Literature Review Guide

Searching As Exploration

It is important to remember that searching and topic creation are an explorative and iterative process. Often when we conceive of research, there is a clear process of deciding on a topic, then doing a search. However, searching can be an important part of the topic development process. It's helpful to remember that as you choose a topic and begin searching, you are learning more about your topic, and it is likely that your topic will evolve. 

The steps laid out below are not necessarily linear, and may need to be repeated.

Where do I start? 

Your research project starts with identifying your broad areas of interest. From there, you'll need to learn more about the topics you're interested in so that you can narrow down from broad ideas to a focused research question. 

Generating Ideas

As you're thinking about possible topics, consider:

• What are you curious about?
• What would support your future work? 
• What topics came up in your class readings and assignments? 
• What type of research do you want to do? 

Initial Researching and Brainstorming

Before you finalize your research topic, it is helpful to survey existing literature and use brainstorming techniques like mind maps to visualize your topic, make connections to evidence from existing scholarly literature, and generate new ideas.

For each broad topic you're interested in:

• Brainstorm possible sub-topics
  • Population - who do you want to study or learn from?
  • Intervention - is there a particular approach, assessment, or other intervention you're interested in? 
  • Phenomenon of Interest - what behavior, experience, or concepts are related to your topic? 
  • Outcome - what do you want to measure or assess? (this could include experiences, attitudes, perceptions, etc.) 
• Search for relevant scholarly literature and make note of what is being researched in relation to your topic
  • Keep your review of the literature brief and high-level
  • Read titles and abstracts to get a birds-eye view of how researchers are discussing your topic of interest in the scholarly literature 

Narrowing Your Focus

As you progress, you will need to narrow your research focus. The FINER criteria (Hulley et al, 2007) can help you evaluate your possible research questions. A good research question should be:

Feasible - The research question can be answered given the timeframe and resources available

Interesting - The research question is interesting to the researcher and the wider academic community

Novel - Answering the research question will provide new insights into a field of study or will extend, refute, or confirm existing findings. 

Ethical - The research question can be addressed using ethical research methods which address necessary IRB / REB protocols. 

Relevant - The research question is relevant to scholarly study and/or clinical practice. 

Hulley, S., Cummings, S. and Browner, W. (2007). Designing Clinical Research. England: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.

Developing Search Terms

Once you have a general topic, you need to start considering what search terms you are going to use. Often we want to break down our topic into smaller components. 

For example if your topic is about the stresses placed on romantic relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic, you might want to consider what the most important parts of that research question are. It might be:

• stress
• romantic relationships
• COVID-19

Next, we need to consider other ways these concepts could be portrayed, otherwise we might be missing out on important research by not using the exact same term as the researcher. We want to consider broader terms, narrower terms, synonyms, related terms, and alternate spellings. A concept map can be a great way to organize your terms.

Concept Map

Bringing Your Terms Together

It's tempting to think while you are looking for articles for your literature review to only search for articles that contain all of your research concepts. However, ideally, you are conducting your literature review on a gap in the research. This means that there is likely very few, if any, articles on your subject. So you will need to look elsewhere for articles for your literature review.

You can think of your literature review like a stool you sit on. Each of the legs of the stool represent your topic, and they all come together to support the seat of the stool - your research. Each part of your concepts needs to be thoroughly researched in order to properly support your research.

For example:

To write a literature review on my topic, I first need to understand the COVID-19 quarantines, then learn about particular challenges for couples, as well as the effect of stress, in order to be able to tie them all together in my research.