Purpose of a Literature Review in Nursing: Types of Literature to Include
Purpose of a Literature Review
- Enable the student to develop skills to search, read, interpret and summarize the literature on a particular subject.
- Enable the student to select a topic; the focus of the topic should be related to a nursing/midwifery issue.
- Determine what is known and not known about a subject, concept or problem in the area of nursing/midwifery
- Determine gaps, consistencies and inconsistencies in the literature about a subject, concept or problem.
- Describe the strengths and weaknesses of designs, methods of inquiry and instruments used in earlier works.
- Discover conceptual traditions used to examine problems.
- Generate useful research questions/projects/activities for the discipline.
- Determine an appropriate research design to answer the research question.
- Determine the need for replication of a well-designed study or refinement of a study.
- Promote development of protocols and policies related to nursing practice.
- Identify a new practice intervention, or provide evidence for changing a practice intervention.
- Enable the student to develop a research question and/or provide discussion on the relevance of the literature review findings to nursing/midwifery practice in a UK context.
Your literature review must focus on a Nursing issue or have a Nursing focus.
- Pick an area that is of interest to you.
- Play around with an idea, rephrase it and try to focus your thoughts into a more specific review question.
- Identify key words that can be used for the literature search.
- The topic should be sufficiently complex to merit rigorous enquiry but narrow enough to yield clear guidelines for practice. Step 2 Planning a Time Scale
- The time taken should not be underestimated.
- Include commitments not connected with work, other study demands and domestic responsibilities.
- Plan a proposed timetable.
- The time scale should be realistic and achievable, making allowances for delays such as, difficulty locating important references. Step 3 Literature Search
- Having defined your question and narrowed down the area of interest, head to the library.
- It is of benefit to have narrowed down your area at this stage to minimise the amount of information to sort through.
- Identify the scope of the literature search in terms of the dates of publication and countries of origin.
Types of Literature to Include
- Research studies are central to a literature review and should be critiqued appropriately.
- The subject may also appear in the literature as debate or description and the reviewer must make an informed judgement about what to include.
- A review should reflect and comment upon the type of literature available i.e. anecdotal / empirical.
- Include literature from other disciplines if appropriate