Health and Social Care

In health and social care there are a number of different types of review. The resources below give an outline of the different types and outline the differences between them:

Grant, M. J., & Booth, A. (2009). A typology of reviews: an analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 26(2), 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-1842.2009.00848.x 

Sutton, A., Clowes, M., Preston, L., & Booth, A. (2019). Meeting the review family: exploring review types and associated information retrieval requirements. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 36(3), 202–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12276  

If you are doing a literature review as part of an academic assignment then please ensure you follow the requirements and any methods set out in your assignment brief. You may be advised to do a specific type of review, but when reading the guidance of how to conduct one find that it differs from your assignment brief. If so, discuss this with your supervisor or module leader.

Choosing a Review Type

You need to understand the purpose of different review types and match this up with what you are intending to achieve from carrying out your review in order to select the most appropriate type. You can include this explanation and justification within your write up. As well as the guidance above please see some further resources below to support your decision making.

Munn, Z., Peters, M. D. J., Stern, C., Tufanaru, C., McArthur, A., & Aromataris, E. (2018). Systematic review or scoping review? Guidance for authors when choosing between a systematic or scoping review approach. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 18(1), 143–143. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-018-0611-x

Jonkoping University. (n.d.). Which review is right for you? https://guides.library.ju.se/c.php?g=690269&p=4943634

Right Review. (2024). Right Review Tool. https://rightreview.knowledgetranslation.net/

There are a number of published reporting and conducting guidelines and handbooks to support you in both carrying out and writing up your review. These help to ensure the quality and transparency of your review by ensuring you have included and conducted your review in a way that meets established methodological expectations.

Reporting guidelines give information on what you need to include in the write up of the review. Conducting guidelines provide more methodological guidance on how to carry out and undertake each stage of a review, not just stating what you need to include/report. When using these they need to be cited and referenced and the wording you would use needs to distinguish if it is a reporting or conducting resource, and therefore how it has been used. Examples:

'this review/protocol was reported using . . . '

'the conducting of this review was guided by . . . '

A lot of these were designed for quantitative systematic reviews of interventions, however a number of resources now exist for different types of evidence synthesis reviews. Below are resources of some of the most commonly used guidelines.

PRISMA

The PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) statement consists of a 27-item checklist that covers the elements needed in the write up of a systematic review, and a flow diagram.

There is an article giving further explanation of every element of the checklist and a glossary of terms.

PRISMA also have guidance for reporting protocols, known as the  PRISMA-P extension.

There is also a checklist extension for Scoping Reviews called PRISMA-ScR, which is very similar to the Systematic Review checklist but with some key differences.

Also a more in-depth explanatory paper for this checklist as well.
 

Cochrane

The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions needs to be followed if you were to publish a review or review protocol in the Cochrane Library of Systematic Reviews.

There are a set a reporting guidelines for both review protocols and full reviews.

Key aspects of the Cochrane handbook are collated as the Methodological Expectations for Cochrane Intervention Reviews – takes you through steps needed to conduct.

The Cochrane Handbook Chapter V also details methodology for conducting Overviews of Reviews.

The Cochrane Qualitative and Implementation Methods Group have published a series of 6 papers covering qualitative evidence synthesis methods.

Other Guides

The JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis separates SRs out by types of evidence included, as well as having chapters on Mixed Methods Reviews, Scoping Reviews and Umbrella Reviews.

RAMSES reporting can be used for realist reviews and meta-narrative reviews.

The ENTREQ checklist can be used to report reviews of qualitative literature, alongside a fuller article explaining the development of the checklist.

Further reporting and conducting guidelines can be found on this useful page from the University of Illinois.

Booth, A. (2016). EVIDENT Guidance for reviewing the evidence: a compendium of methodological literature and websites. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292991575_EVIDENT_Guidance_for_Reviewing_the_Evidence_a_compendium_of_methodological_literature_and_websites

A good literature review should:

• Address a focused, explicit research question.
• Take a systematic approach to the searching of the literature.
• Document the search process so that it is replicable  by others  (often a requirement for publication within many academic journals)
• Demonstrate that a wide range of sources have been searched.
• Undertake a critical analysis of the retrieved literature, not merely describe what has been read.
• Justify why particular items of literature are being referred to. They should summarise the current state of research,  perhaps debates that have taken place over a period of time within that topic or arguments for and against a particular aspect of the topic.
• Relate the question to the larger body of knowledge within which your topic sits, and to put your work into context.
• Summarise the current state of the research evidence.
• Identify the gap in the literature that your research question is going to answer.

Common Mistakes

• Review is too descriptive. No critiquing or critical evaluation of the evidence. No identification of strengths and weaknesses. It becomes an essay, not a review. It does not set the foundation for your own research process.
• It becomes a dumping ground to write down everything you know about the topic  or is presented as a series of quotes from the papers you have read.
• Not enough time has been allocated to searching and reviewing the literature. Do your literature reviewing early. It helps inform your final research question, future methodologies and identifies whether there is indeed a "gap" in the current research literature that your queston is going to answer.
• Literature used is not from scholarly peer reviewed sources.
• There is no documentation or explanation of how the search was undertaken and the key terms used. No explanation of inclusion/exclusion criteria.
• Referencing does not follow the School guidelines. It is not consistent in style or presentation.
• There has been no revision or proof reading. Thinking develops as you write. Go back over what you have written a few days after you have done it. Check grammar and language – give it to someone else to proof read.

Here are 5 top tips towards a stress free  literature review

The eligibility criteria can also be referred to as the inclusion and exclusion criteria. This is a set of criteria you will develop which you will use during the selection process of the review to decide which sources of literature to include and exclude. This criteria helps to reduce selection bias, because every decision you make should be based on this pre-determined set of criteria. 

When take a systematic approach to searching and selecting the literature your eligibility criteria needs to be very detailed, both for you to be able to make decisions for each of the pieces of literature you have found, but also for someone else to be able to use the criteria with the same set of literature and make the same decisions as you. If you are doing a review as part of a review team for publication then there should be a minimum of two people involved in the selection of the literature, both using the same criteria to make selection decisions. This aligns to the systematic criteria of transparency. 

When developing your eligibility criteria think about the following elements:

• Each of your question concepts from your question formulation framework and detail exactly what criteria would mean a source would be included or excluded in relation to each question concept.

E.g. your population group is people with dementia, so as inclusion criteria you would state that each literature source needs this population group and any source without this population group would be excluded. But what about literature where participants and both people with dementia and people with Parkinsons. Would this be included or excluded? Your criteria needs to be detailed enough to capture all of the potential decisions you would need to make.

• The study criteria for research literature, so the methodology, design and any further details. Depending on your review question there will sometimes be specific types of data most suited to answer the question, so sometimes either quantitative or qualitative data only would be appropriate, and sometimes only specific study designs like randomised controlled trials

E.g. you're question is exploring the experiences and views of a particular group of participants, therefore the data most appropriate to 'answer' this question would be qualitative.

• Types of publications, so are you only including primary research or wider sources of literature? Even with primary research there are a number of different source types this could be presented in such as journal articles, theses, conference proceedings.
• Publication dates, so is there a specific date range you will only be including literature from? Try to think about the context of your specific topic/question and what would make something too old. 

E.g. there has been a new guideline in your topic area published in a specific year with major changes to how a specific procedure is done in practice, meaning that older literature is not relevant to the current guideline. Topics related to technology could be outdated more easily due to specific technological developments in a specific field or equipment. 

A search strategy includes where and how you are searching. Can someone else use your process to find what you found? This aligns with the systematic criteria of being transparent.

You need to plan and include the following detail in your write up to allow someone else to replicate your search:

When searching in databases most of the time you want to use the advanced search feature to build a search that will find a more relevant set of search results. To do this you need to be able to plan effective search strategies, using appropriate keyword search terms, and inputting these into the database in the most effective combination.

The videos below demonstrate how to input a planned systematic search strategy into a database. Different database platforms will look slightly different, but the principles for doing an advanced search are the same across them all, but differences are demonstrated.

Searching in EBSCO databases (CINAHL, Medline, APA PsycInfo etc.)

Searching in PubMed

Searching in Ovid

Searching in Web of Science

Searching in Proquest

The selection process is where you will use your eligibility criteria to select the literature for inclusion in your review. Considerations needed are:

Keeping track of literature

Writing a literature review will mean that you will collect a large number of pieces of information from many sources.  Before you begin searching, give some thought as to how you are going to manage this information. 

Reference management software will enable you to automatically  export references you collect from database searches and store them in the reference manager.   Once you have read each paper you can then make personal research notes and store these within each reference inside the reference manager.

Use the software  to format the citations within the text of your review. It will also produce the reference list at the end of your document formatted in a style of your choosing e.g.  APA 7th.

See  our Reference Management LibGuide on how to get started with Endnote or Mendeley, Edinburgh Napier’s referencing management software.

NHS Scotland users can also use the Refworks ref management software supplied on the NHS Knowledge network site instead of Endnote,  if they would prefer.

What is critical appraisal? 

Critical appraisal/quality assessment is a specific aspect of critical analysis where you examine and assess research in order to judge its:

You are evaluating the quality of the research and how it has been conducted, as well as the findings themselves and how it has been reported. Please see the following video by Cochrane on an Introduction to Critical Appraisal for a more in depth description.

Why do we do it?

Critical appraisal is often carried out using checklists that help signpost areas to look for while reading a paper. There are different types of checklist depending on the type of research you are reviewing.

The following document lists some of the main appraisal tools used in published reviews and would be a good place to start when deciding on which tool to use. 

Further Critical Appraisal Resources

Book

 Greehalgh, T (2019) How to read a paper :  the basics of evidence-based medicine. 6th ed. Wiley Blackwell

Videos

Two excellent videos from Andrew Booth at SCHARR at the University of Sheffield. These take you through the actual process of appraising papers using the CASP tool.

Appraising a Quantitative Study             [13 mins]

Critical Appraisal of a Qualitative Study  [12 mins]

Data Extraction and Charting

Your literature findings need to be presented and discussed both descriptively and analytically. It is usually to present a summary of the included sources in the form of a data extraction or study characteristics table, a process also referred to as data extraction and charting your results.  The video below covers how to present your findings in this way.

Analysing and Synthesising the Findings of the Literature

Depending on the type of review you are doing and also whether the review is being done as an assignment, there may be differing expectations of how you analyse the included literature sources.

At Masters dissertation level you would be expected as a minimum to provide a narrative thematic analysis, where you compare and contrast the literature to identify patterns and themes and interpret these in relation to your review question. You can use a deductive approach where you start with a pre-existing framework of themes, or an inductive approach where themes are generated from reading the literature.

At PhD or researcher for publication level there would be an expectation of a more complex analysis of the literature, appropriate to the literature sources. A scoping review including a wide range of source types would likely best be suited to a narrative analysis, but if the review literature is all research then an appropriate quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods form of analysis of the data would be expected.

Most Systematic Review conduction and reporting guidelines are designed around an analysis of quantitative data, so if this does not fit the data of your literature you may need to use different analysis and synthesis guidance. There are a number of different analysis methods, some examples and resources are listed below as a starting point but you may also want to look at examples of similar reviews fur further methods.

• Chapters 10 and 11 of the Cochrane Handbook covers quantitative meta-analysis.
• Chapter 12 covers over methods, however these are all still mainly quantitative methods.
• The eMergE reporting guidance covers meta-ethnography qualitative synthesis, and the ENTREQ statement can also be used for qualitative synthesis.