Notes for carrying out a research review

These rules are an adaptation of an excellent paper1 written for a biological science field. If you are familiar with the requirements for carrying out a systematic review, you'll notice some similarities. All literature reviews need to have some elements of system about them, otherwise they are not credible2

As the author of the paper noted, having familiarity with the field you plan to review is a huge advantage. Simply choosing something with little or no background knowledge is not a good idea.

1. Decide your topic and audience.
The topic ought to be interesting and hopefully important to you. You ought to have a good reason for doing it. Being clear about this will help you decide what your audience will be and hence make it easier to nominate an journal that would be suitable.

2. Search the literature, scan the literature and then search again.
As you will realise you initial idea for a topic may be difficult to locate in the literature or there may be a large volume of it. You need to get to a point where the volume of literature that you need to read carefully is small enough to be done in the time frame. So this process is iterative. You have to try things out. Importantly, you must keep track of all of these attempts in your notebook(s). You have to work systematically. You have to know what you have tried and what it produced. Here are some notes on searching.

  • Keep track of all the search terms you use
  • Use a system to record the papers you locate3.
  • You will need to determine the criteria you use to include or exclude papers. You need to have a good account of these in your notebooks.
  • Check for other reviews that may be related to your topic. If they exist you can build on them. You can't ignore them if they have been done.

3. Write as you read.
Simply scanning a paper and deciding what to do with it without making notes about your thinking will not work. You won't remember. Make notes about what you find to be interesting. It's not too early to think about how you will organise your paper based on what you are reading. If you don't write these ideas down, they will be lost. But if you do make notes you will likely have a very rough draft of the the review.

4. Think about the limits of the review.
Depending upon your topic, it may make sense to do a review only of recent literature. This may be the case if there was a previous review that covered earlier material and it did a good job of doing it.

5. Be critical and give your audience the review they need
Remember that you are saving people with an interest in your topic from doing all the work you have done. So if your target journal is for fellow professionals then you need to write it in a manner suitable for them and your nominated target journal. Your review synthesis ought to give the reader a sense of:

  • the important/major achievements in the research you have reviewed
  • the main areas where there appears to be disagreement
  • any remaining or new research questions

6. The structure is important
As you will have noted from the many examples of reviews on this site, there is more or less a standard structure for a review:

  • Introduction
  • How the review was carried out
  • Results or findings
  • Analysis and discussion

It's always a good idea to structure your paper in dot points and to ask yourself does this look like the best order of ideas? It's easy to move points around at this stage before you begin to put text around your structure. Importantly, a dot point outline will provide some discipline for the writing you do. It can prevent you from wandering off on tangents in your text.

7. Feedback
Getting feedback from peers or instructors is always a good idea. Time will be tricky but if you can get a draft early, getting others to read over it will always help improve the text.

8. The point you should get to
Most teaching is based upon the notion of someone who knows and someone who does not and arranging for the person who does not know something to gain access to it via the teacher. This might be a way to describe how you came to grips with doing a review of the literature. The notes above have been stated over and over in various forms. All it is is an outline of a process. So you could say that when you have carried out a review you have some grasp of what it is like. As we have noted often, this is a kind of ideal. It's a model process. Doing it is really messy, confusing and frustrating.

There are two sets of ideas here. Conforming to the process but also coming to terms with the literature you have chosen to review. You may have had some knowledge of this space to begin with but for the most part, you did not know. You were ignorant. As you work through the literature, that feeling reduces. You begin to get a sense of what is out there. You can begin to join the dots for some of the ideas you have come across. Doing that is where the pleasure of this work lies. You, and you alone develop an expertise or capacity which you then communicate in your draft paper.

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