic respiratory diseases, heart diseases, etc.] [ 14 ], discrimination [ 28 , 29 ], youth incarceration and state care [ 12 , 20 , 30 ], poverty [ 31 ], homelessness [ 32 ], higher adverse mental health conditions [ 20 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 ], higher suicide rates [ 33 , 38 , 39 ], and lower overall life expectancies [ 24 , 40 , 41 , 42 ].

Indigenous peoples’ perception of health and wellness is shaped by their worldview and traditional knowledge [ 43 , 44 ]. While the Western concept of health broadly defines health as the state of complete physical, mental, social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease [ 45 ], Indigenous peoples understand health in a holistic way [ 26 ] that seeks balance between the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of an Indigenous person in reciprocal relationships with their families, communities, the land, the environment, their ancestors, and future generations [ 46 , 47 , 48 ]. Unfortunately, this holistic concept of health and wellness opposes the individualistic and biomedically focused Western worldview of health, which is a dominant lens commonly used in health research, projects, and programs involving Indigenous communities [ 46 ]. This practice further perpetuates the legacy of colonization and excludes avenues for Indigenous communities to access holistic healing practices “grounded in their culture” [ 43 , 49 , 50 ]. For example, health research involving Indigenous peoples in Canada tends to focus on Indigenous health deficits and identified social determinants in the communities, more often and without proper representation [ 43 ]. Additionally, there is the imposition of research on rather than with youth [ 43 , 44 ]; and the failure to acknowledge Indigenous worldviews in research, to ensure in benefits them [ 43 ].

Authentically engaging with Indigenous youth has been cited by Indigenous scholars as one of the ways of achieving and enhancing wellness by, for, and with youth [ 51 , 52 ]. This is characterized by meaningful and sustained involvement of the youth in program planning, development, and decision-making to promote self-confidence and positive relationships [ 53 ]. Authentic engagement involves working with rather than on youth as research partners or program planning participants [ 54 ]. This shift to working with rather than on implies respect for the knowledge of the lived experiences of the youth involved [ 54 , 55 , 56 ] and is based on meaningful relationships built over time among all involved [ 53 , 57 , 58 ]. Research has shown that engaging youth (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) as partners in a project/program fosters a sense of belonging, self-determination, and self-actualization within their community; thus, enhancing community wellness [ 54 , 56 , 58 , 59 ].

This paper explores what is known in the peer-reviewed literature about strategies, approaches, and ways to engage Indigenous youth in health and wellness enhancement. Our main objective is to use information gathered from this review to inform youth engagement strategies, by considering the facilitators/strengths and barriers/roadblocks to enhancing wellness with Indigenous youth. We define facilitators in this context as factors that improve, enhance, strengthen, or motivate a journey to health, wellness, and self-determination. These are considered ‘strengths’ in the language of Indigenous peoples as they support equitable strength-based pathways towards reconciliation. Conversely, barriers are roadblocks, and demotivating factors or processes that limit and challenge Indigenous peoples’ access to achieving health and wellness. Our overarching research question was, in what ways can Indigenous youth enhance health and wellness for themselves, their family, and the Indigenous communities where they live?

Sub-questions included:

What factors do Indigenous youth in Canada identify as facilitators/strengths to enhancing health and wellness?

What factors do Indigenous youth in Canada identify as barriers/roadblocks to enhancing health and wellness?

Methodology and methods

Scoping reviews help provide an overview of the research available on a given area of interest where evidence is emerging [ 60 ]. While there are several accepted approaches to such reviews, this scoping review was undertaken using the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Guideline for scoping reviews [ 61 ]. This approach was based on the Arksey and O’Malley methodological framework [ 62 ], which was further advanced by Levac et al. [ 60 ], and Peter et al. [ 61 ]. Our search strategy focused on primary sources that elucidated youth-driven, youth-led, or youth-engaged strategies carried out by, for, and with Indigenous youth to enhance health and wellness. We chose to explore all health programs and research inquiry that explore health challenges on the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of an Indigenous person to encompass the definition of health and wellness as defined and understood from an Indigenous perspective. This scoping review is reported in accordance with the guidelines provided in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) [ 63 ]. See Supplementary material file 1 for PRISMA-SCR checklist.

Protocol registration and reporting information

There was no pre-published or registered protocol before the commencement of this study.

Eligibility criteria

Types of studies.

A priori inclusion criteria for articles in this study included: 1] peer-reviewed journal articles reporting health and wellness programs, initiatives, and/or strategies among Indigenous youth in Canada, and 2] peer-reviewed journal articles published between January 01, 2017, to May 22, 2021. We chose a 5-year time frame to limit our findings to the most updated peer-reviewed literature which could provide implications for the growing body of work done in the field of Indigenous research among youth. Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, study protocols, opinion pieces, and narrative reviews were excluded.

Participants

Peer-reviewed studies involving Indigenous youth (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) in Canada were eligible for inclusion. We considered the fluidity of definitions for youth by age range as literature sources generally defined youth in stages between adolescence to early adulthood [ 6 , 64 , 65 ]. In Canada, the Government of Canada uses several age brackets to identify youth depending on context, program, or policies in question. For example, Statistics Canada defines youth as between 15 to 29 years [ 6 ], Health Canada in the first State of Youth Report defined youth as between 12 to 30 years [ 65 ] when referring to statistical reports, and as between 13 to 36 years when referring to youth-led programs and policies [ 65 ]. However, for the purposes of this review we defined and referred to Indigenous youth or young people as between 10 to 24 years to be more representative of a broader definition of youth which is in keeping with Indigenous peoples’ worldviews, languages, and cultures and more representative of a broader definition of youth as offered by Sawyer et al. [ 64 ].

Information sources and search strategy

With the assistance of an Academic Reference Librarian, search terms were identified, which were categorized and combined into three conceptual MeSH terms that we adapted for the database-specific search strategy. These terms included: Indigenous youth (including synonyms and MeSH terms), health (including synonyms and MeSH terms) and Canada. Thus, studies were then identified for this scoping review by searching electronic databases and hand-searching reference lists of included articles.

Initially, the following databases (Medline (Ovid), PubMed, ERIC, Web of Science and Scopus) were used to identify relevant articles published between January 1, 2017, and April 30, 2021. This constituted our first search. We then carried out a second search (updated search) on May 22, 2021, using the same search queries on the same library databases; in addition, we included the University of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous Studies Portal (iPortal) [ 66 ] to ensure we had as many hits as possible for our search query on focused studies with Indigenous communities. To ensure exhaustiveness, we employed hand-searching techniques and snowballing methods to identify articles relevant to the research questions by reviewing reference lists of relevant articles that met the eligibility criteria. Following this, all the identified articles were collated in Endnote Reference Manager version X9.3 [ 67 ] and exported, after removing duplicates, into Distiller SR [ 68 ], a web-based systematic review and meta-analysis software. The syntax used on electronic databases and the University of Saskatchewan’s iPortal to identify potentially relevant articles for inclusion into this review study is outlined in Table  1 .

Selection of sources of evidence

Two iterative stages were employed to select sources of evidence for this review study. First, we created screening, coding, and data extraction forms using Distiller SR [ 68 ] for each stage. In the first stage, UO screened titles and abstracts of all articles using the following keywords: Indigenous youth; health; wellness; engagement and Canada. In the second stage, UO independently screened and reviewed the full-text articles (FTAs) of citations included from the first stage. The questions in Table  2 were used to screen the eligibility for inclusion of the article for data extraction. A second reviewer (ST) also independently reviewed and screened every 10th FTA citation from the first phase to check inter-rater reliability.

Data charting process and data items

Data were extracted using a pre-designed data extraction form on DistillerSR [ 68 ]. All extracted data were exported into Microsoft Excel [ 69 ] for data cleaning and analysis. The title fields used to extract data from included articles are shown in Table  3 .

Critical appraisal of individual sources of evidence

Conjointly, UO and CB appraised each article included considering characteristics and methodological quality using the JBI Critical Appraisal Tool for qualitative and quantitative studies [ 70 ]. The JBI Critical Appraisal Tool was designed to evaluate the rigour, trustworthiness, relevance, and potential for bias in study designs, conduct, and analysis [ 70 ]. Results on the critical appraisals are summarized in Supplementary material file  2 .

Synthesis of results

We categorized findings in this review as facilitators/strengths and barriers/roadblocks to enhancing wellness by, for, and with Indigenous youth, further describing how youth described wellness promotion. We met weekly via videoconference to discuss, review, and revisit our study evaluation protocol to ensure we adhered strictly to the scoping review guidelines.

As a result of our literature search, 1671 articles from five library databases and 24 articles through hand-search and snowball methods were identified. Of the 1695 articles, 253 were excluded as duplicates on EndNote vX9.3 using the ‘remove duplicates’ function on the software. Another 1227 articles were excluded following screening of title and abstracts on Distiller SR which we had fed with a series of screening questions (see Table 2 ) that were reviewed independently by two reviewers (UO and ST). Inter-rater reliability (Cohen’s kappa) calculated was 0.886, standard error = 0.147, p -value = 0.001. Where there were conflicts in article inclusion ratings, a third reviewer (CB), was brought in to discuss and provide a resolution. This left 215 articles for full-text article (FTA) screening. After reviewing 215 FTAs, a further 195 articles were excluded, leaving 20 articles for inclusion into the final review. Articles were excluded in the eligibility stage for the following reasons, 1) articles not focused on Indigenous youth or Indigenous communities, 2) articles not focused on Indigenous health and/or wellness, 3) articles not primarily focused in Canadian settings, 4) articles not written in English, 5) articles considered irrelevant or not applicable to addressing the research objectives or research questions of our study, 6) articles other than original research (i.e., we excluded review studies, opinion papers, and conference abstracts). A flowchart of article selection can be found in Fig.  1 .

PRISMA flowchart showing selection of articles for scoping review

Characteristics of sources of evidence

The general and methodological characteristics of all 20 included articles are summarized in Table  4 . Of these, one study was published in 2017, two in 2018, eleven in 2019, four in 2020 and two in 2021. Five (25%) studies that were included were set in the province of Ontario, four (20%) in the province of Saskatchewan, three (15%) in the Northwest Territories and two in the province of Alberta. Fifty percent (10/20) of the studies recruited or focused on Indigenous (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) people as study participants, seven (35%) studies recruited or concentrated on First Nations peoples only, and three (15%), on Inuit peoples only. Sixteen (80%) articles were qualitative studies, three (15%) used mixed methods, and one (5%) was a quantitative study. Eleven (55%) studies used participatory research approaches (which included photovoice, community-based participatory research (CBPR) or participatory action research (PAR)) in their study designs, seven (35%) integrated Indigenous research methods (e.g., the two-eyed seeing approach) into their study design, and five (25%) studies used descriptive or inferential evaluation strategies in their study design. Interviews, focus-group discussions, and discussion circles were the most common data collection methodology used in 17 (85%) of the studies included. Youth were commonly engaged in non-cultural activities in twelve (60%) of the studies and employed a youth-adult co-led strategy in 16 (80%) of the included studies.

Results of individual sources of evidence

All included studies provided answers relevant to one or more of the research questions with the potential for changing practice and strategies for engagement. All the included studies explored, investigated, or evaluated issues addressing health and wellness among Indigenous youth in Canada. The age range of youth involved in included studies ranged between 11 to 24 years. All studies utilized fun and interactive strategies to engage youth in their respective studies with the outcomes aimed at promoting health, developing capacity in youth participants and engaging youth in collaborating on sustainable outcomes for and with their communities [ 5 , 8 , 40 , 44 , 57 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ], save for one [ 16 ]. The summary of individual sources of evidence is described in Table  5 .

The key facilitators/strengths and barriers/roadblocks to enhancing health and wellness by, for, and with Indigenous youth that emerged from the included studies are described in Table  6 , in descending order of major themes for the frequency of citation by included articles per theme. The facilitators/strengths and barriers/roadblocks have also been categorized into sub-themes under five major themes for facilitators/strengths and six major themes for barriers/roadblocks. Health outcomes/programs examined by included studies included suicide prevention [ 40 ], mental health promotion [ 71 , 74 ], HIV prevention [ 75 ], wellness promotion through youth empowerment and cultural activism [5, 8, 16, 57, 72,,76, 77, 78,79, 80], social health [ 76 , 83 ], land-based healing and wellness [ 77 , 82 ], art-media based therapy and wellness [ 44 , 73 , 81 , 84 ]. An overview of the facilitators/strengths and barriers/roadblocks to enhancing health and wellness by, for, and with Indigenous youth is presented in Fig.  2 .

Summary of facilitators/strengths and barriers/roadblocks to enhancing wellness by, for and with Indigenous youth

Facilitators/strengths to enhancing health and wellness by, for, and with indigenous youth

Five major themes emerged and were identified as facilitators/strengths to enhancing health and wellness by, for, and with Indigenous youth in Canada. The most identified facilitator/strength of health and wellness among Indigenous youth in Canada, identified in 19 [95%] of the included studies, was the promotion of strength-based approaches to engaging with youth in the community [ 5 , 8 , 16 , 44 , 57 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ]. A number of sub-themes also emerged from this major theme to include: peer-mentoring [ 5 , 8 , 44 , 57 , 71 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ]; engaging youth in programs that developed and promoted self-determination, capacity building and empowerment [ 5 , 8 , 44 , 57 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 82 , 83 , 84 ]; building positive relationships and social connections with others, nature and the environment [ 5 , 8 , 44 , 57 , 72 , 73 , 76 , 77 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ]; showing kindness to one another [ 5 , 16 , 44 , 57 , 77 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 83 ]; and engaging youth in cultural activities [ 57 , 76 , 82 , 83 ] that stimulate or encourage mutual learning, enhance critical consciousness and cause transformative change [ 5 , 8 , 75 , 76 , 79 , 81 ]. The next most common facilitator identified in 16 [80%] of included studies was enhancing cultural identity and connectedness through youth engagement in cultural activities [ 8 , 16 , 40 , 44 , 57 , 71 , 72 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ]. Other facilitators included: reliance on the wisdom, skills, and teachings of community Elders, Traditional Knowledge Keepers and community leaders in the pursuit of health and wellness promotion with Indigenous youth [ 5 , 16 , 44 , 72 , 77 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 83 , 84 ]; taking responsibility for one’s journey to wellness [ 44 , 57 , 72 , 74 , 79 , 80 , 82 , 83 ]; and providing access to health services and other wellness supports (including traditional health services) for youth in Indigenous communities [ 76 , 78 ]. A summary of the facilitators/strengths is provided in Fig. 2 .

Barriers/roadblocks to enhancing health and wellness by, for, and with indigenous youth

Six major themes emerged and identified as barriers/roadblocks to enhancing health and wellness by, for and with Indigenous youth in Canada. The most identified barrier/roadblock to enhancing health and wellness identified in 55% (11/20) of the included articles was a lack of community support [including social, financial, and organizational support] for wellness promotion strategies among Indigenous youth [ 5 , 44 , 57 , 72 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 80 , 81 ]. Structural and organizational issues within Indigenous communities regarding wellness promotion strategies were identified as the second most common barrier/roadblock to enhancing wellness in 50% [10/20] of included studies [ 5 , 8 , 72 , 73 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 81 , 82 , 83 ]. These structural and organizational issues included: Indigenous community problems or concerns affecting the sustainability of instituted wellness programs/strategies [ 5 , 8 , 78 , 81 ]; dogmatism and debates about definitions regarding traditions of health among Indigenous communities [ 72 , 77 , 82 , 83 ]; social and structural instability within communities (e.g., leadership concerns) [ 8 , 76 , 83 ]; modest to low capacity of service providers (e.g. vendors, health service centers, social service centers, etc.) to meet the demands of communities [ 73 , 78 , 81 ]; and the misperception of a lack of control for self-governance in Indigenous communities [ 81 ]. Discrimination and social exclusion of Indigenous youth were also identified as a barrier/roadblock to enhancing wellness in eight (40%) studies included [ 5 , 8 , 44 , 57 , 74 , 76 , 80 , 83 ]. Forms of discrimination and social exclusion identified as subthemes included: Racism (e.g., personal, interpersonal, structural and systemic racism) [ 5 , 8 , 76 , 80 , 83 ]; low self-esteem and a low view of self-identity leading to self-deprecation and self-exclusion from engaging in youth activities [ 8 , 44 , 76 , 80 , 83 ]; mental health stigmatization [ 73 , 74 , 76 ]; lack of inclusivity of traditional Indigenous activities into Canadian teaching institutions [ 76 , 77 ]; and all forms of bullying, abuse and hunger [ 57 , 80 ]. Other barriers/roadblocks included: cultural illiteracy among Indigenous youth [ 44 , 57 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 83 , 84 ]; friction between Western and Traditional methods of promoting health and wellness [ 5 , 74 , 76 , 77 ]; and risky behaviours such as gang activity, substance use/abuse and addictions [ 44 , 57 , 75 , 76 , 80 ]. A summary of the barriers/roadblocks is provided in Fig. 2 .

Scoping reviews determine the extent, range, and quality of evidence on any chosen topic [ 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 ]. In addition, they can be used to map and describe what is known about an identified topic to identify existing gaps in the literature regarding the chosen topic [ 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 ]. In this scoping review, the peer-reviewed evidence regarding facilitators/strengths and barriers/roadblocks to enhancing health and wellness by, for and with Indigenous youth in Canada were mapped and synthesized. Key facilitators/strengths highlighted included: promoting culturally appropriate interventions [ 8 , 16 , 40 , 44 , 57 , 71 , 72 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ] using strength-based approaches [ 5 , 8 , 16 , 44 , 57 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ]. Key barriers to enhancing health and wellness by, for and with Indigenous youth identified in this review were the lack of community support for wellness promotion activities among Indigenous youth [ 5 , 44 , 57 , 72 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 80 , 81 ] and structural/organizational issues within Indigenous communities [ 5 , 8 , 72 , 73 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 81 , 82 , 83 ].

Strength-based approaches empower community members, academic researchers, and policymakers to effect community change while focusing on what has worked in the past and the community vision for success in the future [ 79 ]. This is contrasted with the common narrative in most studies exploring Indigenous health and wellness that focused on why and where the community has failed to thrive [ 79 ]. Promoting strength-based interventions by, for, and with Indigenous youth works in parallel with ensuring that health interventions are culturally appropriate [ 44 , 79 ] because Indigenous epistemologies or ways of knowing see reality as intricate processes of interdependent relationships between humans, nature, and the spirit world [ 44 , 77 ]. As such, wellness promotion in Indigenous communities should emphasize support for their traditional values such as respect, trust, non-judgement, and relationality, all of which support cultural revitalization [ 26 , 71 ].

Conversely, wellness promotion in Indigenous communities should disavow the use of Western-based epistemologies that embrace and emphasize control over risk factors and health [ 44 , 79 ]. The definition and perception of health and wellness by Indigenous peoples are starkly different from the Western perspective of health promotion [ 44 , 79 ] which was found in our study to be a barrier/roadblock to enhancing health and wellness by, for and with Indigenous youth [ 8 , 43 , 44 , 76 ]. Because of these contrasting and conflicting views on health and wellness, research carried out with Indigenous communities must be grounded in their culture. Elder Jim Dumont – a professor of Native Studies and a member of the Shawanaga First Nation on Eastern Georgian Bay, when describing the role of Indigenous culture in facilitating wellness among Indigenous peoples, defined Indigenous culture as a “ facilitator to spiritual expression” [ 85 p.11]. He described Indigenous culture as “an expression of the life-ways, the spiritual, psychological, social, and material practice of the Indigenous worldview, which attends to the whole person’s spiritual desire to live life to the fullest” [ 85 p.9]. This was the way of life for Indigenous peoples before colonization [ 2 ]. Back then, Indigenous peoples honoured and utilized traditional methods and practices connected to their respective unceded homelands to promote and sustain health and wellness by themselves within their respective communities [ 2 , 16 , 86 ]. These cultural practices provided and promoted health and wellness for the community, the peoples, the lands, and the environment [ 2 ].

Furthermore, Indigenous wellness promotion by, for and with Indigenous youth should go beyond making mainstream health promotion strategies more culturally appropriate. Indigenous wellness promotion should also invite youth as partners and co-researchers to authentically engage with the community, acknowledging their needs while working together with them to identify opportunities for change (which should include shared power and responsibilities in the relationship dynamic). This must be the fundamental principle for any work done by, for, or with Indigenous communities (i.e., authentic engagement) [ 54 , 55 , 59 ]. Authentic engagement is working and walking with rather than on communities [ 54 ] in a way that encourages respectful, compassionate, and genuine interest in the work undertaken by all partners involved [ 54 , 55 , 57 , 87 , 88 ]. In authentically engaging with Indigenous communities, emphasis should be placed on connecting with , rather than controlling, community members [ 44 , 89 ]. By doing so, enhances a community’s ability to answer their issues by identifying their community strengths and assets, considering opportunities for change, and co-creating meaningful solutions to mitigate them.

The Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS) on Ethical Conduct for Research involving Humans indicates in Chapter 9 that, where research involves First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples and their communities, they are to have a role in shaping and co-creating research that affects them; with respect being given to the autonomy of these communities and the individuals within them to decide to participate [ 90 ]. Our study showed that where youth were engaged as partners and co-researchers, promoted self-determination, capacity building and ultimately enhanced wellness [ 8 , 40 , 44 , 57 , 72 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 79 , 84 ].

From the outcomes of this review, youth were engaged as partners or co-researcher in 55% of the included articles using research approaches such as community-based participatory research [CBPR], photovoice, visual voice, participatory videography, performative arts, participatory narrative, and storytelling methods [ 8 , 40 , 44 , 57 , 72 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 79 , 84 ]. This review demonstrated that these methods helped foster an environment for transformative learning, reciprocal transfer of expertise, shared decision-making, and co-ownership of the research processes [ 8 , 40 , 44 , 57 , 72 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 79 , 84 ]. For example, Goodman et al. identified that through photovoice, youth identified how racism negatively influenced the types of social supports and relationships formed in their community, leading to improved access to mental health-promoting social programs [ 76 ]. Anang et al. reported that engaging Indigenous youth as co-researchers in exploring ways to promote suicide prevention revitalized awareness of their cultural identity, which was identified as a protective factor to youth suicide [ 40 ]. A group of First Nation girls involved in the Girl Power Program designed to build and foster empowerment using youth participatory action research approach indicated that working as co-researchers/co-creators in the program empowered them to find healing from wounded spirits, which helped enhance positive changes towards wellness through āhkamēyimowin (perseverance) [ 57 ]. Thus, we can conclude from our study that engaging youth as partners in research processes optimizes their personal experiences and gives them a voice which can stimulate action.

Engaging Indigenous youth in the co-creation of wellness strategies should also involve community Elders, Traditional Knowledge Keepers, and other Indigenous community leaders. This review demonstrated that reliance on the wisdom of Elders, Traditional Knowledge Keepers and Indigenous community leaders facilitated and enhanced wellness among Indigenous youth [ 5 , 16 , 44 , 72 , 77 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 83 , 84 , 91 ]. Elders, Traditional Knowledge Keepers, and Indigenous community leaders play a central role in increasing awareness related to the community’s histories, languages, knowledge, and ways of knowing [ 91 , 92 ]. For non-Indigenous researchers and allies, Elders and Traditional Knowledge Keepers can provide formal and informal teachings on: histories of the Indigenous community in question, their world views, languages in the community, arts, crafts and songs, value systems in the nation/community; knowledge of traditional plants and medicines; clan teachings in the nation/community; ceremonial knowledge or protocols; and understanding of wellness in the community that can increase cultural awareness and build Indigenous research competencies for non-Indigenous researchers and allies [ 91 , 92 , 93 ]. Hence, engaging Elders, Knowledge Keepers and Indigenous community leaders in youth wellness programs can provide an avenue for mutual learning, guiding non-Indigenous researchers/allies towards cultural appropriateness in co-developing youth-driven wellness strategies.

Practical implications

Overall, this review emphasized the importance of promoting wellness among Indigenous youth using ‘ culture as strength ’ rather than imposing control measures on Indigenous values. The historical experiences of Indigenous youth have revealed traumatic and distressful pasts propagated by the cumulative intergenerational impacts of colonization which evolved from Residential Schools, Day Schools, and the Sixties Scoop [ 15 , 16 , 33 , 94 , 95 ]. The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 96 Calls-to-Action stressed the need to decolonize mainstream health promotion strategies and embrace the promotion of self-determination in the use of and access to traditional knowledge, therapies, and healing practices Indigenous peoples [ 95 , 96 ]. This review provided a foundation for authentically engaging Indigenous youth in the co-creation of culturally appropriate wellness promotion strategies/programs driven and sustained by authentically engaged Indigenous youth in the community. Considering the number of qualitative studies we found in our review, a meta-synthesis of qualitative studies may guide future directions based on the findings in our study to further pursue to understand, appraise, summarize, and combine qualitative evidence to address the specific research questions particularly around the influences and experiences of cultural connectedness and wellness among Indigenous youth in Canada. Nonetheless, this review also contributes to the growing literature identifying strength-based approaches to enhancing health and wellness among Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Study limitations

This review aimed to provide an entire scope of all original studies published in peer-reviewed journals to allow for as broad a scope of literature synthesis as possible. However, this study is not without limitations. First, the search was limited to multiple library databases, including the University of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous Studies Portal (iPortal) [ 66 ]. Although this review produced many peer-reviewed and original studies, there is a potential that other relevant articles and reports were missed because we did not search the grey literature. Secondly, because this review was limited to peer-reviewed articles published in English, it is possible that potentially relevant studies in other languages were omitted. Moreover, the outcomes of this review are limited to the nature of the data reported in the articles included in the review. Additionally, we acknowledge the differences and nuances in Indigenous practices, values and culture which limits the generalizability of our review findings. Lastly, some of the studies in the scoping review utilized Indigenous study designs and methods that could not be appropriately evaluated using the JBI Critical Appraisal Tools [ 70 ].

This scoping review identified ways health and wellness can be enhanced by, for, and with Indigenous youth by identifying facilitators/strengths and barriers/roadblocks to enhancing health and wellness among Indigenous youth from identified studies published between January 1, 2017, and May 22, 2021. The outcomes of this review showed that promoting culturally based and appropriate interventions using strength-based approaches were key facilitators/strengths to enhancing health and wellness among Indigenous youth. Thus, the outcomes demonstrate the continued need to promote programs grounded in culture as a part of enhancing health and wellness while authentically engaging Indigenous youth in health and wellness strategies, interventions, and programs.

Availability of data and materials

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Abbreviations

Community-based participatory research

First Nations

Full-Text Articles

University of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous Studies Portal

Joanna Briggs Institute

Medical Subject Headings

Participatory action research

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews

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Funding provided by the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation (SHRF) and the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR)/Saskatchewan Center for Patient-Oriented Research (SCPOR) as part of the SHRF Leader Award held by Dr. Ramsden.

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Okpalauwaekwe, U., Ballantyne, C., Tunison, S. et al. Enhancing health and wellness by, for and with Indigenous youth in Canada: a scoping review. BMC Public Health 22 , 1630 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14047-2

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Measurement of changes to the menstrual cycle: A transdisciplinary systematic review evaluating measure quality and utility for clinical trials

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Despite the importance of menstruation and the menstrual cycle to health, human rights, and sociocultural and economic wellbeing, the study of menstrual health suffers from a lack of funding, and research remains fractured across many disciplines. We sought to systematically review approaches to measure four aspects of changes to the menstrual cycle--bleeding, blood, pain, and perceptions--caused by any source and used in any field. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, and four instrument databases and included peer-reviewed articles published between 2006 and 2023 that reported on the development or validation of instruments assessing menstrual changes using quantitative or mixed-methods methodology. We evaluated instruments on measure quality and utility for clinical trials. From a total of 8,490 articles, 8,316 were excluded (i.e., 376 duplicates, 7,704 during title/abstract screening, and 236 during full text review), yielding 94 instruments from 174 included articles. Almost half of articles were from the United States or United Kingdom and over half of instruments were only in English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. Most instruments measured bleeding, pain, or perceptions, but few assessed blood. Nearly 60% of instruments were developed for populations with menstrual or gynecologic disorders or symptoms. Most instruments had fair or good measure quality and/or clinical trial utility; however, most instruments lacked evidence on responsiveness, question sensitivity and/or transferability, and only three instruments had good scores of both quality and utility. Although we took a novel, broad, and transdisciplinary approach, our systematic review found important gaps in the literature and instrument landscape and a need to examine the menstrual cycle in a more comprehensive, inclusive, and standardized way. Our findings can inform the development of new or modified instruments, which--if used across the many fields that study menstrual health--can contribute to a more systemic and holistic understanding of menstruation and the menstrual cycle.

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Systematically Reviewing the Literature: Building the Evidence for Health Care Quality

There are important research and non-research reasons to systematically review the literature. This article describes a step-by-step process to systematically review the literature along with links to key resources. An example of a graduate program using systematic literature reviews to link research and quality improvement practices is also provided.

Introduction

Systematic reviews that summarize the available information on a topic are an important part of evidence-based health care. There are both research and non-research reasons for undertaking a literature review. It is important to systematically review the literature when one would like to justify the need for a study, to update personal knowledge and practice, to evaluate current practices, to develop and update guidelines for practice, and to develop work related policies. 1 A systematic review draws upon the best health services research principles and methods to address: What is the state of the evidence on the selected topic? The systematic process enables others to reproduce the methods and to make a rational determination of whether to accept the results of the review. An abundance of articles on systematic reviews exist focusing on different aspects of systematic reviews. 2 – 9 The purpose of this article is to describe a step by step process of systematically reviewing the health care literature and provide links to key resources.

Systematic Review Process: Six Key Steps

Six key steps to systematically review the literature are outlined in Table 1 and discussed here.

Systematic Review Steps

1. Formulate the Question and Refine the Topic

When preparing a topic to conduct a systematic review, it is important to ask at the outset, “What exactly am I looking for?” Hopefully it seems like an obvious step, but explicitly writing a one or two sentence statement of the topic before you begin to search is often overlooked. It is important for several reasons; in particular because, although we usually think we know what we are searching for, in truth our mental image of a topic is often quite fuzzy. The act of writing something concise and intelligible to a reader, even if you are the only one who will read it, clarifies your thoughts and can inspire you to ask key questions. In addition, in subsequent steps of the review process, when you begin to develop a strategy for searching the literature, your topic statement is the ready raw material from which you can extract the key concepts and terminology for your strategies. The medical and related health literature is massive, so the more precise and specific your understanding of your information need, the better your results will be when you search.

2. Search, Retrieve, and Select Relevant Articles

The retrieval tools chosen to search the literature should be determined by the purpose of the search. Questions to ask include: For what and by whom will the information be used? A topical expert or a novice? Am I looking for a simple fact? A comprehensive overview on the topic? Exploration of a new topic? A systematic review? For the purpose of a systematic review of journal research in the area of health care, PubMed or Medline is the most appropriate retrieval tool to start with, however other databases may be useful ( Table 2 ). In particular, Google Scholar allows one to search the same set of articles as PubMed/MEDLINE, in addition to some from other disciplines, but it lacks a number of key advanced search features that a skilled searcher can exploit in PubMed/MEDLINE.

Examples of Electronic Bibliographic Databases Specific to Health Care

Note: These databases may be available through university or hospital library systems.

An effective way to search the literature is to break the topic into different “building blocks.” The building blocks approach is the most systematic and works the best in periodical databases such as PubMed/MEDLINE. The “blocks” in a “building blocks” strategy consist of the key concepts in the search topic. For example, let’s say we are interested in researching about mobile phone-based interventions for monitoring of patient status or disease management. We could break the topic into the following concepts or blocks: 1. Mobile phones, 2. patient monitoring, and 3. Disease management. Gather synonyms and related terms to represent each concept and match to available subject headings in databases that offer them. Organize the resulting concepts into individual queries. Run the queries and examine your results to find relevant items and suggest query modifications to improve your results. Revise and re-run your strategy based on your observations. Repeat this process until you are satisfied or further modifications produce no improvements. For example in Medline, these terms would be used in this search and combined as follows: cellular phone AND (ambulatory monitoring OR disease management), where each of the key word phrases is an official subject heading in the MEDLINE vocabulary. Keep detailed notes on the literature search, as it will need to be reported in the methods section of the systematic review paper. Careful noting of search strategies also allows you to revisit a topic in the future and confidently replicate the same results, with the addition of those subsequently published on your topic.

3. Assess Quality

There is no consensus on the best way to assess study quality. Many quality assessment tools include issues such as: appropriateness of study design to the research objective, risk of bias, generalizability, statistical issues, quality of the intervention, and quality of reporting. Reporting guidelines for most literature types are available at the EQUATOR Network website ( http://www.equator-network.org/ ). These guidelines are a useful starting point; however they should not be used for assessing study quality.

4. Extract Data and Information

Extract information from each eligible article into a standardized format to permit the findings to be summarized. This will involve building one or more tables. When making tables each row should represent an article and each column a variable. Not all of the information that is extracted into the tables will end up in the paper. All of the information that is extracted from the eligible articles will help you obtain an overview of the topic, however you will want to reserve the use of tables in the literature review paper for the more complex information. All tables should be introduced and discussed in the narrative of the literature review. An example of an evidence summary table is presented in Table 3 .

Example of an evidence summary table

Notes: BP = blood pressure, HbA1c = Hemoglobin A1c, Hypo = hypoglycemic, I = Internet, NS = not significant, PDA = personal digital assistant, QOL = quality of life, SMBG = self-monitored blood glucose, SMS = short message service, V = voice

5. Analyze and Synthesize Data and information

The findings from individual studies are analyzed and synthesized so that the overall effectiveness of the intervention can be determined. It should also be observed at this time if the effect of an intervention is comparable in different studies, participants, and settings.

6. Write the Systematic Review

The PRISMA 12 and ENTREQ 13 checklists can be useful resources when writing a systematic review. These uniform reporting tools focus on how to write coherent and comprehensive reviews that facilitate readers and reviewers in evaluating the relative strengths and weaknesses. A systematic literature review has the same structure as an original research article:

TITLE : The systematic review title should indicate the content. The title should reflect the research question, however it should be a statement and not a question. The research question and the title should have similar key words.

STRUCTURED ABSTRACT: The structured abstract recaps the background, methods, results and conclusion in usually 250 words or less.

INTRODUCTION: The introduction summarizes the topic or problem and specifies the practical significance for the systematic review. The first paragraph or two of the paper should capture the attention of the reader. It might be dramatic, statistical, or descriptive, but above all, it should be interesting and very relevant to the research question. The topic or problem is linked with earlier research through previous attempts to solve the problem. Gaps in the literature regarding research and practice should also be noted. The final sentence of the introduction should clearly state the purpose of the systematic review.

METHODS: The methods provide a specification of the study protocol with enough information so that others can reproduce the results. It is important to include information on the:

• Eligibility criteria for studies: Who are the patients or subjects? What are the study characteristics, interventions, and outcomes? Were there language restrictions?
• Literature search: What databases were searched? Which key search terms were used? Which years were searched?
• Study selection: What was the study selection method? Was the title screened first, followed by the abstract, and finally the full text of the article?
• Data extraction: What data and information will be extracted from the articles?
• Data analysis: What are the statistical methods for handling any quantitative data?

RESULTS: The results should also be well-organized. One way to approach the results is to include information on the:

• Search results: What are the numbers of articles identified, excluded, and ultimately eligible?
• Study characteristics: What are the type and number of subjects? What are the methodological features of the studies?
• Study quality score: What is the overall quality of included studies? Does the quality of the included studies affect the outcome of the results?
• Results of the study: What are the overall results and outcomes? Could the literature be divided into themes or categories?

DISCUSSION: The discussion begins with a nonnumeric summary of the results. Next, gaps in the literature as well as limitations of the included articles are discussed with respect to the impact that they have on the reliability of the results. The final paragraph provides conclusions as well as implications for future research and current practice. For example, questions for future research on this topic are revealed, as well as whether or not practice should change as a result of the review.

REFERENCES: A complete bibliographical list of all journal articles, reports, books, and other media referred to in the systematic review should be included at the end of the paper. Referencing software can facilitate the compilation of citations and is useful in terms of ensuring the reference list is accurate and complete.

The following resources may be helpful when writing a systematic review:

CEBM: Centre for Evidence-based Medicine. Dedicated to the practice, teaching and dissemination of high quality evidence based medicine to improve health care Available at: http://www.cebm.net/ .

CITING MEDICINE: The National Library of Medicine Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers. This resource provides guidance in compiling, revising, formatting, and setting reference standards. Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7265/ .

EQUATOR NETWORK: Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research. The EQUATOR Network promotes the transparent and accurate reporting of research studies. Available at: http://www.equator-network.org/ .

ICMJE RECOMMENDATIONS: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. The ICJME recommendations are followed by a large number of journals. Available at: http://www.icmje.org/about-icmje/faqs/icmje-recommendations/ .

PRISMA STATEMENT: Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. Authors can utilize the PRISMA Statement checklist to improve the reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Available at: http://prisma-statement.org .

THE COCHRANE COLLABORATION: A reliable source for making evidence generated through research useful for informing decisions about health. Available at: http://www.cochrane.org/ .

Examples of Systematic Reviews To Link Research and Quality Improvement

Over the past 17 years more than 300 learners, including physicians, nurses, and health administrators have completed a course as part of a Master of Health Administration or a Master of Science in Health Informatics degree at the University of Missouri. An objective of the course is to educate health informatics and health administration professionals about how to utilize a systematic, scientific, and evidence-based approach to literature searching, appraisal, and synthesis. Learners in the course conduct a systematic review of the literature on a health care topic of their choosing that could suggest quality improvement in their organization. Students select topics that make sense in terms of their core educational competencies and are related to their work. The categories of topics include public health, leadership, information management, health information technology, electronic medical records, telehealth, patient/clinician safety, treatment/screening evaluation cost/finance, human resources, planning and marketing, supply chain, education/training, policies and regulations, access, and satisfaction. Some learners have published their systematic literature reviews 14 – 15 . Qualitative comments from the students indicate that the course is well received and the skills learned in the course are applicable to a variety of health care settings.

Undertaking a literature review includes identification of a topic of interest, searching and retrieving the appropriate literature, assessing quality, extracting data and information, analyzing and synthesizing the findings, and writing a report. A structured step-by-step approach facilitates the development of a complete and informed literature review.

Suzanne Austin Boren, PhD, MHA, (above) is Associate Professor and Director of Academic Programs, and David Moxley, MLIS, is Clinical Instructor and Associate Director of Executive Programs. Both are in the Department of Health Management and Informatics at the University of Missouri School of Medicine.

Contact: ude.iruossim.htlaeh@snerob

None reported.