Medical Sciences: Literature Reviews

This textbook guides the reader on how to undertake high-quality literature reviews, from traditional narrative to protocol-driven reviews. The guidance covers a broad range of purposes, disciplines and research paradigms. Whether the literature review is part of a research project, doctoral study, dissertation or a stand-alone study, the book offers approaches, methods, tools, tips and guidelines to produce more effective literature reviews in an efficient manner. The numerous examples are drawn from an array of subject areas, such as economics, healthcare, education, medicine, psychology, software engineering amongst others. This makes it worthwhile for a wide range of studies and for reviews into evidence-based interventions, policies, practices and treatments. There is attention given to presenting, reporting and publishing literature reviews. With the additional clarity brought about by explanatory tables and graphs, this textbook is a must-have for all students, researchers, academics and practitioners at any stage of their project or career when engaging with literature.

This book is a step-by-step guide to writing a literature review, and includes tips for modifying the process as needed depending on your audience, purpose, and goals. The lessons in this book can be applied to writing the background section for a thesis or an original research publication. Literature reviews are now much more challenging to compile today than they used to be. You need a structured approach to handle the sheer volume of published research available. This book will help you formulate a strategy for making decisions about what to include and not include in your review, and produce a reliable and unbiased summary of the existing research. You will learn skills for defining research questions, using search tools and managing citations. This book is part of the American Psychological Association's Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research series.

The Matrix Method is one of many ways to approach a literature review. It was created by Judith Garrard when she was preparing NIH grants and is intended to teach students how to read a paper, organize the review using the Matrix Method, analyze it, and create a narrative synthesis. This method is particularly useful in the health sciences. Review is usually the initial step for a proposal for independent scientific study, often a Master's project or doctoral dissertation, and traditionally done under the guidance of faculty or a mentor.

Illustrates all the steps in preparing qualitative and quantitative literature reviews. Emphasizes topic selection, locating literature, and avoiding major pitfalls in evaluating and synthesizing literature. Shows how to improve literature reviews through the judicious inclusion of statistical results found in the literature. Provides easy-to-follow advice on how to avoid misrepresenting the results of published research in literature reviews. The numerous examples throughout the text and the nine model literature reviews clarify the process of following the guidelines for writing solid, state-of-the-art literature reviews. Shows students how to blend qualitative and quantitative approaches to preparing literature reviews without being overly mathematical. Two chapters present clear explanations of how to conduct meta-analyses. All examples have been updated to ensure consistency with the sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and the fourth edition of the American Sociological Association's Style Guide.  

The essential guide--updated, expanded, and easier to use than ever. Creating a successful literature review can be a daunting task, which is why so many researchers have relied on previous editions of this book to make the process more manageable. Using the six-step model, you'll work seamlessly to narrow your research topic, focus your literature search, negotiate the myriad of books, periodicals, and reports about your topic--and, of course, write the review. Updated, expanded, and reorganized to improve ease of use, the fourth edition of this bestselling handbook includes: New and improved graphics ideal for visualizing the process More explanations and tips, especially for writing in the early stages An expanded range of learning tools Additional reflection sections to direct metacognitive activities Four new reference supplements This pioneering book has provided countless graduate students and researchers with a road map to success. Its model takes you through the logical progression needed for producing a quality literature review--while taking the mystery out of the process.