scope of the literature review example

• Research guides

Writing a Literature Review

Phase 1: scope of review, it's a literature review of what, precisely.

Need to Have a Precise Topic It is essential that one defines a research topic very carefully. For example, it should not be too far-reaching. The following is much too broad:

"Life and Times of Sigmund Freud"

However, this is more focused and specific and, accordingly, a more appropriate topic:

"An Analysis of the Relationship of Freud and Jung in the International Psychoanalytic Association, 1910-1914"

Limitations of Study In specifying precisely one's research topic, one is also specifying appropriate limitations on the research. Limiting, for example, by time, personnel, gender, age, location, nationality, etc. results in a more focused and meaningful topic.  

Scope of the Literature Review It is also important to determine the precise scope of the literature review. For example,

• What exactly will you cover in your review?
• How comprehensive will it be?
• How long? About how many citations will you use?
• How detailed? Will it be a review of ALL relevant material or will the scope be limited to more recent material, e.g., the last five years.
• Are you focusing on methodological approaches; on theoretical issues; on qualitative or quantitative research?
• Will you broaden your search to seek literature in related disciplines?
• Will you confine your reviewed material to English language only or will you include research in other languages too?

In evaluating studies, timeliness is more significant for some subjects than others. Scientists generally need more recent material. However, currency is often less of a factor for scholars in arts/humanities. Research published in 1920 about Plato's philosophy might be more relevant than recent studies.

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What is a Literature Review? How to Write It (with Examples)

A literature review is a critical analysis and synthesis of existing research on a particular topic. It provides an overview of the current state of knowledge, identifies gaps, and highlights key findings in the literature. 1 The purpose of a literature review is to situate your own research within the context of existing scholarship, demonstrating your understanding of the topic and showing how your work contributes to the ongoing conversation in the field. Learning how to write a literature review is a critical tool for successful research. Your ability to summarize and synthesize prior research pertaining to a certain topic demonstrates your grasp on the topic of study, and assists in the learning process. 

Table of Contents

What is the purpose of literature review , a. habitat loss and species extinction: , b. range shifts and phenological changes: , c. ocean acidification and coral reefs: , d. adaptive strategies and conservation efforts: .

• Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question: 
• Decide on the Scope of Your Review: 
• Select Databases for Searches: 
• Conduct Searches and Keep Track: 
• Review the Literature: 
• Organize and Write Your Literature Review: 
• How to write a literature review faster with Paperpal? 

Frequently asked questions 

What is a literature review .

A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with the existing literature, establishes the context for their own research, and contributes to scholarly conversations on the topic. One of the purposes of a literature review is also to help researchers avoid duplicating previous work and ensure that their research is informed by and builds upon the existing body of knowledge.

A literature review serves several important purposes within academic and research contexts. Here are some key objectives and functions of a literature review: 2  

1. Contextualizing the Research Problem: The literature review provides a background and context for the research problem under investigation. It helps to situate the study within the existing body of knowledge. 

2. Identifying Gaps in Knowledge: By identifying gaps, contradictions, or areas requiring further research, the researcher can shape the research question and justify the significance of the study. This is crucial for ensuring that the new research contributes something novel to the field.

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3. Understanding Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks: Literature reviews help researchers gain an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in previous studies. This aids in the development of a theoretical framework for the current research. 

4. Providing Methodological Insights: Another purpose of literature reviews is that it allows researchers to learn about the methodologies employed in previous studies. This can help in choosing appropriate research methods for the current study and avoiding pitfalls that others may have encountered. 

5. Establishing Credibility: A well-conducted literature review demonstrates the researcher’s familiarity with existing scholarship, establishing their credibility and expertise in the field. It also helps in building a solid foundation for the new research. 

6. Informing Hypotheses or Research Questions: The literature review guides the formulation of hypotheses or research questions by highlighting relevant findings and areas of uncertainty in existing literature. 

Literature review example 

Let’s delve deeper with a literature review example: Let’s say your literature review is about the impact of climate change on biodiversity. You might format your literature review into sections such as the effects of climate change on habitat loss and species extinction, phenological changes, and marine biodiversity. Each section would then summarize and analyze relevant studies in those areas, highlighting key findings and identifying gaps in the research. The review would conclude by emphasizing the need for further research on specific aspects of the relationship between climate change and biodiversity. The following literature review template provides a glimpse into the recommended literature review structure and content, demonstrating how research findings are organized around specific themes within a broader topic. 

Literature Review on Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity:  

Climate change is a global phenomenon with far-reaching consequences, including significant impacts on biodiversity. This literature review synthesizes key findings from various studies: 

Climate change-induced alterations in temperature and precipitation patterns contribute to habitat loss, affecting numerous species (Thomas et al., 2004). The review discusses how these changes increase the risk of extinction, particularly for species with specific habitat requirements. 

Observations of range shifts and changes in the timing of biological events (phenology) are documented in response to changing climatic conditions (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003). These shifts affect ecosystems and may lead to mismatches between species and their resources. 

The review explores the impact of climate change on marine biodiversity, emphasizing ocean acidification’s threat to coral reefs (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007). Changes in pH levels negatively affect coral calcification, disrupting the delicate balance of marine ecosystems. 

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the literature review discusses various adaptive strategies adopted by species and conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change on biodiversity (Hannah et al., 2007). It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for effective conservation planning. 

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How to write a good literature review 

Writing a literature review involves summarizing and synthesizing existing research on a particular topic. A good literature review format should include the following elements. 

Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your literature review, providing context and introducing the main focus of your review. 

• Opening Statement: Begin with a general statement about the broader topic and its significance in the field. 
• Scope and Purpose: Clearly define the scope of your literature review. Explain the specific research question or objective you aim to address. 
• Organizational Framework: Briefly outline the structure of your literature review, indicating how you will categorize and discuss the existing research. 
• Significance of the Study: Highlight why your literature review is important and how it contributes to the understanding of the chosen topic. 
• Thesis Statement: Conclude the introduction with a concise thesis statement that outlines the main argument or perspective you will develop in the body of the literature review. 

Body: The body of the literature review is where you provide a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, grouping studies based on themes, methodologies, or other relevant criteria. 

• Organize by Theme or Concept: Group studies that share common themes, concepts, or methodologies. Discuss each theme or concept in detail, summarizing key findings and identifying gaps or areas of disagreement. 
• Critical Analysis: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each study. Discuss the methodologies used, the quality of evidence, and the overall contribution of each work to the understanding of the topic. 
• Synthesis of Findings: Synthesize the information from different studies to highlight trends, patterns, or areas of consensus in the literature. 
• Identification of Gaps: Discuss any gaps or limitations in the existing research and explain how your review contributes to filling these gaps. 
• Transition between Sections: Provide smooth transitions between different themes or concepts to maintain the flow of your literature review. 

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Conclusion: The conclusion of your literature review should summarize the main findings, highlight the contributions of the review, and suggest avenues for future research. 

• Summary of Key Findings: Recap the main findings from the literature and restate how they contribute to your research question or objective. 
• Contributions to the Field: Discuss the overall contribution of your literature review to the existing knowledge in the field. 
• Implications and Applications: Explore the practical implications of the findings and suggest how they might impact future research or practice. 
• Recommendations for Future Research: Identify areas that require further investigation and propose potential directions for future research in the field. 
• Final Thoughts: Conclude with a final reflection on the importance of your literature review and its relevance to the broader academic community. 

Conducting a literature review 

Conducting a literature review is an essential step in research that involves reviewing and analyzing existing literature on a specific topic. It’s important to know how to do a literature review effectively, so here are the steps to follow: 1  

Choose a Topic and Define the Research Question:  

• Select a topic that is relevant to your field of study. 
• Clearly define your research question or objective. Determine what specific aspect of the topic do you want to explore? 

Decide on the Scope of Your Review:  

• Determine the timeframe for your literature review. Are you focusing on recent developments, or do you want a historical overview? 
• Consider the geographical scope. Is your review global, or are you focusing on a specific region? 
• Define the inclusion and exclusion criteria. What types of sources will you include? Are there specific types of studies or publications you will exclude? 

Select Databases for Searches:  

• Identify relevant databases for your field. Examples include PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. 
• Consider searching in library catalogs, institutional repositories, and specialized databases related to your topic. 

Conduct Searches and Keep Track:  

• Develop a systematic search strategy using keywords, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and other search techniques. 
• Record and document your search strategy for transparency and replicability. 
• Keep track of the articles, including publication details, abstracts, and links. Use citation management tools like EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley to organize your references. 

Review the Literature:  

• Evaluate the relevance and quality of each source. Consider the methodology, sample size, and results of studies. 
• Organize the literature by themes or key concepts. Identify patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing research. 
• Summarize key findings and arguments from each source. Compare and contrast different perspectives. 
• Identify areas where there is a consensus in the literature and where there are conflicting opinions. 
• Provide critical analysis and synthesis of the literature. What are the strengths and weaknesses of existing research? 

Organize and Write Your Literature Review:  

• Literature review outline should be based on themes, chronological order, or methodological approaches. 
• Write a clear and coherent narrative that synthesizes the information gathered. 
• Use proper citations for each source and ensure consistency in your citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). 
• Conclude your literature review by summarizing key findings, identifying gaps, and suggesting areas for future research. 

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The literature review sample and detailed advice on writing and conducting a review will help you produce a well-structured report. But remember that a good literature review is an ongoing process, and it may be necessary to revisit and update it as your research progresses. By combining effortless research with an easy citation process, Paperpal Research streamlines the literature review process and empowers you to write faster and with more confidence. Try Paperpal Research now and see for yourself.  

A literature review is a critical and comprehensive analysis of existing literature (published and unpublished works) on a specific topic or research question and provides a synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a particular field. A well-conducted literature review is crucial for researchers to build upon existing knowledge, avoid duplication of efforts, and contribute to the advancement of their field. It also helps researchers situate their work within a broader context and facilitates the development of a sound theoretical and conceptual framework for their studies.

Literature review is a crucial component of research writing, providing a solid background for a research paper’s investigation. The aim is to keep professionals up to date by providing an understanding of ongoing developments within a specific field, including research methods, and experimental techniques used in that field, and present that knowledge in the form of a written report. Also, the depth and breadth of the literature review emphasizes the credibility of the scholar in his or her field.  

Before writing a literature review, it’s essential to undertake several preparatory steps to ensure that your review is well-researched, organized, and focused. This includes choosing a topic of general interest to you and doing exploratory research on that topic, writing an annotated bibliography, and noting major points, especially those that relate to the position you have taken on the topic. 

Literature reviews and academic research papers are essential components of scholarly work but serve different purposes within the academic realm. 3 A literature review aims to provide a foundation for understanding the current state of research on a particular topic, identify gaps or controversies, and lay the groundwork for future research. Therefore, it draws heavily from existing academic sources, including books, journal articles, and other scholarly publications. In contrast, an academic research paper aims to present new knowledge, contribute to the academic discourse, and advance the understanding of a specific research question. Therefore, it involves a mix of existing literature (in the introduction and literature review sections) and original data or findings obtained through research methods. 

Literature reviews are essential components of academic and research papers, and various strategies can be employed to conduct them effectively. If you want to know how to write a literature review for a research paper, here are four common approaches that are often used by researchers.  Chronological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the chronological order of publication. It helps to trace the development of a topic over time, showing how ideas, theories, and research have evolved.  Thematic Review: Thematic reviews focus on identifying and analyzing themes or topics that cut across different studies. Instead of organizing the literature chronologically, it is grouped by key themes or concepts, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of various aspects of the topic.  Methodological Review: This strategy involves organizing the literature based on the research methods employed in different studies. It helps to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies and allows the reader to evaluate the reliability and validity of the research findings.  Theoretical Review: A theoretical review examines the literature based on the theoretical frameworks used in different studies. This approach helps to identify the key theories that have been applied to the topic and assess their contributions to the understanding of the subject.  It’s important to note that these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and a literature review may combine elements of more than one approach. The choice of strategy depends on the research question, the nature of the literature available, and the goals of the review. Additionally, other strategies, such as integrative reviews or systematic reviews, may be employed depending on the specific requirements of the research.

The literature review format can vary depending on the specific publication guidelines. However, there are some common elements and structures that are often followed. Here is a general guideline for the format of a literature review:  Introduction:   Provide an overview of the topic.  Define the scope and purpose of the literature review.  State the research question or objective.  Body:   Organize the literature by themes, concepts, or chronology.  Critically analyze and evaluate each source.  Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the studies.  Highlight any methodological limitations or biases.  Identify patterns, connections, or contradictions in the existing research.  Conclusion:   Summarize the key points discussed in the literature review.  Highlight the research gap.  Address the research question or objective stated in the introduction.  Highlight the contributions of the review and suggest directions for future research.

Both annotated bibliographies and literature reviews involve the examination of scholarly sources. While annotated bibliographies focus on individual sources with brief annotations, literature reviews provide a more in-depth, integrated, and comprehensive analysis of existing literature on a specific topic. The key differences are as follows: 

References 

• Denney, A. S., & Tewksbury, R. (2013). How to write a literature review.  Journal of criminal justice education ,  24 (2), 218-234. 
• Pan, M. L. (2016).  Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches . Taylor & Francis. 
• Cantero, C. (2019). How to write a literature review.  San José State University Writing Center . 

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Writing a literature review.

• Definitions

Determine the scope of your review

A review of what, planning your literature review.

• Finding sources
• Annotating sources
• Organizing the review
• Writing the review
• Practical Tips

The length of the review depends on your objective. 

• Are you writing a research paper as the final project in a specific course?
• Are you writing a senior or honor's capstone project or thesis? 
• Are you writing for an undergraduate or graduate course? 
• Are you writing a master's thesis? 
• Are you writing a dissertation?

The majority of these projects will require a selective examination of the literature.  Discuss the length of your review with your instructor or paper advisor.

• You must have a precise question to study. For example, your question cannot be too broad, nor too narrow. 
• You must understand the limitations of your research. Limiting by time, geographic area, gender, age, and/or nationality are all good ways to develop a more focused topic.
• what will you cover?
• will your coverage be selective or exhaustive?
• are you focusing on a specific theory or methodology; a specific type of research?
• will you include information published in other languages?
• will you include information from related disciplines?

It will take time to locate and review the literature relevant to your research question.  Starting early will allow you sufficient time to gather and review your sources.  The process of writing a literature review normally includes the following elements:

1. Defining your research question

2. Planning the approach to your review and research

3. Searching the literature

4. Analyzing the material you find

5. Organizing the review

6. Writing the review

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Literature review.

• Introduction to Literature Reviews
• Purpose and Scope
• Types of Lit Reviews
• Finding Published Literature Reviews
• Writing the Lit Review
• Books and Websites

The literature review analyzes relationships and connections among different works. This differs from an annotated bibliography which provides a list and brief description of articles, books, theses, and other documents. The literature review should not merely list and summarize one piece of research after another. 

Through analysis of major works and subsequent scholarship the lit review lays out the evolution of scholarship on a topic and establishes a context for further research. This will help you to establish why the topic is important and place your research in a theoretical context.

A literature review will help you to avoid redundancy in your own research and to identify new problems, possibilities for further research, and to expand upon or ask new questions. The literature review allows you as a researcher to enter into an ongoing conversation with other scholars and researchers.

A literature review may be comprehensive or selective but should examine seminal or principal works and works that have been consequential in the field. The scope of a literature review will vary by assignment and discipline. The literature review may be part of a larger work or a stand-alone article, meaning that it is the entirety of a paper. The literature review may be part of the introduction, or a separate section to a thesis, dissertation, or research report setting up the context for the author's original research.   The literature review:

• Compares and contrasts
• Identifies areas of consensus and dissent
• Reveals gaps or oversights
• Indicates areas needing further research
• Points out trends, themes, approaches, methodologies, theories, and frames of analysis
• Discusses major debates in the field
• Examines methodological or theoretical strengths and weaknesses

The importance of currency (timeliness of information) will vary by discipline and the purpose of the assignment. The sciences are typically more concerned with current research, practice, and findings. For example, in fields like health or medicine the lit review may only draw on recent literature which has been published within 5-10 years. However, inclusion of much older works is often relevant in fields such as the arts, humanities, philosophy, or history.

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Methodology

• 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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See an example

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.

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.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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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.

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• 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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How To Structure Your Literature Review

3 options to help structure your chapter.

By: Amy Rommelspacher (PhD) | Reviewer: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | November 2020 (Updated May 2023)

Writing the literature review chapter can seem pretty daunting when you’re piecing together your dissertation or thesis. As  we’ve discussed before , a good literature review needs to achieve a few very important objectives – it should:

• Demonstrate your knowledge of the research topic
• Identify the gaps in the literature and show how your research links to these
• Provide the foundation for your conceptual framework (if you have one)
• Inform your own  methodology and research design

To achieve this, your literature review needs a well-thought-out structure . Get the structure of your literature review chapter wrong and you’ll struggle to achieve these objectives. Don’t worry though – in this post, we’ll look at how to structure your literature review for maximum impact (and marks!).

But wait – is this the right time?

Deciding on the structure of your literature review should come towards the end of the literature review process – after you have collected and digested the literature, but before you start writing the chapter. 

In other words, you need to first develop a rich understanding of the literature before you even attempt to map out a structure. There’s no use trying to develop a structure before you’ve fully wrapped your head around the existing research.

Equally importantly, you need to have a structure in place before you start writing , or your literature review will most likely end up a rambling, disjointed mess. 

Importantly, don’t feel that once you’ve defined a structure you can’t iterate on it. It’s perfectly natural to adjust as you engage in the writing process. As we’ve discussed before , writing is a way of developing your thinking, so it’s quite common for your thinking to change – and therefore, for your chapter structure to change – as you write. 

Need a helping hand?

Like any other chapter in your thesis or dissertation, your literature review needs to have a clear, logical structure. At a minimum, it should have three essential components – an  introduction , a  body   and a  conclusion . 

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

1: The Introduction Section

Just like any good introduction, the introduction section of your literature review should introduce the purpose and layout (organisation) of the chapter. In other words, your introduction needs to give the reader a taste of what’s to come, and how you’re going to lay that out. Essentially, you should provide the reader with a high-level roadmap of your chapter to give them a taste of the journey that lies ahead.

Here’s an example of the layout visualised in a literature review introduction:

Your introduction should also outline your topic (including any tricky terminology or jargon) and provide an explanation of the scope of your literature review – in other words, what you  will   and  won’t   be covering (the delimitations ). This helps ringfence your review and achieve a clear focus . The clearer and narrower your focus, the deeper you can dive into the topic (which is typically where the magic lies). 

Depending on the nature of your project, you could also present your stance or point of view at this stage. In other words, after grappling with the literature you’ll have an opinion about what the trends and concerns are in the field as well as what’s lacking. The introduction section can then present these ideas so that it is clear to examiners that you’re aware of how your research connects with existing knowledge .

2: The Body Section

The body of your literature review is the centre of your work. This is where you’ll present, analyse, evaluate and synthesise the existing research. In other words, this is where you’re going to earn (or lose) the most marks. Therefore, it’s important to carefully think about how you will organise your discussion to present it in a clear way. 

The body of your literature review should do just as the description of this chapter suggests. It should “review” the literature – in other words, identify, analyse, and synthesise it. So, when thinking about structuring your literature review, you need to think about which structural approach will provide the best “review” for your specific type of research and objectives (we’ll get to this shortly).

There are (broadly speaking)  three options  for organising your literature review.

Option 1: Chronological (according to date)

Organising the literature chronologically is one of the simplest ways to structure your literature review. You start with what was published first and work your way through the literature until you reach the work published most recently. Pretty straightforward.

The benefit of this option is that it makes it easy to discuss the developments and debates in the field as they emerged over time. Organising your literature chronologically also allows you to highlight how specific articles or pieces of work might have changed the course of the field – in other words, which research has had the most impact . Therefore, this approach is very useful when your research is aimed at understanding how the topic has unfolded over time and is often used by scholars in the field of history. That said, this approach can be utilised by anyone that wants to explore change over time .

For example , if a student of politics is investigating how the understanding of democracy has evolved over time, they could use the chronological approach to provide a narrative that demonstrates how this understanding has changed through the ages.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help you structure your literature review chronologically.

• What is the earliest literature published relating to this topic?
• How has the field changed over time? Why?
• What are the most recent discoveries/theories?

In some ways, chronology plays a part whichever way you decide to structure your literature review, because you will always, to a certain extent, be analysing how the literature has developed. However, with the chronological approach, the emphasis is very firmly on how the discussion has evolved over time , as opposed to how all the literature links together (which we’ll discuss next ).

Option 2: Thematic (grouped by theme)

The thematic approach to structuring a literature review means organising your literature by theme or category – for example, by independent variables (i.e. factors that have an impact on a specific outcome).

As you’ve been collecting and synthesising literature , you’ll likely have started seeing some themes or patterns emerging. You can then use these themes or patterns as a structure for your body discussion. The thematic approach is the most common approach and is useful for structuring literature reviews in most fields.

For example, if you were researching which factors contributed towards people trusting an organisation, you might find themes such as consumers’ perceptions of an organisation’s competence, benevolence and integrity. Structuring your literature review thematically would mean structuring your literature review’s body section to discuss each of these themes, one section at a time.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when structuring your literature review by themes:

• Are there any patterns that have come to light in the literature?
• What are the central themes and categories used by the researchers?
• Do I have enough evidence of these themes?

PS – you can see an example of a thematically structured literature review in our literature review sample walkthrough video here.

Option 3: Methodological

The methodological option is a way of structuring your literature review by the research methodologies used . In other words, organising your discussion based on the angle from which each piece of research was approached – for example, qualitative , quantitative or mixed  methodologies.

Structuring your literature review by methodology can be useful if you are drawing research from a variety of disciplines and are critiquing different methodologies. The point of this approach is to question  how  existing research has been conducted, as opposed to  what  the conclusions and/or findings the research were.

For example, a sociologist might centre their research around critiquing specific fieldwork practices. Their literature review will then be a summary of the fieldwork methodologies used by different studies.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself when structuring your literature review according to methodology:

• Which methodologies have been utilised in this field?
• Which methodology is the most popular (and why)?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the various methodologies?
• How can the existing methodologies inform my own methodology?

3: The Conclusion Section

Once you’ve completed the body section of your literature review using one of the structural approaches we discussed above, you’ll need to “wrap up” your literature review and pull all the pieces together to set the direction for the rest of your dissertation or thesis.

The conclusion is where you’ll present the key findings of your literature review. In this section, you should emphasise the research that is especially important to your research questions and highlight the gaps that exist in the literature. Based on this, you need to make it clear what you will add to the literature – in other words, justify your own research by showing how it will help fill one or more of the gaps you just identified.

Last but not least, if it’s your intention to develop a conceptual framework for your dissertation or thesis, the conclusion section is a good place to present this.

Example: Thematically Structured Review

In the video below, we unpack a literature review chapter so that you can see an example of a thematically structure review in practice.

Let’s Recap

In this article, we’ve  discussed how to structure your literature review for maximum impact. Here’s a quick recap of what  you need to keep in mind when deciding on your literature review structure:

• Just like other chapters, your literature review needs a clear introduction , body and conclusion .
• The introduction section should provide an overview of what you will discuss in your literature review.
• The body section of your literature review can be organised by chronology , theme or methodology . The right structural approach depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your research.
• The conclusion section should draw together the key findings of your literature review and link them to your research questions.

If you’re ready to get started, be sure to download our free literature review template to fast-track your chapter outline.

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling short course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

29 Comments

Great work. This is exactly what I was looking for and helps a lot together with your previous post on literature review. One last thing is missing: a link to a great literature chapter of an journal article (maybe with comments of the different sections in this review chapter). Do you know any great literature review chapters?

I agree with you Marin… A great piece

I agree with Marin. This would be quite helpful if you annotate a nicely structured literature from previously published research articles.

Awesome article for my research.

I thank you immensely for this wonderful guide

It is indeed thought and supportive work for the futurist researcher and students

Very educative and good time to get guide. Thank you

Great work, very insightful. Thank you.

Thanks for this wonderful presentation. My question is that do I put all the variables into a single conceptual framework or each hypothesis will have it own conceptual framework?

Thank you very much, very helpful

This is very educative and precise . Thank you very much for dropping this kind of write up .

Pheeww, so damn helpful, thank you for this informative piece.

I’m doing a research project topic ; stool analysis for parasitic worm (enteric) worm, how do I structure it, thanks.

comprehensive explanation. Help us by pasting the URL of some good “literature review” for better understanding.

great piece. thanks for the awesome explanation. it is really worth sharing. I have a little question, if anyone can help me out, which of the options in the body of literature can be best fit if you are writing an architectural thesis that deals with design?

I am doing a research on nanofluids how can l structure it?

Beautifully clear.nThank you!

Lucid! Thankyou!

Brilliant work, well understood, many thanks

I like how this was so clear with simple language 😊😊 thank you so much 😊 for these information 😊

Insightful. I was struggling to come up with a sensible literature review but this has been really helpful. Thank you!

You have given thought-provoking information about the review of the literature.

Thank you. It has made my own research better and to impart your work to students I teach

I learnt a lot from this teaching. It’s a great piece.

I am doing research on EFL teacher motivation for his/her job. How Can I structure it? Is there any detailed template, additional to this?

You are so cool! I do not think I’ve read through something like this before. So nice to find somebody with some genuine thoughts on this issue. Seriously.. thank you for starting this up. This site is one thing that is required on the internet, someone with a little originality!

I’m asked to do conceptual, theoretical and empirical literature, and i just don’t know how to structure it

Asking questions are actually fastidious thing if you are not understanding anything fully, but this article presents good understanding yet.

thank you SOOO much it is really helpful ..

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• What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

What is a Literature Review? | Guide, Template, & Examples

Published on 22 February 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 7 June 2022.

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.

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 summarise sources – it analyses, synthesises, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

Why write 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, frequently asked questions about literature reviews, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a dissertation or thesis, you will 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 scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position yourself in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your dissertation addresses a gap or contributes to a debate

You might also have to write a literature review as a stand-alone assignment. In this case, the purpose is to evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of scholarly debates around a topic.

The content will look slightly different in each case, but the process of conducting a literature review follows the same steps. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

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 objectives and questions .

If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search. Unlike a dissertation research question, this question has to be answerable without collecting original data. You should be able to answer it based only on a review of existing publications.

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research topic. 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 if 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 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 use boolean operators to help narrow down your search:

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.

To identify the most important publications on your topic, take note of recurring citations. If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading, make sure to seek them out.

You probably won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on the topic – you’ll have to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your questions.

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?
• How does the publication contribute to your understanding of the topic? What are its key insights and arguments?
• 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 find out how many times an article has been cited on Google Scholar – a high citation count means the article has been influential in the field, and should certainly be included in your literature review.

The scope of your review will depend on your topic and discipline: in the sciences you usually only review recent literature, but in the humanities you might take a long historical perspective (for example, to trace how a concept has changed in meaning over time).

Remember that you can use our template to summarise and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using!

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’s important to keep track of your sources with references to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography, where you compile full reference 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.

You can use our free APA Reference Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations.

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To begin organising your literature review’s argument and structure, you need to 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 organising the body of a literature review. You should have a rough idea of your strategy before you start writing.

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 summarising sources in order.

Try to analyse 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 organise 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.

If you are writing the literature review as part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate your central problem or research question and give a brief summary of the scholarly context. You can emphasise the timeliness of the topic (“many recent studies have focused on the problem of x”) or highlight a gap in the literature (“while there has been much research on x, few researchers have taken y into consideration”).

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, make sure to follow these tips:

• Summarise and synthesise: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole.
• Analyse and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations, 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 transitions and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts.

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

If the literature review is part of your dissertation or thesis, reiterate how your research addresses gaps and contributes new knowledge, or discuss how you have drawn on existing theories and methods to build a framework for your research. This can lead directly into your methodology section.

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 dissertation , thesis, research paper , or proposal .

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

• To familiarise 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  dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

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Writing a Literature Review

• Getting Started

Defining the topic

Limiting the scope.

• Finding the Literature
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• Writing the Review
• Systematic Reviews and Other Review Types
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Identifying a well-defined research question is the first step for writing a literature review. It should focus on something from the research field that needs to be explored, where there are gaps in the information. This will ensure that your contribution is valuable and that you are providing readers with a different angle or perspective on an issue or problem.

Your topic needs to be given careful consideration. A research question like “why are social networking sites harmful?” is too broad; there will be too much information to write a concise literature review. Change it to “how are online users experiencing or addressing privacy issues on Twitter and Facebook?" and it is more specific. It gives you a niche within the research field to focus on and explore.

Sometimes a broad topic can be narrowed by using one or more extra criteria, which can include:

• population group
• culture/ethnicity
• theoretical framework
• methodology (e.g., qualitative or quantitative, fieldwork/ethnography)

How you narrow the scope can be done in two broad ways, detailed in Developing a Search Strategy :

• add more search strands using AND to give fewer results (see Combining your terms: search operators )
• use "filters" in a database to eliminate results from outside those limits (see Using methodological search filters )
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What is a literature review? [with examples]

What is a literature review?

The purpose of a literature review, how to write a literature review, the format of a literature review, general formatting rules, the length of a literature review, literature review examples, frequently asked questions about literature reviews, related articles.

A literature review is an assessment of the sources in a chosen topic of research.

In a literature review, you’re expected to report on the existing scholarly conversation, without adding new contributions.

If you are currently writing one, you've come to the right place. In the following paragraphs, we will explain:

• the objective of a literature review
• how to write a literature review
• the basic format of a literature review

Tip: It’s not always mandatory to add a literature review in a paper. Theses and dissertations often include them, whereas research papers may not. Make sure to consult with your instructor for exact requirements.

The four main objectives of a literature review are:

• Studying the references of your research area
• Summarizing the main arguments
• Identifying current gaps, stances, and issues
• Presenting all of the above in a text

Ultimately, the main goal of a literature review is to provide the researcher with sufficient knowledge about the topic in question so that they can eventually make an intervention.

The format of a literature review is fairly standard. It includes an:

• introduction that briefly introduces the main topic
• body that includes the main discussion of the key arguments
• conclusion that highlights the gaps and issues of the literature

➡️ Take a look at our guide on how to write a literature review to learn more about how to structure a literature review.

First of all, a literature review should have its own labeled section. You should indicate clearly in the table of contents where the literature can be found, and you should label this section as “Literature Review.”

➡️ For more information on writing a thesis, visit our guide on how to structure a thesis .

There is no set amount of words for a literature review, so the length depends on the research. If you are working with a large amount of sources, it will be long. If your paper does not depend entirely on references, it will be short.

Take a look at these three theses featuring great literature reviews:

• School-Based Speech-Language Pathologist's Perceptions of Sensory Food Aversions in Children [ PDF , see page 20]
• Who's Writing What We Read: Authorship in Criminological Research [ PDF , see page 4]
• A Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experience of Online Instructors of Theological Reflection at Christian Institutions Accredited by the Association of Theological Schools [ PDF , see page 56]

Literature reviews are most commonly found in theses and dissertations. However, you find them in research papers as well.

There is no set amount of words for a literature review, so the length depends on the research. If you are working with a large amount of sources, then it will be long. If your paper does not depend entirely on references, then it will be short.

No. A literature review should have its own independent section. You should indicate clearly in the table of contents where the literature review can be found, and label this section as “Literature Review.”

The main goal of a literature review is to provide the researcher with sufficient knowledge about the topic in question so that they can eventually make an intervention.

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Literature Review – Types Writing Guide and Examples

Table of Contents

Literature Review

Definition:

A literature review is a comprehensive and critical analysis of the existing literature on a particular topic or research question. It involves identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing relevant literature, including scholarly articles, books, and other sources, to provide a summary and critical assessment of what is known about the topic.

Types of Literature Review

Types of Literature Review are as follows:

• Narrative literature review : This type of review involves a comprehensive summary and critical analysis of the available literature on a particular topic or research question. It is often used as an introductory section of a research paper.
• Systematic literature review: This is a rigorous and structured review that follows a pre-defined protocol to identify, evaluate, and synthesize all relevant studies on a specific research question. It is often used in evidence-based practice and systematic reviews.
• Meta-analysis: This is a quantitative review that uses statistical methods to combine data from multiple studies to derive a summary effect size. It provides a more precise estimate of the overall effect than any individual study.
• Scoping review: This is a preliminary review that aims to map the existing literature on a broad topic area to identify research gaps and areas for further investigation.
• Critical literature review : This type of review evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature on a particular topic or research question. It aims to provide a critical analysis of the literature and identify areas where further research is needed.
• Conceptual literature review: This review synthesizes and integrates theories and concepts from multiple sources to provide a new perspective on a particular topic. It aims to provide a theoretical framework for understanding a particular research question.
• Rapid literature review: This is a quick review that provides a snapshot of the current state of knowledge on a specific research question or topic. It is often used when time and resources are limited.
• Thematic literature review : This review identifies and analyzes common themes and patterns across a body of literature on a particular topic. It aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature and identify key themes and concepts.
• Realist literature review: This review is often used in social science research and aims to identify how and why certain interventions work in certain contexts. It takes into account the context and complexities of real-world situations.
• State-of-the-art literature review : This type of review provides an overview of the current state of knowledge in a particular field, highlighting the most recent and relevant research. It is often used in fields where knowledge is rapidly evolving, such as technology or medicine.
• Integrative literature review: This type of review synthesizes and integrates findings from multiple studies on a particular topic to identify patterns, themes, and gaps in the literature. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of knowledge on a particular topic.
• Umbrella literature review : This review is used to provide a broad overview of a large and diverse body of literature on a particular topic. It aims to identify common themes and patterns across different areas of research.
• Historical literature review: This type of review examines the historical development of research on a particular topic or research question. It aims to provide a historical context for understanding the current state of knowledge on a particular topic.
• Problem-oriented literature review : This review focuses on a specific problem or issue and examines the literature to identify potential solutions or interventions. It aims to provide practical recommendations for addressing a particular problem or issue.
• Mixed-methods literature review : This type of review combines quantitative and qualitative methods to synthesize and analyze the available literature on a particular topic. It aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the research question by combining different types of evidence.

Parts of Literature Review

Parts of a literature review are as follows:

Introduction

The introduction of a literature review typically provides background information on the research topic and why it is important. It outlines the objectives of the review, the research question or hypothesis, and the scope of the review.

Literature Search

This section outlines the search strategy and databases used to identify relevant literature. The search terms used, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and any limitations of the search are described.

Literature Analysis

The literature analysis is the main body of the literature review. This section summarizes and synthesizes the literature that is relevant to the research question or hypothesis. The review should be organized thematically, chronologically, or by methodology, depending on the research objectives.

Critical Evaluation

Critical evaluation involves assessing the quality and validity of the literature. This includes evaluating the reliability and validity of the studies reviewed, the methodology used, and the strength of the evidence.

The conclusion of the literature review should summarize the main findings, identify any gaps in the literature, and suggest areas for future research. It should also reiterate the importance of the research question or hypothesis and the contribution of the literature review to the overall research project.

The references list includes all the sources cited in the literature review, and follows a specific referencing style (e.g., APA, MLA, Harvard).

How to write Literature Review

Here are some steps to follow when writing a literature review:

• Define your research question or topic : Before starting your literature review, it is essential to define your research question or topic. This will help you identify relevant literature and determine the scope of your review.
• Conduct a comprehensive search: Use databases and search engines to find relevant literature. Look for peer-reviewed articles, books, and other academic sources that are relevant to your research question or topic.
• Evaluate the sources: Once you have found potential sources, evaluate them critically to determine their relevance, credibility, and quality. Look for recent publications, reputable authors, and reliable sources of data and evidence.
• Organize your sources: Group the sources by theme, method, or research question. This will help you identify similarities and differences among the literature, and provide a structure for your literature review.
• Analyze and synthesize the literature : Analyze each source in depth, identifying the key findings, methodologies, and conclusions. Then, synthesize the information from the sources, identifying patterns and themes in the literature.
• Write the literature review : Start with an introduction that provides an overview of the topic and the purpose of the literature review. Then, organize the literature according to your chosen structure, and analyze and synthesize the sources. Finally, provide a conclusion that summarizes the key findings of the literature review, identifies gaps in knowledge, and suggests areas for future research.
• Edit and proofread: Once you have written your literature review, edit and proofread it carefully to ensure that it is well-organized, clear, and concise.

Examples of Literature Review

Here’s an example of how a literature review can be conducted for a thesis on the topic of “ The Impact of Social Media on Teenagers’ Mental Health”:

• Start by identifying the key terms related to your research topic. In this case, the key terms are “social media,” “teenagers,” and “mental health.”
• Use academic databases like Google Scholar, JSTOR, or PubMed to search for relevant articles, books, and other publications. Use these keywords in your search to narrow down your results.
• Evaluate the sources you find to determine if they are relevant to your research question. You may want to consider the publication date, author’s credentials, and the journal or book publisher.
• Begin reading and taking notes on each source, paying attention to key findings, methodologies used, and any gaps in the research.
• Organize your findings into themes or categories. For example, you might categorize your sources into those that examine the impact of social media on self-esteem, those that explore the effects of cyberbullying, and those that investigate the relationship between social media use and depression.
• Synthesize your findings by summarizing the key themes and highlighting any gaps or inconsistencies in the research. Identify areas where further research is needed.
• Use your literature review to inform your research questions and hypotheses for your thesis.

For example, after conducting a literature review on the impact of social media on teenagers’ mental health, a thesis might look like this:

“Using a mixed-methods approach, this study aims to investigate the relationship between social media use and mental health outcomes in teenagers. Specifically, the study will examine the effects of cyberbullying, social comparison, and excessive social media use on self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. Through an analysis of survey data and qualitative interviews with teenagers, the study will provide insight into the complex relationship between social media use and mental health outcomes, and identify strategies for promoting positive mental health outcomes in young people.”

Reference: Smith, J., Jones, M., & Lee, S. (2019). The effects of social media use on adolescent mental health: A systematic review. Journal of Adolescent Health, 65(2), 154-165. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2019.03.024

Reference Example: Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume number(issue number), page range. doi:0000000/000000000000 or URL

Applications of Literature Review

some applications of literature review in different fields:

• Social Sciences: In social sciences, literature reviews are used to identify gaps in existing research, to develop research questions, and to provide a theoretical framework for research. Literature reviews are commonly used in fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science.
• Natural Sciences: In natural sciences, literature reviews are used to summarize and evaluate the current state of knowledge in a particular field or subfield. Literature reviews can help researchers identify areas where more research is needed and provide insights into the latest developments in a particular field. Fields such as biology, chemistry, and physics commonly use literature reviews.
• Health Sciences: In health sciences, literature reviews are used to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments, identify best practices, and determine areas where more research is needed. Literature reviews are commonly used in fields such as medicine, nursing, and public health.
• Humanities: In humanities, literature reviews are used to identify gaps in existing knowledge, develop new interpretations of texts or cultural artifacts, and provide a theoretical framework for research. Literature reviews are commonly used in fields such as history, literary studies, and philosophy.

Role of Literature Review in Research

Here are some applications of literature review in research:

• Identifying Research Gaps : Literature review helps researchers identify gaps in existing research and literature related to their research question. This allows them to develop new research questions and hypotheses to fill those gaps.
• Developing Theoretical Framework: Literature review helps researchers develop a theoretical framework for their research. By analyzing and synthesizing existing literature, researchers can identify the key concepts, theories, and models that are relevant to their research.
• Selecting Research Methods : Literature review helps researchers select appropriate research methods and techniques based on previous research. It also helps researchers to identify potential biases or limitations of certain methods and techniques.
• Data Collection and Analysis: Literature review helps researchers in data collection and analysis by providing a foundation for the development of data collection instruments and methods. It also helps researchers to identify relevant data sources and identify potential data analysis techniques.
• Communicating Results: Literature review helps researchers to communicate their results effectively by providing a context for their research. It also helps to justify the significance of their findings in relation to existing research and literature.

Purpose of Literature Review

Some of the specific purposes of a literature review are as follows:

• To provide context: A literature review helps to provide context for your research by situating it within the broader body of literature on the topic.
• To identify gaps and inconsistencies: A literature review helps to identify areas where further research is needed or where there are inconsistencies in the existing literature.
• To synthesize information: A literature review helps to synthesize the information from multiple sources and present a coherent and comprehensive picture of the current state of knowledge on the topic.
• To identify key concepts and theories : A literature review helps to identify key concepts and theories that are relevant to your research question and provide a theoretical framework for your study.
• To inform research design: A literature review can inform the design of your research study by identifying appropriate research methods, data sources, and research questions.

Characteristics of Literature Review

Some Characteristics of Literature Review are as follows:

• Identifying gaps in knowledge: A literature review helps to identify gaps in the existing knowledge and research on a specific topic or research question. By analyzing and synthesizing the literature, you can identify areas where further research is needed and where new insights can be gained.
• Establishing the significance of your research: A literature review helps to establish the significance of your own research by placing it in the context of existing research. By demonstrating the relevance of your research to the existing literature, you can establish its importance and value.
• Informing research design and methodology : A literature review helps to inform research design and methodology by identifying the most appropriate research methods, techniques, and instruments. By reviewing the literature, you can identify the strengths and limitations of different research methods and techniques, and select the most appropriate ones for your own research.
• Supporting arguments and claims: A literature review provides evidence to support arguments and claims made in academic writing. By citing and analyzing the literature, you can provide a solid foundation for your own arguments and claims.
• I dentifying potential collaborators and mentors: A literature review can help identify potential collaborators and mentors by identifying researchers and practitioners who are working on related topics or using similar methods. By building relationships with these individuals, you can gain valuable insights and support for your own research and practice.
• Keeping up-to-date with the latest research : A literature review helps to keep you up-to-date with the latest research on a specific topic or research question. By regularly reviewing the literature, you can stay informed about the latest findings and developments in your field.

Advantages of Literature Review

There are several advantages to conducting a literature review as part of a research project, including:

• Establishing the significance of the research : A literature review helps to establish the significance of the research by demonstrating the gap or problem in the existing literature that the study aims to address.
• Identifying key concepts and theories: A literature review can help to identify key concepts and theories that are relevant to the research question, and provide a theoretical framework for the study.
• Supporting the research methodology : A literature review can inform the research methodology by identifying appropriate research methods, data sources, and research questions.
• Providing a comprehensive overview of the literature : A literature review provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on a topic, allowing the researcher to identify key themes, debates, and areas of agreement or disagreement.
• Identifying potential research questions: A literature review can help to identify potential research questions and areas for further investigation.
• Avoiding duplication of research: A literature review can help to avoid duplication of research by identifying what has already been done on a topic, and what remains to be done.
• Enhancing the credibility of the research : A literature review helps to enhance the credibility of the research by demonstrating the researcher’s knowledge of the existing literature and their ability to situate their research within a broader context.

Limitations of Literature Review

Limitations of Literature Review are as follows:

• Limited scope : Literature reviews can only cover the existing literature on a particular topic, which may be limited in scope or depth.
• Publication bias : Literature reviews may be influenced by publication bias, which occurs when researchers are more likely to publish positive results than negative ones. This can lead to an incomplete or biased picture of the literature.
• Quality of sources : The quality of the literature reviewed can vary widely, and not all sources may be reliable or valid.
• Time-limited: Literature reviews can become quickly outdated as new research is published, making it difficult to keep up with the latest developments in a field.
• Subjective interpretation : Literature reviews can be subjective, and the interpretation of the findings can vary depending on the researcher’s perspective or bias.
• Lack of original data : Literature reviews do not generate new data, but rather rely on the analysis of existing studies.
• Risk of plagiarism: It is important to ensure that literature reviews do not inadvertently contain plagiarism, which can occur when researchers use the work of others without proper attribution.

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Cochrane Training

Chapter 2: determining the scope of the review and the questions it will address.

James Thomas, Dylan Kneale, Joanne E McKenzie, Sue E Brennan, Soumyadeep Bhaumik

Key Points:

• Systematic reviews should address answerable questions and fill important gaps in knowledge.
• Developing good review questions takes time, expertise and engagement with intended users of the review.
• Cochrane Reviews can focus on broad questions, or be more narrowly defined. There are advantages and disadvantages of each.
• Logic models are a way of documenting how interventions, particularly complex interventions, are intended to ‘work’, and can be used to refine review questions and the broader scope of the review.
• Using priority-setting exercises, involving relevant stakeholders, and ensuring that the review takes account of issues relating to equity can be strategies for ensuring that the scope and focus of reviews address the right questions.

Cite this chapter as: Thomas J, Kneale D, McKenzie JE, Brennan SE, Bhaumik S. Chapter 2: Determining the scope of the review and the questions it will address [last updated August 2023]. In: Higgins JPT, Thomas J, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page MJ, Welch VA (editors). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions version 6.5. Cochrane, 2024. Available from www.training.cochrane.org/handbook .

2.1 Rationale for well-formulated questions

As with any research, the first and most important decision in preparing a systematic review is to determine its focus. This is best done by clearly framing the questions the review seeks to answer. The focus of any Cochrane Review should be on questions that are important to people making decisions about health or health care. These decisions will usually need to take into account both the benefits and harms of interventions (see MECIR Box 2.1.a ). Good review questions often take time to develop, requiring engagement with not only the subject area, but with a wide group of stakeholders (Section 2.4.2 ).

Well-formulated questions will guide many aspects of the review process, including determining eligibility criteria, searching for studies, collecting data from included studies, structuring the syntheses and presenting findings (Cooper 1984, Hedges 1994, Oliver et al 2017) . In Cochrane Reviews, questions are stated broadly as review ‘Objectives’, and operationalized in terms of the studies that will be eligible to answer those questions as ‘Criteria for considering studies for this review’. As well as focusing review conduct, the contents of these sections are used by readers in their initial assessments of whether the review is likely to be directly relevant to the issues they face.

The FINER criteria have been proposed as encapsulating the issues that should be addressed when developing research questions. These state that questions should be F easible, I nteresting, N ovel, E thical, and R elevant (Cummings et al 2007). All of these criteria raise important issues for consideration at the outset of a review and should be borne in mind when questions are formulated.

A feasible review is one that asks a question that the author team is capable of addressing using the evidence available. Issues concerning the breadth of a review are discussed in Section 2.3.1 , but in terms of feasibility it is important not to ask a question that will result in retrieving unmanageable quantities of information; up-front scoping work will help authors to define sensible boundaries for their reviews. Likewise, while it can be useful to identify gaps in the evidence base, review authors and stakeholders should be aware of the possibility of asking a question that may not be answerable using the existing evidence (i.e. that will result in an ‘empty’ review, see also Section 2.5.3 ).

Embarking on a review that authors are interested in is important because reviews are a significant undertaking and review authors need sufficient commitment to see the work through to its conclusion.

A novel review will address a genuine gap in knowledge, so review authors should be aware of any related or overlapping reviews. This reduces duplication of effort, and also ensures that authors understand the wider research context to which their review will contribute. Authors should check for pre-existing syntheses in the published research literature and also for ongoing reviews in the PROSPERO register of systematic reviews before beginning their own review.

Given the opportunity cost involved in undertaking an activity as demanding as a systematic review, authors should ensure that their work is relevant by: (i) involving relevant stakeholders in defining its focus and the questions it will address; and (ii) writing up the review in such a way as to facilitate the translation of its findings to inform decisions. The GRADE framework aims to achieve this, and should be considered throughout the review process, not only when it is being written up (see Chapter 14 and Chapter 15 ).

Consideration of opportunity costs is also relevant in terms of the ethics of conducting a review, though ethical issues should also be considered primarily in terms of the questions that are prioritized for answering and the way that they are framed. Research questions are often not value-neutral, and the way that a given problem is approached can have political implications which can result in, for example, the widening of health inequalities (whether intentional or not). These issues are explored in Section 2.4.3 and Chapter 16 .

MECIR Box 2.1.a Relevant expectations for conduct of intervention reviews

2.2 Aims of reviews of interventions

Systematic reviews can address any question that can be answered by a primary research study. This Handbook focuses on a subset of all possible review questions: the impact of intervention(s) implemented within a specified human population. Even within these limits, systematic reviews examining the effects of intervention(s) can vary quite markedly in their aims. Some will focus specifically on evidence of an effect of an intervention compared with a specific alternative, whereas others may examine a range of different interventions. Reviews that examine multiple interventions and aim to identify which might be the most effective can be broader and more challenging than those looking at single interventions. These can also be the most useful for end users, where decision making involves selecting from a number of intervention options. The incorporation of network meta-analysis as a core method in this edition of the Handbook (see Chapter 11 ) reflects the growing importance of these types of reviews.

As well as looking at the balance of benefit and harm that can be attributed to a given intervention, reviews within the ambit of this Handbook might also aim to investigate the relationship between the size of an intervention effect and other characteristics, such as aspects of the population, the intervention itself, how the outcome is measured, or the methodology of the primary research studies included. Such approaches might be used to investigate which components of multi-component interventions are more or less important or essential (and when). While it is not always necessary to know how an intervention achieves its effect for it to be useful, many reviews will aim to articulate an intervention’s mechanisms of action (see Section 2.5.1 ), either by making this an explicit aim of the review itself (see Chapter 17 and Chapter 21 ), or when describing the scope of the review. Understanding how an intervention works (or is intended to work) can be an important aid to decision makers in assessing the applicability of the review to their situation. These investigations can be assisted by the incorporation of results from process evaluations conducted alongside trials (see Chapter 21 ). Further, many decisions in policy and practice are at least partially constrained by the resource available, so review authors often need to consider the economic context of interventions (see Chapter 20 ).

2.3 Defining the scope of a review question

Studies comparing healthcare interventions, notably randomized trials, use the outcomes of participants to compare the effects of different interventions. Statistical syntheses (e.g. meta-analysis) focus on comparisons of interventions, such as a new intervention versus a control intervention (which may represent conditions of usual practice or care), or the comparison of two competing interventions. Throughout the Handbook we use the terminology experimental intervention versus comparator intervention. This implies a need to identify one of the interventions as experimental, and is used only for convenience since all methods apply to both controlled and head-to-head comparisons. The contrast between the outcomes of two groups treated differently is known as the ‘effect’, the ‘treatment effect’ or the ‘intervention effect’; we generally use the last of these throughout the Handbook .

A statement of the review’s objectives should begin with a precise statement of the primary objective, ideally in a single sentence ( MECIR Box 2.3.a ). Where possible the style should be of the form ‘To assess the effects of [ intervention or comparison ] for [ health problem ] in [ types of people, disease or problem and setting if specified ]’. This might be followed by one or more secondary objectives, for example relating to different participant groups, different comparisons of interventions or different outcome measures. The detailed specification of the review question(s) requires consideration of several key components (Richardson et al 1995, Counsell 1997) which can often be encapsulated by the ‘PICO’ mnemonic, an acronym for P opulation, I ntervention, C omparison(s) and O utcome. Equal emphasis in addressing, and equal precision in defining, each PICO component is not necessary. For example, a review might concentrate on competing interventions for a particular stage of breast cancer, with stage and severity of the disease being defined very precisely; or alternately focus on a particular drug for any stage of breast cancer, with the treatment formulation being defined very precisely.

Throughout the Handbook we make a distinction between three different stages in the review at which the PICO construct might be used. This division is helpful for understanding the decisions that need to be made:

• The review PICO (planned at the protocol stage) is the PICO on which eligibility of studies is based (what will be included and what excluded from the review).
• The PICO for each synthesis (also planned at the protocol stage) defines the question that each specific synthesis aims to answer, determining how the synthesis will be structured, specifying planned comparisons (including intervention and comparator groups, any grouping of outcome and population subgroups).
• The PICO of the included studies (determined at the review stage) is what was actually investigated in the included studies.

Reaching the point where it is possible to articulate the review’s objectives in the above form – the review PICO – requires time and detailed discussion between potential authors and users of the review. It is important that those involved in developing the review’s scope and questions have a good knowledge of the practical issues that the review will address as well as the research field to be synthesized. Developing the questions is a critical part of the research process. As such, there are methodological issues to bear in mind, including: how to determine which questions are most important to answer; how to engage stakeholders in question formulation; how to account for changes in focus as the review progresses; and considerations about how broad (or narrow) a review should be.

MECIR Box 2.3 . a Relevant expectations for conduct of intervention reviews

2.3.1 Broad versus narrow reviews

The questions addressed by a review may be broad or narrow in scope. For example, a review might address a broad question regarding whether antiplatelet agents in general are effective in preventing all thrombotic events in humans. Alternatively, a review might address whether a particular antiplatelet agent, such as aspirin, is effective in decreasing the risks of a particular thrombotic event, stroke, in elderly persons with a previous history of stroke. Increasingly, reviews are becoming broader, aiming, for example, to identify which intervention – out of a range of treatment options – is most effective, or to investigate how an intervention varies depending on implementation and participant characteristics.

Overviews of reviews (see  Chapter V ), in which multiple reviews are summarized, can be one way of addressing the need for breadth when synthesizing the evidence base, since they can summarize multiple reviews of different interventions for the same condition, or multiple reviews of the same intervention for different types of participants. It may be considered desirable to plan a series of reviews with a relatively narrow scope, alongside an Overview to summarize their findings. Alternatively, it may be more useful – particularly given the growth in support for network meta-analysis – to combine comparisons of different treatment options within the same review (see Chapter 11 ). When deciding whether or not an overview might be the most appropriate approach, review authors should take account of the breadth of the question being asked and the resources available. Some questions are simply too broad for a review of all relevant primary research to be practicable, and if a field has sufficient high-quality reviews, then the production of another review of primary research that duplicates the others might not be a sensible use of resources.

Some of the advantages and disadvantages of broad and narrow reviews are summarized in Table 2.3.a . While having a broad scope in terms of the range of participants has the potential to increase generalizability, the extent to which findings are ultimately applicable to broader (or different) populations will depend on the participants who have actually been recruited into research studies. Likewise, heterogeneity can be a disadvantage when the expectation is for homogeneity of effects between studies, but an advantage when the review question seeks to understand differential effects (see Chapter 10 ).A distinction should be drawn between the scope of a review and the precise questions within, since it is possible to have a broad review that addresses quite narrow questions. In the antiplatelet agents for preventing thrombotic events example, a systematic review with a broad scope might include all available treatments. Rather than combining all the studies into one comparison though, specific treatments would be compared with one another in separate comparisons, thus breaking a heterogeneous set of treatments into narrower, more homogenous groups. This relates to the three levels of PICO, outlined in Section 2.3 . The review PICO defines the broad scope of the review, and the PICO for comparison defines the specific treatments that will be compared with one another; Chapter 3 elaborates on the use of PICOs.

In practice, a Cochrane Review may start (or have started) with a broad scope, and be divided up into narrower reviews as evidence accumulates and the original review becomes unwieldy. This may be done for practical and logistical reasons, for example to make updating easier as well as to make it easier for readers to see which parts of the evidence base are changing. Individual review authors must decide if there are instances where splitting a broader focused review into a series of more narrowly focused reviews is appropriate and implement appropriate methods to achieve this. If a major change is to be undertaken, such as splitting a broad review into a series of more narrowly focused reviews, a new protocol must be written for each of the component reviews that documents the eligibility criteria for each one.

Ultimately, the selected breadth of a review depends upon multiple factors including perspectives regarding a question’s relevance and potential impact; supporting theoretical, biologic and epidemiological information; the potential generalizability and validity of answers to the questions; and available resources. As outlined in Section 2.4.2 , authors should consider carefully the needs of users of the review and the context(s) in which they expect the review to be used when determining the most optimal scope for their review.

Table 2.3.a Some advantages and disadvantages of broad versus narrow reviews

2.3.2 ‘Lumping’ versus ‘splitting’

It is important not to confuse the issue of the breadth of the review (determined by the review PICO) with concerns about between-study heterogeneity and the legitimacy of combining results from diverse studies in the same analysis (determined by the PICOs for comparison).

Broad reviews have been criticized as ‘mixing apples and oranges’, and one of the inventors of meta-analysis, Gene Glass, has responded “Of course it mixes apples and oranges… comparing apples and oranges is the only endeavour worthy of true scientists; comparing apples to apples is trivial” (Glass 2015). In fact, the two concepts (‘broad reviews’ and ‘mixing apples and oranges’) are different issues. Glass argues that broad reviews, with diverse studies, provide the opportunity to ask interesting questions about the reasons for differential intervention effects.

The ‘apples and oranges’ critique refers to the inappropriate mixing of studies within a single comparison, where the purpose is to estimate an average effect. In situations where good biologic or sociological evidence suggests that various formulations of an intervention behave very differently or that various definitions of the condition of interest are associated with markedly different effects of the intervention, the uncritical aggregation of results from quite different interventions or populations/settings may well be questionable.

Unfortunately, determining the situations where studies are similar enough to combine with one another is not always straightforward, and it can depend, to some extent, on the question being asked. While the decision is sometimes characterized as ‘lumping’ (where studies are combined in the same analysis) or ‘splitting’ (where they are not) (Squires et al 2013), it is better to consider these issues on a continuum, with reviews that have greater variation in the types of included interventions, settings and populations, and study designs being towards the ‘lumped’ end, and those that include little variation in these elements being towards the ‘split’ end (Petticrew and Roberts 2006).

While specification of the review PICO sets the boundary for the inclusion and exclusion of studies, decisions also need to be made when planning the PICO for the comparisons to be made in the analysis as to whether they aim to address broader (‘lumped’) or narrower (‘split’) questions (Caldwell and Welton 2016). The degree of ‘lumping’ in the comparisons will be primarily driven by the review’s objectives, but will sometimes be dictated by the availability of studies (and data) for a particular comparison (see Chapter 9 for discussion of the latter). The former is illustrated by a Cochrane Review that examined the effects of newer-generation antidepressants for depressive disorders in children and adolescents (Hetrick et al 2012).

Newer-generation antidepressants include multiple different compounds (e.g. paroxetine, fluoxetine). The objectives of this review were to (i) estimate the overall effect of newer-generation antidepressants on depression, (ii) estimate the effect of each compound, and (iii) examine whether the compound type and age of the participants (children versus adolescents) is associated with the intervention effect. Objective (i) addresses a broad, ‘in principle’ (Caldwell and Welton 2016), question of whether newer-generation antidepressants improve depression, where the different compounds are ‘lumped’ into a single comparison. Objective (ii) seeks to address narrower, ‘split’, questions that investigate the effect of each compound on depression separately. Answers to both questions can be identified by setting up separate comparisons for each compound, or by subgrouping the ‘lumped’ comparison by compound ( Chapter 10, Section 10.11.2 ). Objective (iii) seeks to explore factors that explain heterogeneity among the intervention effects, or equivalently, whether the intervention effect varies by the factor. This can be examined using subgroup analysis or meta-regression ( Chapter 10, Section 10.11 ) but, in the case of intervention types, is best achieved using network meta-analysis (see Chapter 11 ).

There are various advantages and disadvantages to bear in mind when defining the PICO for the comparison and considering whether ‘lumping’ or ‘splitting’ is appropriate. Lumping allows for the investigation of factors that may explain heterogeneity. Results from these investigations may provide important leads as to whether an intervention operates differently in, for example, different populations (such as in children and adolescents in the example above). Ultimately, this type of knowledge is useful for clinical decision making. However, lumping is likely to introduce heterogeneity, which will not always be explained by a priori specified factors, and this may lead to a combined effect that is clinically difficult to interpret and implement. For example, when multiple intervention types are ‘lumped’ in one comparison (as in objective (i) above), and there is unexplained heterogeneity, the combined intervention effect would not enable a clinical decision as to which intervention should be selected. Splitting comparisons carries its own risk of there being too few studies to yield a useful synthesis. Inevitably, some degree of aggregation across the PICO elements is required for a meta-analysis to be undertaken (Caldwell and Welton 2016).

2.4 Ensuring the review addresses the right questions

Since systematic reviews are intended for use in healthcare decision making, review teams should ensure not only the application of robust methodology, but also that the review question is meaningful for healthcare decision making. Two approaches are discussed below:

• Using results from existing research priority-setting exercises to define the review question.
• In the absence of, or in addition to, existing research priority-setting exercises, engaging with stakeholders to define review questions and establish their relevance to policy and practice.

2.4.1 Using priority-setting exercises to define review questions

A research priority-setting exercise is a “collective activity for deciding which uncertainties are most worth trying to resolve through research; uncertainties considered may be problems to be understood or solutions to be developed or tested; across broad or narrow areas” (Sandy Oliver, referenced in Nasser 2018). Using research priority-setting exercises to define the scope of a review helps to prevent the waste of scarce resources for research by making the review more relevant to stakeholders (Chalmers et al 2014).

Research priority setting is always conducted in a specific context, setting and population with specific principles, values and preferences (which should be articulated). Different stakeholders’ interpretation of the scope and purpose of a ‘research question’ might vary, resulting in priorities that might be difficult to interpret. Researchers or review teams might find it necessary to translate the research priorities into an answerable PICO research question format, and may find it useful to recheck the question with the stakeholder groups to determine whether they have accurately reflected their intentions.

While Cochrane Review teams are in most cases reviewing the effects of an intervention with a global scope, they may find that the priorities identified by important stakeholders (such as the World Health Organization or other organizations or individuals in a representative health system) are informative in planning the review. Review authors may find that differences between different stakeholder groups’ views on priorities and the reasons for these differences can help them to define the scope of the review. This is particularly important for making decisions about excluding specific populations or settings, or being inclusive and potentially conducting subgroup analyses.

Whenever feasible, systematic reviews should be based on priorities identified by key stakeholders such as decision makers, patients/public, and practitioners. Cochrane has developed a list of priorities for reviews in consultation with key stakeholders, which is available on the Cochrane website. Issues relating to equity (see Chapter 16 and Section 2.4.3 ) need to be taken into account when conducting and interpreting the results from priority-setting exercises. Examples of materials to support these processes are available (Viergever et al 2010, Nasser et al 2013, Tong et al 2017).

The results of research priority-setting exercises can be searched for in electronic databases and via websites of relevant organizations. Examples are: James Lind Alliance , World Health Organization, organizations of health professionals including research disciplines, and ministries of health in different countries (Viergever 2010). Examples of search strategies for identifying research priority-setting exercises are available (Bryant et al 2014, Tong et al 2015).

Other sources of questions are often found in ‘implications for future research’ sections of articles in journals and clinical practice guidelines. Some guideline developers have prioritized questions identified through the guideline development process (Sharma et al 2018), although these priorities will be influenced by the needs of health systems in which different guideline development teams are working.

2.4.2 Engaging stakeholders to help define the review questions

In the absence of a relevant research priority-setting exercise, or when a systematic review is being conducted for a very specific purpose (for example, commissioned to inform the development of a guideline), researchers should work with relevant stakeholders to define the review question. This practice is especially important when developing review questions for studying the effectiveness of health systems and policies, because of the variability between countries and regions; the significance of these differences may only become apparent through discussion with the stakeholders.

The stakeholders for a review could include consumers or patients, carers, health professionals of different kinds, policy decision makers and others ( Chapter 1, Section 1.3.1 ). Identifying the stakeholders who are critical to a particular question will depend on the question, who the answer is likely to affect, and who will be expected to implement the intervention if it is found to be effective (or to discontinue it if not).

Stakeholder engagement should, optimally, be an ongoing process throughout the life of the systematic review, from defining the question to dissemination of results (Keown et al 2008). Engaging stakeholders increases relevance, promotes mutual learning, improves uptake and decreases research waste (see Chapter 1, Section 1.3.1 and Section 1.3.2 ). However, because such engagement can be challenging and resource intensive, a one-off engagement process to define the review question might only be possible. Review questions that are conceptualized and refined by multiple stakeholders can capture much of the complexity that should be addressed in a systematic review.

2.4.3 Considering issues relating to equity when defining review questions

Deciding what should be investigated, who the participants should be, and how the analysis will be carried out can be considered political activities, with the potential for increasing or decreasing inequalities in health. For example, we now know that well-intended interventions can actually widen inequalities in health outcomes since researchers have chosen to investigate this issue (Lorenc et al 2013). Decision makers can now take account of this knowledge when planning service provision. Authors should therefore consider the potential impact on disadvantaged groups of the intervention(s) that they are investigating on disadvantaged groups, and whether socio-economic inequalities in health might be affected depending on whether or how they are implemented.

Health equity is the absence of avoidable and unfair differences in health (Whitehead 1992). Health inequity may be experienced across characteristics defined by PROGRESS-Plus (Place of residence, Race/ethnicity/culture/language, Occupation, Gender/sex, Religion, Education, Socio-economic status, Social capital, and other characteristics (‘Plus’) such as sexual orientation, age, and disability) (O’Neill et al 2014). Issues relating to health equity should be considered when review questions are developed ( MECIR Box 2.4.a ). Chapter 16 presents detailed guidance on this issue for review authors.

MECIR Box 2.4 . a Relevant expectations for conduct of intervention reviews

2.5 Methods and tools for structuring the review

It is important for authors to develop the scope of their review with care: without a clear understanding of where the review will contribute to existing knowledge – and how it will be used – it may be at risk of conceptual incoherence. It may mis-specify critical elements of how the intervention(s) interact with the context(s) within which they operate to produce specific outcomes, and become either irrelevant or possibly misleading. For example, in a systematic review about smoking cessation interventions in pregnancy, it was essential for authors to take account of the way that health service provision has changed over time. The type and intensity of ‘usual care’ in more recent evaluations was equivalent to the interventions being evaluated in older studies, and the analysis needed to take this into account. This review also found that the same intervention can have different effects in different settings depending on whether its materials are culturally appropriate in each context (Chamberlain et al 2017).

In order to protect the review against conceptual incoherence and irrelevance, review authors need to spend time at the outset developing definitions for key concepts and ensuring that they are clear about the prior assumptions on which the review depends. These prior assumptions include, for example, why particular populations should be considered inside or outside the review’s scope; how the intervention is thought to achieve its effect; and why specific outcomes are selected for evaluation. Being clear about these prior assumptions also requires review authors to consider the evidential basis for these assumptions and decide for themselves which they can place more or less reliance on. When considered as a whole, this initial conceptual and definitional work states the review’s conceptual framework . Each element of the review’s PICO raises its own definitional challenges, which are discussed in detail in the Chapter 3 .

In this section we consider tools that may help to define the scope of the review and the relationships between its key concepts; in particular, articulating how the intervention gives rise to the outcomes selected. In some situations, long sequences of events are expected to occur between an intervention being implemented and an outcome being observed. For example, a systematic review examining the effects of asthma education interventions in schools on children’s health and well-being needed to consider: the interplay between core intervention components and their introduction into differing school environments; different child-level effect modifiers; how the intervention then had an impact on the knowledge of the child (and their family); the child’s self-efficacy and adherence to their treatment regime; the severity of their asthma; the number of days of restricted activity; how this affected their attendance at school; and finally, the distal outcomes of education attainment and indicators of child health and well-being (Kneale et al 2015).

Several specific tools can help authors to consider issues raised when defining review questions and planning their review; these are also helpful when developing eligibility criteria and classifying included studies. These include the following.

• Taxonomies: hierarchical structures that can be used to categorize (or group) related interventions, outcomes or populations.
• Generic frameworks for examining and structuring the description of intervention characteristics (e.g. TIDieR for the description of interventions (Hoffmann et al 2014), iCAT_SR for describing multiple aspects of complexity in systematic reviews (Lewin et al 2017)).
• Core outcome sets for identifying and defining agreed outcomes that should be measured for specific health conditions (described in more detail in Chapter 3 ).

Unlike these tools, which focus on particular aspects of a review, logic models provide a framework for planning and guiding synthesis at the review level (see Section 2.5.1 ).

2.5.1 Logic models

Logic models (sometimes referred to as conceptual frameworks or theories of change) are graphical representations of theories about how interventions work. They depict intervention components, mechanisms (pathways of action), outputs, and outcomes as sequential (although not necessarily linear) chains of events. Among systematic review authors, they were originally proposed as a useful tool when working with evaluations of complex social and population health programmes and interventions, to conceptualize the pathways through which interventions are intended to change outcomes (Anderson et al 2011).

In reviews where intervention complexity is a key consideration (see Chapter 17 ), logic models can be particularly helpful. For example, in a review of psychosocial group interventions for those with HIV, a logic model was used to show how the intervention might work (van der Heijden et al 2017). The review authors depicted proximal outcomes, such as self-esteem, but chose only to include psychological health outcomes in their review. In contrast, Bailey and colleagues included proximal outcomes in their review of computer-based interventions for sexual health promotion using a logic model to show how outcomes were grouped (Bailey et al 2010). Finally, in a review of slum upgrading, a logic model showed the broad range of interventions and their interlinkages with health and socio-economic outcomes (Turley et al 2013), and enabled the review authors to select a specific intervention category (physical upgrading) on which to focus the review. Further resources provide further examples of logic models, and can help review authors develop and use logic models (Anderson et al 2011, Baxter et al 2014, Kneale et al 2015, Pfadenhauer et al 2017, Rohwer et al 2017).

Logic models can vary in their emphasis, with a distinction sometimes made between system-based and process-oriented logic models (Rehfuess et al 2018). System-based logic models have particular value in examining the complexity of the system (e.g. the geographical, epidemiological, political, socio-cultural and socio-economic features of a system), and the interactions between contextual features, participants and the intervention (see Chapter 17 ). Process-oriented logic models aim to capture the complexity of causal pathways by which the intervention leads to outcomes, and any factors that may modify intervention effects. However, this is not a crisp distinction; the two types are interrelated; with some logic models depicting elements of both systems and process models simultaneously.

The way that logic models can be represented diagrammatically (see Chapter 17 for an example) provides a valuable visual summary for readers and can be a communication tool for decision makers and practitioners. They can aid initially in the development of a shared understanding between different stakeholders of the scope of the review and its PICO, helping to support decisions taken throughout the review process, from developing the research question and setting the review parameters, to structuring and interpreting the results. They can be used in planning the PICO elements of a review as well as for determining how the synthesis will be structured (i.e. planned comparisons, including intervention and comparator groups, and any grouping of outcome and population subgroups). These models may help review authors specify the link between the intervention, proximal and distal outcomes, and mediating factors. In other words, they depict the intervention theory underpinning the synthesis plan.

Anderson and colleagues note the main value of logic models in systematic review as (Anderson et al 2011):

• refining review questions;
• deciding on ‘lumping’ or ‘splitting’ a review topic;
• identifying intervention components;
• defining and conducting the review;
• identifying relevant study eligibility criteria;
• guiding the literature search strategy;
• explaining the rationale behind surrogate outcomes used in the review;
• justifying the need for subgroup analyses (e.g. age, sex/gender, socio-economic status);
• making the review relevant to policy and practice;
• structuring the reporting of results;
• illustrating how harms and feasibility are connected with interventions; and
• interpreting results based on intervention theory and systems thinking (see Chapter 17 ).

Logic models can be useful in systematic reviews when considering whether failure to find a beneficial effect of an intervention is due to a theory failure, an implementation failure, or both (see Chapter 17 and Cargo et al 2018). Making a distinction between implementation and intervention theory can help to determine whether and how the intervention interacts with (and potentially changes) its context (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 17 for further discussion of context). This helps to elucidate situations in which variations in how the intervention is implemented have the potential to affect the integrity of the intervention and intended outcomes.

Given their potential value in conceptualizing and structuring a review, logic models are increasingly published in review protocols. Logic models may be specified a priori and remain unchanged throughout the review; it might be expected, however, that the findings of reviews produce evidence and new understandings that could be used to update the logic model in some way (Kneale et al 2015). Some reviews take a more staged approach, pre-specifying points in the review process where the model may be revised on the basis of (new) evidence (Rehfuess et al 2018) and a staged logic model can provide an efficient way to report revisions to the synthesis plan. For example, in a review of portion, package and tableware size for changing selection or consumption of food and other products, the authors presented a logic model that clearly showed changes to their original synthesis plan (Hollands et al 2015).

It is preferable to seek out existing logic models for the intervention and revise or adapt these models in line with the review focus, although this may not always be possible. More commonly, new models are developed starting with the identification of outcomes and theorizing the necessary pre-conditions to reach those outcomes. This process of theorizing and identifying the steps and necessary pre-conditions continues, working backwards from the intended outcomes, until the intervention itself is represented. As many mechanisms of action are invisible and can only be ‘known’ through theory, this process is invaluable in exposing assumptions as to how interventions are thought to work; assumptions that might then be tested in the review. Logic models can be developed with stakeholders (see Section 2.5.2 ) and it is considered good practice to obtain stakeholder input in their development.

Logic models are representations of how interventions are intended to ‘work’, but they can also provide a useful basis for thinking through the unintended consequences of interventions and identifying potential adverse effects that may need to be captured in the review (Bonell et al 2015). While logic models provide a guiding theory of how interventions are intended to work, critiques exist around their use, including their potential to oversimplify complex intervention processes (Rohwer et al 2017). Here, contributions from different stakeholders to the development of a logic model may be able to articulate where complex processes may occur; theorizing unintended intervention impacts; and the explicit representation of ambiguity within certain parts of the causal chain where new theory/explanation is most valuable.

2.5.2 Changing review questions

While questions should be posed in the protocol before initiating the full review, these questions should not prevent exploration of unexpected issues. Reviews are analyses of existing data that are constrained by previously chosen study populations, settings, intervention formulations, outcome measures and study designs. It is generally not possible to formulate an answerable question for a review without knowing some of the studies relevant to the question, and it may become clear that the questions a review addresses need to be modified in light of evidence accumulated in the process of conducting the review.

Although a certain fluidity and refinement of questions is to be expected in reviews as a fuller understanding of the evidence is gained, it is important to guard against bias in modifying questions. Data-driven questions can generate false conclusions based on spurious results. Any changes to the protocol that result from revising the question for the review should be documented at the beginning of the Methods section. Sensitivity analyses may be used to assess the impact of changes on the review findings (see Chapter 10, Section 10.14 ). When refining questions it is useful to ask the following questions.

• What is the motivation for the refinement?
• Could the refinement have been influenced by results from any of the included studies?
• Does the refined question require a modification to the search strategy and/or reassessment of any decisions regarding study eligibility?
• Are data collection methods appropriate to the refined question?
• Does the refined question still meet the FINER criteria discussed in Section 2.1 ?

2.5.3 Building in contingencies to deal with sparse data

The ability to address the review questions will depend on the maturity and validity of the evidence base. When few studies are identified, there will be limited opportunity to address the question through an informative synthesis. In anticipation of this scenario, review authors may build contingencies into their protocol analysis plan that specify grouping (any or multiple) PICO elements at a broader level; thus potentially enabling synthesis of a larger number of studies. Broader groupings will generally address a less specific question, for example:

• ‘the effect of any antioxidant supplement on …’ instead of ‘the effect of vitamin C on …’;
• ‘the effect of sexual health promotion on biological outcomes ’ instead of ‘the effect of sexual health promotion on sexually transmitted infections ’; or
• ‘the effect of cognitive behavioural therapy in children and adolescents on …’ instead of ‘the effect of cognitive behavioural therapy in children on …’.

However, such broader questions may be useful for identifying important leads in areas that lack effective interventions and for guiding future research. Changes in the grouping may affect the assessment of the certainty of the evidence (see Chapter 14 ).

2.5.4 Economic data

Decision makers need to consider the economic aspects of an intervention, such as whether its adoption will lead to a more efficient use of resources. Economic data such as resource use, costs or cost-effectiveness (or a combination of these) may therefore be included as outcomes in a review. It is useful to break down measures of resource use and costs to the level of specific items or categories. It is helpful to consider an international perspective in the discussion of costs. Economics issues are discussed in detail in Chapter 20 .

2.6 Chapter information

Authors: James Thomas, Dylan Kneale, Joanne E McKenzie, Sue E Brennan, Soumyadeep Bhaumik

Acknowledgements: This chapter builds on earlier versions of the Handbook . Mona Nasser, Dan Fox and Sally Crowe contributed to Section 2.4 ; Hilary J Thomson contributed to Section 2.5.1 .

Funding: JT and DK are supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care North Thames at Barts Health NHS Trust. JEM is supported by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Career Development Fellowship (1143429). SEB’s position is supported by the NHMRC Cochrane Collaboration Funding Program. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, the Department of Health or the NHMRC.

2.7 References

Anderson L, Petticrew M, Rehfuess E, Armstrong R, Ueffing E, Baker P, Francis D, Tugwell P. Using logic models to capture complexity in systematic reviews. Research Synthesis Methods 2011; 2 : 33–42.

Bailey JV, Murray E, Rait G, Mercer CH, Morris RW, Peacock R, Cassell J, Nazareth I. Interactive computer-based interventions for sexual health promotion. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2010; 9 : CD006483.

Baxter SK, Blank L, Woods HB, Payne N, Rimmer M, Goyder E. Using logic model methods in systematic review synthesis: describing complex pathways in referral management interventions. BMC Medical Research Methodology 2014; 14 : 62.

Bonell C, Jamal F, Melendez-Torres GJ, Cummins S. ‘Dark logic’: theorising the harmful consequences of public health interventions. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 2015; 69 : 95–98.

Bryant J, Sanson-Fisher R, Walsh J, Stewart J. Health research priority setting in selected high income countries: a narrative review of methods used and recommendations for future practice. Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation 2014; 12 : 23.

Caldwell DM, Welton NJ. Approaches for synthesising complex mental health interventions in meta-analysis. Evidence-Based Mental Health 2016; 19 : 16–21.

Cargo M, Harris J, Pantoja T, Booth A, Harden A, Hannes K, Thomas J, Flemming K, Garside R, Noyes J. Cochrane Qualitative and Implementation Methods Group guidance series-paper 4: methods for assessing evidence on intervention implementation. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2018; 97 : 59–69.

Chalmers I, Bracken MB, Djulbegovic B, Garattini S, Grant J, Gülmezoglu AM, Howells DW, Ioannidis JPA, Oliver S. How to increase value and reduce waste when research priorities are set. Lancet 2014; 383 : 156–165.

Chamberlain C, O’Mara-Eves A, Porter J, Coleman T, Perlen S, Thomas J, McKenzie J. Psychosocial interventions for supporting women to stop smoking in pregnancy. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2017; 2 : CD001055.

Cooper H. The problem formulation stage. In: Cooper H, editor. Integrating Research: A Guide for Literature Reviews . Newbury Park (CA) USA: Sage Publications; 1984.

Counsell C. Formulating questions and locating primary studies for inclusion in systematic reviews. Annals of Internal Medicine 1997; 127 : 380–387.

Cummings SR, Browner WS, Hulley SB. Conceiving the research question and developing the study plan. In: Hulley SB, Cummings SR, Browner WS, editors. Designing Clinical Research: An Epidemiological Approach . 4th ed. Philadelphia (PA): Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2007. p. 14–22.

Glass GV. Meta-analysis at middle age: a personal history. Research Synthesis Methods 2015; 6 : 221–231.

Hedges LV. Statistical considerations. In: Cooper H, Hedges LV, editors. The Handbook of Research Synthesis . New York (NY): USA: Russell Sage Foundation; 1994.

Hetrick SE, McKenzie JE, Cox GR, Simmons MB, Merry SN. Newer generation antidepressants for depressive disorders in children and adolescents. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2012; 11 : CD004851.

Hoffmann T, Glasziou P, Boutron I. Better reporting of interventions: template for intervention description and replication (TIDieR) checklist and guide. BMJ 2014; 348: g1687.

Hollands GJ, Shemilt I, Marteau TM, Jebb SA, Lewis HB, Wei Y, Higgins JPT, Ogilvie D. Portion, package or tableware size for changing selection and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2015; 9 : CD011045.

Keown K, Van Eerd D, Irvin E. Stakeholder engagement opportunities in systematic reviews: Knowledge transfer for policy and practice. Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions 2008; 28 : 67–72.

Kneale D, Thomas J, Harris K. Developing and optimising the use of logic models in systematic reviews: exploring practice and good practice in the use of programme theory in reviews. PloS One 2015; 10 : e0142187.

Lewin S, Hendry M, Chandler J, Oxman AD, Michie S, Shepperd S, Reeves BC, Tugwell P, Hannes K, Rehfuess EA, Welch V, McKenzie JE, Burford B, Petkovic J, Anderson LM, Harris J, Noyes J. Assessing the complexity of interventions within systematic reviews: development, content and use of a new tool (iCAT_SR). BMC Medical Research Methodology 2017; 17 : 76.

Lorenc T, Petticrew M, Welch V, Tugwell P. What types of interventions generate inequalities? Evidence from systematic reviews. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 2013; 67 : 190–193.

Nasser M, Ueffing E, Welch V, Tugwell P. An equity lens can ensure an equity-oriented approach to agenda setting and priority setting of Cochrane Reviews. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2013; 66 : 511–521.

Nasser M. Setting priorities for conducting and updating systematic reviews [PhD Thesis]: University of Plymouth; 2018.

O’Neill J, Tabish H, Welch V, Petticrew M, Pottie K, Clarke M, Evans T, Pardo Pardo J, Waters E, White H, Tugwell P. Applying an equity lens to interventions: using PROGRESS ensures consideration of socially stratifying factors to illuminate inequities in health. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2014; 67 : 56–64.

Oliver S, Dickson K, Bangpan M, Newman M. Getting started with a review. In: Gough D, Oliver S, Thomas J, editors. An Introduction to Systematic Reviews . London (UK): Sage Publications Ltd.; 2017.

Petticrew M, Roberts H. Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide . Oxford (UK): Blackwell; 2006.

Pfadenhauer L, Gerhardus A, Mozygemba K, Lysdahl KB, Booth A, Hofmann B, Wahlster P, Polus S, Burns J, Brereton L, Rehfuess E. Making sense of complexity in context and implementation: the Context and Implementation of Complex Interventions (CICI) framework. Implementation Science 2017; 12 : 21.

Rehfuess EA, Booth A, Brereton L, Burns J, Gerhardus A, Mozygemba K, Oortwijn W, Pfadenhauer LM, Tummers M, van der Wilt GJ, Rohwer A. Towards a taxonomy of logic models in systematic reviews and health technology assessments: a priori, staged, and iterative approaches. Research Synthesis Methods 2018; 9 : 13–24.

Richardson WS, Wilson MC, Nishikawa J, Hayward RS. The well-built clinical question: a key to evidence-based decisions. ACP Journal Club 1995; 123 : A12–13.

Rohwer A, Pfadenhauer L, Burns J, Brereton L, Gerhardus A, Booth A, Oortwijn W, Rehfuess E. Series: Clinical epidemiology in South Africa. Paper 3: Logic models help make sense of complexity in systematic reviews and health technology assessments. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2017; 83 : 37–47.

Sharma T, Choudhury M, Rejón-Parrilla JC, Jonsson P, Garner S. Using HTA and guideline development as a tool for research priority setting the NICE way: reducing research waste by identifying the right research to fund. BMJ Open 2018; 8 : e019777.

Squires J, Valentine J, Grimshaw J. Systematic reviews of complex interventions: framing the review question. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2013; 66 : 1215–1222.

Tong A, Chando S, Crowe S, Manns B, Winkelmayer WC, Hemmelgarn B, Craig JC. Research priority setting in kidney disease: a systematic review. American Journal of Kidney Diseases 2015; 65 : 674–683.

Tong A, Sautenet B, Chapman JR, Harper C, MacDonald P, Shackel N, Crowe S, Hanson C, Hill S, Synnot A, Craig JC. Research priority setting in organ transplantation: a systematic review. Transplant International 2017; 30 : 327–343.

Turley R, Saith R, Bhan N, Rehfuess E, Carter B. Slum upgrading strategies involving physical environment and infrastructure interventions and their effects on health and socio-economic outcomes. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2013; 1 : CD010067.

van der Heijden I, Abrahams N, Sinclair D. Psychosocial group interventions to improve psychological well-being in adults living with HIV. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2017; 3 : CD010806.

Viergever RF. Health Research Prioritization at WHO: An Overview of Methodology and High Level Analysis of WHO Led Health Research Priority Setting Exercises . Geneva (Switzerland): World Health Organization; 2010.

Viergever RF, Olifson S, Ghaffar A, Terry RF. A checklist for health research priority setting: nine common themes of good practice. Health Research Policy and Systems 2010; 8 : 36.

Whitehead M. The concepts and principles of equity and health. International Journal of Health Services 1992; 22 : 429–25.

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Learn how to write a review of literature

What is a review of literature.

The format of a review of literature may vary from discipline to discipline and from assignment to assignment.

A review may be a self-contained unit — an end in itself — or a preface to and rationale for engaging in primary research. A review is a required part of grant and research proposals and often a chapter in theses and dissertations.

Generally, the purpose of a review is to analyze critically a segment of a published body of knowledge through summary, classification, and comparison of prior research studies, reviews of literature, and theoretical articles.

Writing the introduction

In the introduction, you should:

Define or identify the general topic, issue, or area of concern, thus providing an appropriate context for reviewing the literature.

Point out overall trends in what has been published about the topic; or conflicts in theory, methodology, evidence, and conclusions; or gaps in research and scholarship; or a single problem or new perspective of immediate interest.

Establish the writer’s reason (point of view) for reviewing the literature; explain the criteria to be used in analyzing and comparing literature and the organization of the review (sequence); and, when necessary, state why certain literature is or is not included (scope).

Writing the body

In the body, you should:

Group research studies and other types of literature (reviews, theoretical articles, case studies, etc.) according to common denominators such as qualitative versus quantitative approaches, conclusions of authors, specific purpose or objective, chronology, etc.

Summarize individual studies or articles with as much or as little detail as each merits according to its comparative importance in the literature, remembering that space (length) denotes significance.

Provide the reader with strong “umbrella” sentences at beginnings of paragraphs, “signposts” throughout, and brief “so what” summary sentences at intermediate points in the review to aid in understanding comparisons and analyses.

Writing the conclusion

In the conclusion, you should:

Summarize major contributions of significant studies and articles to the body of knowledge under review, maintaining the focus established in the introduction.

Evaluate the current “state of the art” for the body of knowledge reviewed, pointing out major methodological flaws or gaps in research, inconsistencies in theory and findings, and areas or issues pertinent to future study.

Conclude by providing some insight into the relationship between the central topic of the literature review and a larger area of study such as a discipline, a scientific endeavor, or a profession.

For further information see our handouts on Writing a Critical Review of a Nonfiction Book or Article or Reading a Book to Review It .

To learn more about literature reviews, take a look at our workshop on Writing Literature Reviews of Published Research.

Sample Literature Reviews

An important strategy for learning how to compose literature reviews in your field or within a specific genre is to locate and analyze representative examples. The following collection of annotated sample literature reviews written and co-written by colleagues associated with UW-Madison showcases how these reviews can do different kind of work for different purposes. Use these successful examples as a starting point for understanding how other writers have approached the challenging and important task of situating their idea in the context of established research.

• Sample 1 (PDF) A brief literature review within a political scientists’  National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship  grant
• Sample 2 (PDF) A several-page literature review at the beginning of a published, academic article about philosophy
• Sample 3 (PDF) A brief literature review at the beginning of a published, academic article about photochemistry

Academic and Professional Writing

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Analysis Papers

Reading Poetry

A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis

Using Literary Quotations

Play Reviews

Writing a Rhetorical Précis to Analyze Nonfiction Texts

Incorporating Interview Data

Grant Proposals

Planning and Writing a Grant Proposal: The Basics

Additional Resources for Grants and Proposal Writing

Job Materials and Application Essays

Writing Personal Statements for Ph.D. Programs

• Before you begin: useful tips for writing your essay
• Guided brainstorming exercises
• Get more help with your essay
• Frequently Asked Questions

Resume Writing Tips

CV Writing Tips

Cover Letters

Business Letters

Proposals and Dissertations

Resources for Proposal Writers

Resources for Dissertators

Research Papers

Planning and Writing Research Papers

Quoting and Paraphrasing

Writing Annotated Bibliographies

Creating Poster Presentations

Writing an Abstract for Your Research Paper

Thank-You Notes

Advice for Students Writing Thank-You Notes to Donors

Reading for a Review

Critical Reviews

Writing a Review of Literature

Scientific Reports

Scientific Report Format

Sample Lab Assignment

Writing for the Web

Writing an Effective Blog Post

Writing for Social Media: A Guide for Academics

Literature reviews: Scoping and planning

• Reviewing for research
• Stand-alone review
• Scoping and planning
• Screening and appraising
• The process of reviewing
• Planning a search strategy

On this page:

“Organization and planning are the key factors to successfully completing a systematic review.” Boland et al., Doing a systematic review: a student's guide.

It's crucial to initially scope your review before starting. Consider whether a systematic review is necessary and whether you have the time and resources to conduct one. You need to establish whether one has been done on your topic already, or is about to be conducted. 

Scoping searches

Once you've identified a topic area that interests you, you will need to conduct an initial scoping search . This will help identify the body of literature that has been written on the topic and identify whether systematic reviews have already been conducted in your topic area. Unfortunately it is often the case that you have your heart set on a specific topic only to find that it has already been done or that there is very limited literature available. Better to find out at this stage before you do any further work on it though!

Whilst running your scoping searches on the electronic database you will notice if a systematic review has already been conducted . Protocols of new reviews will be registered on  PROSPERO so you would also need to check there in addition to databases such as the Cochrane Library and Campbell Collaboration to establish if any have been published.

Once you have conducted these initial searches you are ready to start to formulate your own research question based on your findings. Make sure it is not too wide that there is too much literature and not too specific so that there is not enough literature.

Use your scoping searches to help formulate your search strategy by identifying different terminology, spellings, alternative terms and appropriate subject headings.

Formulating a research question

The development and refinement of the question is the most important phase. The question will determine the nature and scope of the review; will identify the key concepts to be used in your search strategy; and will guide which papers you are searching for. The question needs to be clear, well defined, appropriate, manageable and relevant to the outcomes you are seeking. As your question should be comprehensive and specific, it should only include one question and ideally have three for four elements.

There are many frameworks available to help formulate your research question such as PICO, PICOS, PICOT, SPIDER etc. One example is given below: 

P atient - the person affected by what you are researching - what are their defining characteristics and what is the condition they are experiencing?

I ntervention -   how are they being treated?

C omparison -   is there another treatment method that you would like to compare the intervention to?

O utcome -  what is the result of the intervention? These can be primary and secondary outcomes?

The breadth of your review

The breadth of the review will depend on the nature of the literature, your aims, time constraints, and pragmatics. If an undergraduate or masters student then the topic will need to be quite narrow to make it achievable. PhD students or other researchers may work with a team over a much longer period of time allowing for a much broader review to be conducted. It's useful to determine which kind of studies you wish to include in your review before starting the search and this will help with your decisions around inclusion and exclusion criteria.

The table below gives an outline of the types of studies you might come across:

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Once you have your research question you need to consider your inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Inclusion criteria define the attributes studies must have to be included, sometimes also known as eligibility criteria.

Exclusion criteria identify which papers you want to specifically exclude from your results. These should map onto your review question and contain sufficient detail to help you screen through the results.

Create an initial list that will help you to:

• specifically address the research question
• ensure the quality and similarity of included studies
• clearly define the boundaries of the review

Developing a review protocol

Now you have your question you need to write a review protocol. This will outline how you will answer your question. Every piece of quality research is guided by a research protocol.

A good protocol

• describes the current evidence base
• identifies the question addressed
• outlines the methods that will be used to answer the question

It typically includes:

• Research question

Examples of published protocols can be found on the PROSPERO site. Students doing training or mini-reviews should not register their own on this site however. Students can use the system to create and store a record by saving but not submitting.

Creating record keeping systems

It is strongly recommended that you create a record keeping system to document your decisions at different stages of the review.

Record keeping allows you to keep an up-to-date and accurate account of what you have achieved at different stages of the review.

If you need to repeat or check anything this record will save you time in the future. You can use this information to help write the Methods section of the review.

Record keeping options

There are many ways to keep records from pen and paper to saving searches and papers within a folder in the electronic databases. Keeping tables of decisions on excluded papers can help you further down the line if you need to revisit these. Keep your files in order and importantly make back-ups!

You should make a record of the details of the searches you conduct and a list of the number of studies excluded at the screening stage. Adhere to recommended reporting standards such as  PRISMA .

Reference management software

Use reference management software to help you organise, annotate and integrate the required references into your text. RefWorks or EndNote are both support by the University and can help with this.

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Steps for Conducting a Scoping Review

Susanne mak.

Both authors are with McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Susanne Mak, MSc, is an Assistant Professor, School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, and an Associate Member, Institute of Health Sciences Education, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences

Aliki Thomas

Aliki Thomas, PhD, is an Associate Professor, School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, and an Associate Member, Institute of Health Sciences Education, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences

A scoping review is a type of knowledge synthesis that uses a systematic and iterative approach to identify and synthesize an existing or emerging body of literature on a given topic. 1 While there are several reasons for conducting a scoping review, the main reasons are to map the extent, range, and nature of the literature, as well as to determine possible gaps in the literature on a topic. 1 - 3 Scoping reviews are not limited to peer-reviewed literature. 3 , 4

Identifying a Team

Before conducting the review, it is important to consider the composition of the research team: scoping reviews are not conducted by a single individual. The team should include someone with content expertise and an individual with experience conducting scoping reviews. 1 , 3 , 5 Adding a librarian who can assist with building the search strategy is also extremely helpful. 1 , 3 Thoughtful planning of the team membership will result in the right knowledge, skills, and expertise to successfully complete the review and ensure that the findings make a notable contribution to the field.

An overview of the steps involved in conducting scoping reviews is provided below.

Step 1: Identifying the Research Question

Creating the research question is a vital first step. 1 , 3 - 5 A question that is too broad increases the number of papers for consideration, which may affect the feasibility of the review. 5 A question that is too narrow may compromise the breadth and depth of the review. Therefore, a preliminary search of the literature may be helpful in determining: (1) the breadth of your question; (2) whether a scoping review on the topic has already been conducted; and (3) if there is sufficient literature to warrant a scoping review. Consulting with a librarian can help in deciding if a scoping review is the appropriate review method. 1 , 3 In particular, a librarian may confirm that there is insufficient literature or that there is too much, which will necessitate a more targeted research question.

Step 2: Identifying Relevant Studies

Early consultation with a librarian should occur to build the search strategy—keywords, Medical Subject Headings, databases—and further refine the strategy based on the papers found. For example, you may find too many irrelevant papers. In this case you may need to review your search strategy to identify the terms which introduce too much “noise.”

You will also need to define the inclusion and exclusion criteria. 1 , 3 - 5 Discussions with your team are important to ensure diverse perspectives and that the inclusion criteria are aligned with the research question. 5 , 6

Step 3: Selecting Studies to Be Included in the Review

Tools such as Covidence and Rayyan can be helpful in organizing papers and making the screening process more efficient ( Box ). Once you have collected the citations from the search, you can import these from reference management software (eg, EndNote) into Rayyan. After selecting papers for inclusion, the citations of the included papers can be exported to reference management software for the next stage of the review. Other helpful features of management software can include the identification of duplicates, proportion of an abstract that resembles another, and documentation of reasons for inclusion or exclusion. Both Covidence and Rayyan allow for blinding the results of team members' reviews to each other.

• ▪ Covidence: www.covidence.org
• ▪ NVivo: https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo-qualitative-data-analysis-software/home
• ▪ Rayyan: https://rayyan.qcri.org/welcome

Having additional reviewers will accelerate the pace of the review but will require calibration between reviewers. 1 , 3 , 5 A calibration exercise consists of selecting 5% to 10% of the papers for independent screening by each reviewer. 1 If a high level of agreement among reviewers is not achieved (eg, lower than 90%), 7 , 8 the reviewers should discuss their points of disagreement and review (and possibly revise) the inclusion criteria. 1 Another 10% of the papers are then selected for a second calibration exercise to test the modified inclusion criteria. If having 2 reviewers for each paper is not feasible, one reviewer can conduct an independent review, with a second reviewer verifying a portion of the papers, with the goal of 90% or better agreement.

The actual screening of papers should consist of reading not only the title of the paper, but the abstract as well. If an abstract is not available, a full-text review of the paper is required. Screening papers by title alone is insufficient, as the contents of a paper are not always well reflected in the title.

Step 4: Charting the Data

The team develops the data extraction form collaboratively. Although the extraction categories vary depending on the research question and review purpose, common categories are: author, year, geographical location, study population, main results, study limitations, and future directions. 4 , 5 More specific categories will be needed to capture the data for a given research question.

The extraction form will need to be pilot tested for further refinements and undergo a calibration exercise as well. 1 , 3 , 5 This entails a dyad of reviewers independently extracting data from a small number of papers (eg, 5-10), and meeting afterward to discuss any discrepancies, with further refinement of the form if a high level of agreement between reviewers is not obtained.

Step 5: Collating, Summarizing, and Reporting the Results

Once the data have been extracted from all papers, numerical and thematic analyses are conducted. 5 The findings from the numerical analysis can be presented in a table or chart to showcase the most salient aspects of the review. Readers should be able to see alignment of findings with objectives for conducting the review. 1 , 3 Thematic analysis 9 consists of examining excerpts of text and asking how this text relates to the research question, as well as creating a code (label) that best reflects that text. A list of tentative codes (a codebook) is created and modified iteratively as the team engages in data analysis. Once codes are developed, a review of the codes and how they relate to each other can help to identify patterns among them, which leads to the creation of categories (collections of similar data in one place) 10 and themes (patterns across the dataset). 9

Reflexivity is essential throughout the review process but especially during thematic analysis, with use of memos, to capture the thoughts that arise from examining and interpreting the data. Once the codes are generated, the research team will further refine them through discussion. 6 The team should discuss not only the clarity of the operational definitions of the codes, but also how the codes are named and how they may relate to each other. As the codes are grouped together, the team will develop themes. 5

Step 6: Consulting Stakeholders (Optional)

Reasons for stakeholder consultation may be to obtain input on the research question and sources of information, and to provide insights on a topic. Other purposes may include obtaining feedback to help shed light on the review findings and pinpoint gaps not explored in the literature. While a stakeholder consultation has been named as the final step of a review, it can be incorporated throughout the review stages and can occur through focus groups, individual interviews, or surveys. 1 , 5

A scoping review is useful to map the literature on evolving or emerging topics and to identify gaps. It may be a step before undertaking research or conducting another type of review, such as a systematic review. Before conducting a scoping review, it is important to consider how the research team will implement each step and who will be involved at each stage, while being mindful that the methodological approach provides teams with the opportunity to move back to earlier stages as the review evolves.

Scoping Reviews

• Introduction
• Guidelines & procedures
• Management tools
• Define the question
• Check the topic
• Determine inclusion/exclusion criteria
• Develop a protocol
• Identify keywords
• Databases and search strategies
• Grey literature
• Manage and organise
• Screen & Select
• Locate full text
• Extract data

Example reviews

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• Health & medicine
• Social sciences
• Technologically-enhanced psychological interventions for older adults: A scoping review. (2020).
• The effects of Toxic Early Childhood Experiences on depression according to Young Schema Model: A scoping review. (2019).

Rehab sciences

• Occupational therapists' contributions to fostering older adults' social participation: A scoping review. (2018).
• Physiotherapy interventions for people with dementia and a hip fracture—a scoping review of the literature. (2017).
• Speech, language and swallowing impairments in functional neurological disorder: A scoping review. (2019).

Veterinary sciences

• A scoping review of the evidence for efficacy of acupuncture in companion animals. (2017).
• Scoping review of indicators and methods of measurement used to evaluate the impact of dog population management interventions. (2017).
• Promoting social creativity in science education with digital technology to overcome inequalities: A scoping review. (2019).
• Simulation in social work education: A scoping review. (2020).
• Performance management: A scoping review of the literature and an agenda for future research. (2019).
• A scoping review of feed interventions and livelihoods of small-scale livestock keepers. (2020).
• Ice-jam flood research: A scoping review. (2018).
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How to write a literature review introduction (+ examples)

The introduction to a literature review serves as your reader’s guide through your academic work and thought process. Explore the significance of literature review introductions in review papers, academic papers, essays, theses, and dissertations. We delve into the purpose and necessity of these introductions, explore the essential components of literature review introductions, and provide step-by-step guidance on how to craft your own, along with examples.

Why you need an introduction for a literature review

In academic writing , the introduction for a literature review is an indispensable component. Effective academic writing requires proper paragraph structuring to guide your reader through your argumentation. This includes providing an introduction to your literature review.

It is imperative to remember that you should never start sharing your findings abruptly. Even if there isn’t a dedicated introduction section .

When you need an introduction for a literature review

There are three main scenarios in which you need an introduction for a literature review:

What to include in a literature review introduction

It is crucial to customize the content and depth of your literature review introduction according to the specific format of your academic work.

Academic literature review paper

The introduction of an academic literature review paper, which does not rely on empirical data, often necessitates a more extensive introduction than the brief literature review introductions typically found in empirical papers. It should encompass:

Regular literature review section in an academic article or essay

In a standard 8000-word journal article, the literature review section typically spans between 750 and 1250 words. The first few sentences or the first paragraph within this section often serve as an introduction. It should encompass:

Introduction to a literature review chapter in thesis or dissertation

Some students choose to incorporate a brief introductory section at the beginning of each chapter, including the literature review chapter. Alternatively, others opt to seamlessly integrate the introduction into the initial sentences of the literature review itself. Both approaches are acceptable, provided that you incorporate the following elements:

Examples of literature review introductions

Example 1: an effective introduction for an academic literature review paper.

To begin, let’s delve into the introduction of an academic literature review paper. We will examine the paper “How does culture influence innovation? A systematic literature review”, which was published in 2018 in the journal Management Decision.

Example 2: An effective introduction to a literature review section in an academic paper

The second example represents a typical academic paper, encompassing not only a literature review section but also empirical data, a case study, and other elements. We will closely examine the introduction to the literature review section in the paper “The environmentalism of the subalterns: a case study of environmental activism in Eastern Kurdistan/Rojhelat”, which was published in 2021 in the journal Local Environment.

Thus, the author successfully introduces the literature review, from which point onward it dives into the main concept (‘subalternity’) of the research, and reviews the literature on socio-economic justice and environmental degradation.

Examples 3-5: Effective introductions to literature review chapters

Numerous universities offer online repositories where you can access theses and dissertations from previous years, serving as valuable sources of reference. Many of these repositories, however, may require you to log in through your university account. Nevertheless, a few open-access repositories are accessible to anyone, such as the one by the University of Manchester . It’s important to note though that copyright restrictions apply to these resources, just as they would with published papers.

Master’s thesis literature review introduction

Phd thesis literature review chapter introduction.

The second example is Deep Learning on Semi-Structured Data and its Applications to Video-Game AI, Woof, W. (Author). 31 Dec 2020, a PhD thesis completed at the University of Manchester . In Chapter 2, the author offers a comprehensive introduction to the topic in four paragraphs, with the final paragraph serving as an overview of the chapter’s structure:

PhD thesis literature review introduction

The last example is the doctoral thesis Metacognitive strategies and beliefs: Child correlates and early experiences Chan, K. Y. M. (Author). 31 Dec 2020 . The author clearly conducted a systematic literature review, commencing the review section with a discussion of the methodology and approach employed in locating and analyzing the selected records.

Steps to write your own literature review introduction

Master academia, get new content delivered directly to your inbox, the best answers to "what are your plans for the future", 10 tips for engaging your audience in academic writing, related articles, minimalist writing for a better thesis, how to deal with procrastination productively during thesis writing, the top 10 thesis defense questions (+ how to prepare strong answers), the best coursera courses for phd researchers in 2023.

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Literature Review: Conducting & Writing

• Sample Literature Reviews
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Note: These are sample literature reviews from a class that were given to us by an instructor when APA 6th edition was still in effect. These were excellent papers from her class, but it does not mean they are perfect or contain no errors. Thanks to the students who let us post!

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How to write a scoping review

This article explains how to conduct a scoping review. If you’re interested in a free tool that helps you write literature reviews quicker, check out Avidnote .

A scoping review presents a relatively “new” approach to synthesizing research literature which is different from the traditional systematic review. The difference of scoping review concern primarily the purpose and aims of the review. With a scoping review, the primary goal is to give the reader an overview of the current evidence from the literature with respect to a specific research topic without giving a summary answer to a discrete research question. Scoping reviews are typically less exhaustive than systematic reviews. The general purpose for conducting a scoping review is to map and identify the available evidence (Anderson et al., 2008; Arksey and O’Malley, 2005)

Scoping reviews can be preferred to systematic reviews in cases where the review’s objectives include identification of gaps in knowledge, interrogating a body of literature, describing concepts, or scrutinizing research conduct. They can also act as useful precursors to systematic reviews (Munn et al., 2018) as well as help determine the suitability of inclusion criteria and likely research questions. Because of the exploratory nature of scoping reviews, it is not necessary that each review must be a holistic coverage of all the extant body of knowledge in the subject matter being reviewed.

What is a scoping review?

According to the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, scoping reviews are:

“exploratory projects that map the literature available on a topic, identifying key concepts, theories, sources of evidence and gaps in the research.”

A more extensive definition was given by Colquhoun, et al (2014).

“A scoping review or scoping study is a form of knowledge synthesis that addresses an exploratory research question aimed at mapping key concepts, types of evidence, and gaps in research related to a defined area or field by systematically searching, selecting, and synthesizing existing knowledge” Colquhoun, et al. J of Clin Epi. 2014, 67, p. 1292-94

How to perform a scoping study in 5 easy steps

In the sections below, I intend to summarize the guidelines provided by the Joana Briggs Institute for conducting a scoping review.

Step 1 – Define the topic that you will be reviewing; its objectives and any potential sub-questions.

Step 2 – Develop a review protocol. The protocols functions as the plan behind your review. Here you’ll state eligibility criteria (for inclusion/exclusion), how you screened the literature and the charting process that you utilized.

Step 3 – Apply PCC framework

Step 4 – Perform systematic literature searches

Step 5 – Screen the obtained results and only include studies that meet your eligibility criteria

Step 6 – Extract and chart the data you extracted from the collected studies

Step 7 – Write a summary of the evidence to answer your research question(s).

The list above summarizes the process behind performing a scoping review. Below, we elaborate further, based on recommendations from the Joana Briggs Institute.

Title of the review protocol

The suggested length according to JBI of the length for the introduction section of the scoping review protocol is roughly 1,000 words. The protocol (and the review itself) should have an informative title that helps shed light on the topic of the scoping review. To this end, the phrase – “…: a scoping review” should be attached to the title.  Such an attachment will enable readers to easily have an idea of what the document is about. Be sure to include the word “protocol” if that is what the document is about.

For example, “Assessing the impact of treating anxiety using nigella sativa: a scoping review protocol.”

You should also avoid constructing titles in question format. The Joana Briggs Institute (JBI) recommends a “PCC” mnemonic to help in generating a clear and meaningful title for a scoping review. The acronym PCC stands for population, concept, and context. According to the Institute:

• the population aspect focuses on “important characteristics of participants, including age and other qualifying criteria.”
• concept may include details related to elements that would appear in a standard systematic review. Among such details are “interventions” and/or “phenomena of interest” and/or “outcomes.”
• context can be made up of cultural factors like geographic location and/or particular gender or racial-based interests. In some reviews, context can also include information about the particular setting.

Adopting the PCC mnemonic also enables the reviewers to craft a title that conveys important details to readers, e.g., the focus and scope of the review as well as how the reviews can be applied to their needs. In a nutshell, the PCC concept is necessary to establish concord between the title, review question(s), and inclusion criteria.

Scoping review question(s)

Just like the title, the scoping review question(s), should also reflect the PCC elements. The question guides and directs the reviewers to develop inclusion criteria that are suitable for the scoping review. Moreover, a clearly expressed question helps in constructing the protocol, makes for an optimal literature search, and offers a clarified structure for developing the scoping review. A Scoping review will usually come with only one primary question. For example,

Are there any side effects in the various treatments for depression?

However, sub-questions may be necessary, especially if the primary question neither sufficiently reflects the PCC nor the review’s objective(s). In such a scenario, sub-questions can help shed more light on the specific characteristics of a population, concept, or context. Sub-questions can also help to highlight the most likely way to map evidence with respect to the PCC elements. Using context, for example, the above primary question which deals with just the side effects of depression treatments can be expanded to:

Are there any geographical contexts that depression treatments have been associated with side effects? 

Introduction

The introduction should be broad enough to capture all the key elements of the topic being reviewed. It should include the reason for carrying out the scoping review (including the rationale behind each of the elements as well as the information the review intends to disseminate in addition to the objective(s) of the review.

Be sure to explain any definitions that are relevant to the topic under review. You should also ensure that the introductory information must be presented in a way that sufficiently sheds light on the inclusion criteria. For instance, information about the existence or otherwise of scoping reviews, systematic reviews, research syntheses, and/or primary research papers on the topic. This will help reinforce your reason or rationale for undertaking the scoping review. 

The concluding phase of the introduction should indicate that the reviewer has already conducted a preparatory search for available scoping reviews (and maybe systematic reviews as well) on the topic. The dates of such searches, the databases, and journals searched and search platforms used must also be included. Some examples in this regard include the JBI Evidence Synthesis, Evidence for Policy and Practice Information (EPPI), and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.

If scoping and/or systematic reviews about the topic are available, the reviewers then have to clearly justify how their proposed review will differ from those they have identified. This will enable readers to easily determine any new insight or knowledge which the forthcoming review espouses when compared to existing evidence syntheses.

Finally, the concluding phase of the introduction should explain how the review’s objective(s) align with the main elements of the inclusion criteria, for example, the PCC.

Inclusion criteria

The inclusion criteria capture the reviewers’ reasons for selecting which sources that will be part of their scoping review (or otherwise). These reasons should be clearly explained in a way that enables readers to easily comprehend the reviewers’ ideas. As stated earlier, there must be concord or synergy between the title, question(s), and inclusion criteria.

Search strategy

Even with time and resource constraints, the search strategy for a scoping review should try to be as broad-based as possible. This will help the reviewers to fish out both published and unpublished primary sources of evidence and reviews. The reviewers should endeavor to narrate and rationalize any limitations that negatively impacted the scope of their search strategy.

It is recommended that the search strategy follows the three steps enumerated below.

1) Conducting a preliminary search on not less than a couple of web-based databases determined to be relevant to the topic. 

2) A second search that includes all identified keywords and index terms to be conducted on all the selected databases.

3) Identified reports and articles should be searched.

The reviewer has to specify both the languages he or she will consider for inclusion and the timeframe. They should also provide clear reasons for such specifications. To ensure an optimal search strategy, several search iterations may be necessary especially if the evidence base becomes clearer to reviewers thus leading to the knowledge of additional keywords, sources, and search terms. Because of this possibility for repetitions, it is very essential to ensure that the whole search strategy is characterized by transparency and audit capacity. To this end, a research librarian or information/data scientist can be a useful partner to help design and refine the search strategy. 

The process of conducting a literature search can itself be divided into 5 steps:

• Decide on research question(s) in your specific subject area
• Find relevant databases you will search
• Create a list of relevant keywords and phrases for your literature search
• Begin the literature search while taking notes from each database to keep track of your queries
• Begin the scoping review and compile your results into an article
• If needed, revise your original research question(s)

Source of evidence selection

A scoping review protocol should include a description of all the stages of the source selection process based on title and abstract examination as well as on full-text examination. It should be premised on the inclusion criteria and also explain the mechanisms for resolving disagreements among reviewers.  The source selection (both the title and abstract examination and the full-text screening) should be conducted by a couple of reviewers or more. Disagreements arising between the reviewers can be resolved either by consensus or by a third reviewer. 

The process should be explained through a narrative description which has to include a flowchart of the review process (from the PRISMA-ScR statement). The chart shows the flow from the search through source selection, duplicates, full-text retrieval, and all inclusions from the third search, data extraction, and presentation of the evidence.

Information on the retrieved full-text articles should be provided. Separate appendices providing information on included sources should also be provided. The appendices should briefly disclose all excluded sources as well as the reasons for their exclusion.

The reviewers should mention the software used to manage the results of the search. Examples include Covidence, JBI SUMARI, etc. Before venturing into source selection across a team, it may be necessary to pilot test the source selectors to enable the team to refine their source selection tool (assuming they are using such a tool).

Data extraction

The data extraction process is often referred to as “data charting” in scoping reviews. Data charting is a logical and descriptive summary of the results which are in alignment with the objective(s) and question(s) of the scoping review. It is necessary to construct and pilot a data charting table or form during the protocol stage. This will help the reviewers to record important details about the source such as those below.

• Publication year
• Origin/country of origin (where the source was published or conducted)
• Aims or purposes
• Population and sample size within the source of evidence (if applicable)
• Methodology / methods
• Intervention type, comparator, and information on these (e.g. duration of the intervention) (if applicable). Duration of the intervention (if applicable)
• Outcomes and information on these (e.g. how it was measured, if applicable)
• Important findings relating to the scoping review question(s)

These details can be refined in the review stage albeit this will necessitate an updating of the charting table. Careful record-keeping is necessary on the part of the reviewers since it will ensure ease of reference and tracking as well as help them to identify and chart every source as well as any other additional unanticipated data. This implies that charting the results can be a repetitive process of continuous updating of data.

In summary, it is very important that the reviewers exhibit transparency and clarity in their data extraction methods. Like in source of evidence selection, pilot testing is also necessary.

Analysis of the evidence

Many scoping reviews are usually analyzed through simple counting of concepts, populations, characteristics and so forth. However, other reviews may need a more complex analyses, e.g., descriptive qualitative content analysis which includes basic coding of data .  

For quantitative data, more sophisticated techniques can be utilized instead of simple frequency counts to determine the occurrence of concepts, characteristics, populations, etc. However, such in-depth analyses are not common in scoping reviews. Areas like meta-analysis and interpretive qualitative analysis have very small probabilities of being used in scoping reviews.

The nature of data analysis in scoping reviews is largely determined by the purpose of the review and the reviewers’ evaluations. The most vital concern is the level of transparency of the analytical method used and the ability of the reviewers to rationalize their approach in addition to a priori planning of the review.

Presentation of the results                                                                                                        

It is important provide a plan for the presentation of results (one that includes the type of charts, tables and/or figures that will be used) during protocol development. The essence of early planning is to have some knowledge of the kinds of data that might emerge and the best way to present such data with respect to both the objective(s) and research question(s) of the scoping review. This knowledge can be modified during the review process when the reviewers must have become more aware of all data from the included sources.

It is possible to present the results of a scoping review in a descriptive format and/or as a map of the data from the included sources, e.g., tables and other diagrams. The PCC concept can be an essential guide on how to map data efficiently.

For more information regarding scoping reviews, please refer to Arksey, H. and O’Malley paper [1] or JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis [2], this article is based primarily on the latter source.

✅ Also check out

This post was produced as part of a research guide series by  Avidnote  which is a free web-based app that helps you to write and organize your academic writing online.  Click here  to find out more.

Anderson S, Allen P, Peckham S, Goodwin N. Asking the right questions: scoping studies in the commissioning of research on the organisation and delivery of health services. Health Research Policy and Systems. 2008;6(1):1.

Arksey H, O’Malley L. Scoping studies: towards a methodological framework. Int J Soc Res Methodol. 2005;8(1):19–32.

Arksey, H. and O’Malley paper (2015). Scoping studies: towards a methodological framework.  International journal of social research methodology ,  8 (1), pp.19-32.        

Colquhoun, H.L., Levac, D., O’Brien, K.K., Straus, S., Tricco, A.C., Perrier, L., Kastner, M. and Moher, D., 2014. Scoping reviews: time for clarity in definition, methods, and reporting.  Journal of clinical epidemiology ,  67 (12), pp.1291-1294.

JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis. Source: https://wiki.jbi.global/display/MANUAL/11.2.6+Source+of+evidence+selection

Munn, Z., Peters, M.D., Stern, C., Tufanaru, C., McArthur, A. and Aromataris, E., 2018. Systematic review or scoping review? Guidance for authors when choosing between a systematic or scoping review approach.  BMC medical research methodology ,  18 (1), pp.1-7.        

Osman, M.A., Schick-Makaroff, K., Thompson, S., Featherstone, R., Bialy, L., Kurzawa, J., Okpechi, I.G., Habib, S., Shojai, S., Jindal, K. and Klarenbach, S., 2018. Barriers and facilitators for implementation of electronic consultations (eConsult) to enhance specialist access to care: a scoping review protocol.  BMJ open ,  8 (9), p.e022733.                                                                           

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Digital Transformation of Tax Administration and Compliance: A Systematic Literature Review on E-Invoicing and Prefilled Returns

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Information & Contributors

Bibliometrics & citations, view options, 1 introduction, 1.1 basic concepts and definitions, 1.2 e-invoicing, 1.3 prefilling of returns, 2 research methodology, 2.1 research question, 2.2 conducting the search.

2.3 Search Formalization

2.4 literature analysis.

3 Findings of Review Based On Major Themes from the Literature

3.1 e-invoicing and efficiency of taxation, 3.1.1 e-invoicing for vat., 3.1.2 e-invoicing and smes., 3.1.3 e-invoicing and tax fraud., 3.2 prefilling of returns and effectiveness of taxation, 3.2.1 prefilling of tax returns and compliance/administrative cost., 3.2.2 prefilling of tax returns for smes., 3.2.3 prefilling of returns to minimize tax fraud., 4 discussion, 4.1 e-invoicing, 4.2 prefilling of returns, 5 conclusion, 5.1 limitations, 5.2 future research, a.1 list of articles (appendix a ).

• Terán L Vaca C Riofrio D Stürmer M (2024) Introduction to the Special Issue on Smart Government Development and Applications Digital Government: Research and Practice 10.1145/3691353 5 :3 (1-9) Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691353

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• Guest Editors:
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• Carmen Vaca ,
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• Matthias Stürmer

Association for Computing Machinery

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• e-invoicing
• prefilling of returns
• tax administration
• tax technology
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The use of energy simulations in residential design: a systematic literature review.

1. Introduction

• RQ: “What is the range of applications for energy simulations in residential design?”

2. Materials and Methods

• Studies conducted in the field of architectural design;
• Studies on residential buildings;
• Studies that used computer simulation in energy analysis;
• Studies published in the Web of Science database and written in English.

3. Findings

4. discussion, 4.1. cluster i, 4.2. cluster ii, 4.3. cluster iii, 4.4. cluster iv, 4.5. cluster v, 4.6. cluster vi, 4.7. theme 1 energy efficiency, 4.8. theme 2 architectural design strategies, 4.9. section summary, 5. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Sağdıçoğlu, M.S.; Yenice, M.S.; Tel, M.Z. The Use of Energy Simulations in Residential Design: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability 2024 , 16 , 8138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16188138

Sağdıçoğlu MS, Yenice MS, Tel MZ. The Use of Energy Simulations in Residential Design: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability . 2024; 16(18):8138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16188138

Sağdıçoğlu, Mert Sercan, M. Serhat Yenice, and M. Zübeyr Tel. 2024. "The Use of Energy Simulations in Residential Design: A Systematic Literature Review" Sustainability 16, no. 18: 8138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16188138

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A Tutorial on Indicating Responses and Their Importance in Mand Training

• Technical and Tutorials
• Published: 19 September 2024

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• Sarah E. Frampton   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9279-7998 1 ,
• Judah B. Axe   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6182-2145 2 ,
• Caleb R. Davis 2 , 3 ,
• Olga Meleshkevich   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9510-0896 2 , 4 &
• Mei-Hua Li   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0672-9340 2 , 5  

One of the most critical intervention strategies when working with individuals with significant language delays associated with autism spectrum disorder and related developmental delays is teaching mands. For mand training to be effective, an establishing operation (EO) must be in effect, yet EOs are often difficult to observe. Before learning to mand, an individual may point to or approach a reinforcer, which likely indicates an EO related to that reinforcer, and may be considered an indicating response (IR). Observing an IR before prompting a mand increases the likelihood that the prompt is delivered when an EO is in effect and that the response is truly a mand. Missing from the literature is a consistent definition of IRs and a robust set of guidelines for using them in practice. In this tutorial, we review the terms and topographies of IRs in the literature to arrive at a definition of IRs. We then provide practical, research-based recommendations for using IRs during mand training, as well as assessing, selecting, teaching, and replacing IRs. Last, we provide tools and resources related to decision making and data collection with respect to IRs.

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Data Availability

There are no data to disclose.

In this case, the intended listener for this tact is the speaker (i.e., the behavior analyst). The listener may then take “effective action” (Skinner, 1957 , p. 88) by more rapidly responding to the environmental conditions indicative of an EO, thereby strengthening the behavior of the client. By tacting, the speaker makes themselves a more efficacious mand trainer.

We came to this number through data collection for an unpublished systematic review of mand training studies. We acknowledge there are possibly more terms and examples. Our point is to acknowledge the inconsistency.

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We thank Dr. Matt Normand and Dr. Caio Miguel for their thoughtful comments regarding the intricacies of verbal behavior.

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Frampton, S.E., Axe, J.B., Davis, C.R. et al. A Tutorial on Indicating Responses and Their Importance in Mand Training. Behav Analysis Practice (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-024-00965-7

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