Conducting Your Literature Review

This book is a step-by-step guide to writing a literature review, and includes tips for modifying the process as needed depending on your audience, purpose, and goals. The lessons in this book can be applied to writing the background section for a thesis or an original research publication.

Literature reviews are now much more challenging to compile today than they used to be. You need a structured approach to handle the sheer volume of published research available. This book will help you formulate a strategy for making decisions about what to include and not include in your review, and produce a reliable and unbiased summary of the existing research. You will learn skills for defining research questions, using search tools and managing citations.

This book is part of the American Psychological Association’s Concise Guides to Conducting Behavioral, Health, and Social Science Research series. Aimed at undergraduate students in research methods courses or others with a lab or research project, each book describes a key stage in the research process. Collectively, these books provide a solid grounding in research from start to finish.

Susanne Hempel, PhD, is a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She is the co-director of the Southern California Evidence-based Practice Center, leading contracts for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). She carries out systematic reviews in healthcare research and methodological projects aiming to improve evidence syntheses. Hempel teaches systematic review methodology and applied psychometrics. She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: What to Achieve: Clarifying the Goal of Your Literature Review
Chapter 2: Where to Look: Choosing Databases and Other Sources of Literature
Chapter 3: How to Look: Developing Search Strategies
Chapter 4: What to Look For: Deciding What Literature to Include
Chapter 5: How to Organize: Managing Your Material
Chapter 6: How to Abstract: Extracting Key Information from the Literature
Chapter 7: How to Assess: Critically Appraising Your Material
Chapter 8: How to Synthesize: Determining What to Say About the Literature
Chapter 9: How to Document: Writing Up Your Literature Review
Further Reading
Index
About the Author
About the Series Editor

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Conducting Your Literature Review

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials