Literature reviews - a guide how to carry them out

Choosing your research question:

Starting your systematised literature review can be a daunting task. To complete a successful review you will need to choose a appropriate question. As a general rule, your question needs to be closed and specific rather than general and open.  Your question should be:

• Well-defined to successfully identify the appropriate literature.

• Specific and have a clear focus

Too much or too little?

Students often think they have to think up an exact question before they consult literature, this can cause the following two problems:

1. Finding no relevant literature on a topic: often a topic is so niche on student may struggle to embed their research into an existing field of literature. For example, if your question references Lincolnshire you are highly unlikely to find the research you need to complete a successful review.
2. Finding too much literature: often a key question has been directly answered already. When this happens you may struggle to find an original angle or wording.

When this happens there is a tendency to panic

Don’t panic: instead, the exercises below can be helpful:

Exercise One

1. Pick a broad topic of interest — some examples for Education might be “leadership in education”, “mentoring and teachers" or “practical work in schools”

2. Start consulting literature by carrying out some scoping searches in the library webpage, a database or for Education: EBSCOhost database or use Google Scholar. Begin by reading broadly then focus in on specific areas; let the literature shape and form your question.

3. Start to refine a more specific question based on your scoping searches. Your question will be specific enough when you can identify a clear body of literature (not too much or too little) that fits the scope of your question.

Exercise Two

1. Type your area of interest followed by “systematic review” into an Education or Social Work database or Google Scholar.
2. Browse the titles to get a feel for the questions that work for your chosen topic. You will not be able to copy these questions, but this exercise can be useful in gauging how other systematised reviews in your field have been approached and written.

An important first step of your systematic  literature review is to define and develop your review question to ensure that your review is sufficiently focused, manageable and relevant to the outcomes that you have identified.

There are various frameworks you can use to define your review question. These provide a structure for the review question and will help you identify the concepts that will ultimately be used when developing your search strategy.

The key one used in the health sciences for clinical questions is PICO (Patient - Intervention - Comparison - Outcome) (Richardson et al., 1995).

P: Patient or Problem: Who is the patient? What are the most important characteristics of the patient? What is the primary problem, disease, or co-existing condition?

I: Intervention: What is the main intervention being considered?

C: Comparison: What is the main comparison intervention?

O: Outcome: What are the anticipated measures, improvements, or affects?

(Davies, 2011)

PICo - (Population/ Patient/Problem - Interest - Context. This is for qualitative studies that the School of Education may refer you to use.  It is from Murdoch University (2023). 

Other mnemonics which can be used to frame your search strategy include:

ECLIPSE (Expectation – Client group – Location – Impact ‐ Professionals involved – SErvice). Useful for health management, health policy topics (Wildridge and Bell, 2002)

PEO (Population – Exposure – Outcome). Useful for qualitative research (Moola et al., 2015)

PICOC (Population - Intervention - Comparison - Outcome - Context) (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006)

SPICE (Setting (context) – Perspective– Intervention – Comparison – Evaluation). Useful for qualitative research topics as well as in the social sciences (Booth, 2004)

SPIDER (Sample - Phenonemon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type). Useful for qualitative and mixed methods studies (Cooke et al., 2012)

You don't have to use one of these frameworks but you do need to break your search question down into the relevant concepts in order to frame your search strategy. 

When you have done some scoping searches, looked at a framework and developed your question, you need to formulate your inclusion and exclusion criteria. This formally delineates the literature you will include and exclude in your review. This information needs to be presented in your write up (normally as a table).

The nature of your criteria will depend on your question (no two questions are the same), but some key variables to consider might be:

• Geographic area (UK, European, or worldwide focus?)
• Methodology (quantitative or qualitative or mixed methods?)
• Date of publication (last five or ten years or a historical study?)
• Demographic (are you going to focus, for example, on a specific age group or for Education primary or secondary school)
• Quality of studies (are you going to focus on peer reviewed articles, or could you use grey literature/ official documents as well?)

You may find creating a mind map useful in highlighting some of the key issues of your review question.  The following resources may be useful: