Assistant Professor

Physiotherapy

Rama Institute of Paramedical Sciences

 Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India 

Background:

A literature review is an integral and important part of research designs and research methodologies whether the researches pertain to a smaller area or smaller sample or the research pertain to a vast global healthcare need or social need. As the name suggests, literature review means gaining a thorough understanding of the subject being studied or collecting information which is sufficient to draw a conclusion of the subject topic and is considered sufficient to instigate other researchers and individuals to draw their attention towards it. Although, there are many assumptions about literature review being just a part of the thesis or dissertations which the students undertaking research work for the completion of their degree curriculum undergo to collect information generalised related to their subject. But in reality, the scope of literature searches and reviews is vast and it can incorporate various modifications within itself which we will be discussing here on.

Definition:

A literature review stands for searching, collecting, analysing and drawing a useful information from already existing information without altering the actual obtained information and summarising it in a manner that it becomes more stable, in line with other literatures being studied for the same topic round the world, and becomes highly specified for an individual to understand. There have been many authors which have viewed literature search in their own manner and do not interfere with the purpose and scope of each other’s understanding of the literature review.

Literature review or literature search wouldn’t be wrong to be considered as the first and basic step to be up taken while formulating a research question or a research gap. The primary objective behind conducting a literature search is to understand the level of knowledge of worldwide authors about a given certain topic and the possible literature gaps that can be addressed in upcoming researches. It has many benefits and is thus considered primary for conducting a research work. Although the definition of literature review has been many a times formulated and translated depending upon the authors concern and the area of their study but the essentialness and the enormity of the data being searched as literature review has not been altered since a long time. 

Intentions behind conducting a Literature Review:

The purpose behind conducting a literature search can be studied in detail as:

1. To identify the possibility of conducting research in a particular field or area of study. It could be conducted in order to clarify whether the research being thought of is practically possible to conduct or not.

2. To report a specific part of literature which is unknown to the world. It can be conducted to identify the research gaps or literature gaps about a specific topic or subject which is already being studied around the world.

3. To demonstrate the level and the amount of knowledge present about a particular study. To analyse the available thoughts of schools or ideologies present over a given specified topic.

4. To accumulate various thought processes and various findings about a given research topic or subject in a systematic and easily available format. This helps the researchers and authors to find various sort of knowledge or information materials at a single instance which is studied by numerous authors separately.

5. To organize a document of the available information at an instance so that it could be used for citation purposes in the research articles which use this article as a research gap content.

6. To understand that the knowledge available on the documents about a topic is relevant and justifies the topic or not. This could be helpful in opting out which sort of information is reliable or can be estimated to be reliable or not.

7. It provides the authors to gain full information regarding a single topic and master that particular topic so that the author can deliver it in form of lectures or practical or presentations at various instances.

8. It may be conducted to document the progress of a field in a particular topic of choice.

9. It may be conducted to assess the reliability of the articles published or the content released for the individuals or authors worldwide to study.

10. It may be conducted to revise or restudy about the variables one researcher is keen to work on.

11. Conducting literature reviews at regular intervals not only keep the researchers updated regarding the topic but also tend to keep researchers aware of the work being undertaken throughout the world so that there could be lesser discrepancy between studied of same sort with more specific newer strategies to be adopted.

12. Conducting literature search for some topic gives the authors immense confidence and vulnerability to work on that topic and face confounding variables easily throughout the course of the research work.

13. It provides the level of significance a study can have, whether priorly given importance or not by other researchers.

14. To specify the ideology or school of thought of a researcher at first instance and to make sure the content being used by the researcher is new and isn’t taken from previous researches.

15. To analyse the work of other authors so that, the limitations and the drawbacks of the studies or authors can be directed and the authors can be given a mode of correcting their errors while conducting a research work.

Derivation of literature:

This literature which is searched before initiation of any study is itself a study to be conducted. The practise of searching literatures for understanding the possible outcomes and the literature gaps is quite prevalent. The main derivatives of any literature search include collection of data from various resources. These resources can be studied as:

1. Published Articles: there are many articles or reports which are published in public domain for the individuals concerning the data can read and understand it. A very common example for such a source is the newspapers we read in our day-to-day lifestyle which gives us the current past and reports of various subjects.

2. Unpublished articles: some of the data or literatures remain unpublished but are not outside the reach of researchers or individuals. But these literature sources are hard to find and generally represent first form or primary form of the data which is raw and which can be used for research work purposes only by obtaining the consent of the reporter or the researcher who is responsible for collecting that data.

3. Grey literature: these are the literature sources which can be either published or unpublished but are difficult to search for since their address or format of address to be found is difficult to locate.

4. Research Journals: there are numerous articles published in journals that publish data offline and online for a specific sort of population which can access that journal and read the research papers in order to extract data from them. These research journals are some specific to their discipline or can be specific to a particular stream of occupation.

5. Archives: these are the literature sources that tend to be collected from some ground resources and are crude in nature and can be used or analysed depending upon the topic of selection. These literatures are generally stored by the authors for the future generation of researchers to study and analyse from their perspectives.

6. Books / E-books: Books are a common source of information for various streams of study and these days students or researchers get insight of these books on online platforms in the form of pdf or word formats to understand and access these books at any time and location.

7. Census: these sorts of literatures are usually published in public domain for the general population to understand and have thorough knowledge of the data being worked on and collected.

Finding a Literature:

As we discussed earlier the sources of the literatures from where the researchers can get access to the data already in knowledge and available for the readers or researchers, but as a matter of fact, mostly people conducting research or literature survey are unaware of the measures they need to follow in order to obtain a literature from its source. Earlier, the researchers needed to run a complete survey or search from the search engines or manually to collect these literatures to be studied but as the community of education and training has grown, it has become quite easier for the researchers to get valuable source of information at single instance and from a particular site or web page.

Earlier researchers needed to search for articles or journal papers through libraries and other relevant sources but through technology assistance it is now evident that the articles can be collected by specified search tools that help the researchers to get appropriate articles and journals in lesser time. These newer techniques include the evaluation of PICO, PICOS and SPIDER tools for searching appropriate and quality articles related to one’s search only and removal or extra or irrelevant articles. There are various benefits of using these tools to get appropriate articles but most commonly used is the PICOS tool for analysing the actual sort and type of articles needed by the researcher to study.

The full form of this tools is explained below:

Strategy	Meaning	Search
P	Population	This will include the population needed to study by the researcher so that any population apart from this can be removed or ignored. For example: Spinal Cord injury patients.
I	Interventions	This will include the set of interventions which the researcher needs to focus in order to get relevant articles in search. For example: Aquatic therapy
C	Comparison	This will involve the articles if the researcher needs to compare any of the intervention with other interventions on the articles listed. For example: Resisted Training
O	Outcome	This will involve the exact outcome needed by the researcher to be studied. For example: Mobility of patients
S	Study designs	This will involve the correct type of studies which the researcher needs to be collected in line with above researches. For example: Randomized clinical trials

Thus, if the researcher follows these searching tools for identification of accurate sort of articles, by example, researcher will get the articles that are Randomized Clinical trials in which physiotherapists have compared aquatic therapy and resisted training in patients with Spinal Cord Injury. Likewise, any search can be regulated using these acronyms. 

Types of Literature Reviews:

There are various forms of literature searches which can be made in order to obtain useful information from the available contents or information.

Some of these forms which are used prominently in healthcare researches include:

a. Systematic Reviews: These are those reviews that are conducted following a proper set of lineages of steps and leads to synchronized and valuable source of information.

b. Meta- Analysis: These sorts of reviews include the evaluation of the data collected by primary researchers and re-evaluation of their data to analyse the credibility of the articles and their findings.

c. Narrative Review: These sorts of reviews are considered generalised form of reviews that pertains that such a narrative could be proposed depending upon a sequence of articles published which are indicative of such findings.

d. Scoping Review: These sorts of reviews are those which depict the possibility conducting a literature search on a valuable topic which can lead to generation of immense literature gaps that can be solved.

e. Critical Reviews: Critical reviews are those which suggest the critical analysis of the articles being studied and demand that whether the result of the articles could be relied on or not.

f. Exploratory reviews: These sorts of reviews are those which suggest the exploration of theoretical points and contributions which can be evaluated.

g. Mixed Method Reviews: These sorts of reviews are often mixture of two or types of review in a single review article.

Constituents of a Literature search:

For conducting or writing a literature review it is mandatory for the researcher to enlist the following points:

1. The search strategy opted by the researcher while collecting appropriate articles for the review. It is mandatory for the researcher to give and enlisted panel of search histories run in order to get to the articles included in the research work or literature survey.

2. The search engines or the web pages from where the articles have been collected and this reviewed.

3. The review or literature survey must mention the time line from which year to which year articles are being included in the literature search so that it is possible for the researcher to concise the available information according the newer and older research articles available to them.

4. The depiction of sources of the collected literature and their mode of collection to be specified primarily.

5. Citation of the articles form where the content or the information is being taken must be noted so that the due credits of the information is conveyed to the actual authors of the information.

6. Critical evaluation of the collected articles and the method of critically analysing the credibility and reliability of the articles collected and being mentioned in the literature search.

7. Development of the literature gap must be in the form of a story outline which may connect the researchers or readers to directly point on the understanding of the authors.

8. Detailed knowledge obtained by the researcher on the basis of previous articles published by researchers and along with due credits of the authors.

9. A short inclusive summary which will give an insight of the search being carried out and the amount of information derived from this literature search.

10.  Appropriate keywords which will denote the actual meaning of this literature search. 

References:

1. Siddaway AP, Wood AM, Hedges LV. How to Do a Systematic Review: A Best Practice Guide for Conducting and Reporting Narrative Reviews, Meta-Analyses, and Meta-Syntheses. Annu Rev Psychol. 2019 Jan 4;70:747-770. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-102803. Epub 2018 Aug 8. PMID: 30089228.

2. Maggio LA, Sewell JL, Artino AR Jr. The Literature Review: A Foundation for High-Quality Medical Education Research. J Grad Med Educ. 2016 Jul;8(3):297-303. doi: 10.4300/JGME-D-16-00175.1. PMID: 27413425; PMCID: PMC4936839.

3. Silva AR, Padilha MI, Petry S, Silva E Silva V, Woo K, Galica J, Wilson R, Luctkar-Flude M. Reviews of Literature in Nursing Research: Methodological Considerations and Defining Characteristics. ANS Adv Nurs Sci. 2022 Jul-Sep 01;45(3):197-208. doi: 10.1097/ANS.0000000000000418. Epub 2022 Feb 24. PMID: 35213877.

4. Amir-Behghadami M, Janati A. Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes and Study (PICOS) design as a framework to formulate eligibility criteria in systematic reviews. Emerg Med J. 2020 Jun;37(6):387. doi: 10.1136/emermed-2020-209567. Epub 2020 Apr 5. PMID: 32253195.

5. Conte G, Caruso R, Dellafiore F, Magon A, Ghizzardi G, Arrigoni C. Mapping the literature on Digital and Technological Solutions in nursing: a scoping review protocol. Prof Inferm. 2022 Jul 1;75(2):123-126. English, Italian. doi: 10.7429/pi.2022.752123. PMID: 36964923.

6.  Evans D, Kowanko I. Literature reviews: evolution of a research methodology. Aust J Adv Nurs. 2000 Dec-2001 Feb;18(2):33-8. PMID: 11878498.