O.K. Today we are going to talk about literature reviews. How do you find literature reviews?
You're in a class that's asked you to find and analyze literature reviews for a certain subject.
First let's talk about what a literature review is and what it isn't. Let's start off by talking
about what it isn't. So, in general most of the articles that you're going to find when you
look up a certain topic if they're peer-reviewed articles, are going to be studies or experiments
or surveys. What they're doing, they're collecting original data. They're studying a certain group of
people or a certain group of data and drawing conclusions about that set of data. So, that's,
here's an example of what you will find a lot. So, I looked up depression and I found studies
on depression. This is an individual study, very specific experience of internet-based cognitive
behavior therapy for depression and anxiety among Arabic speaking individuals in Sweden:
a qualitative study. So, obviously this is very specific and its original research.
O.K. So here's the background, the methods, 10 individuals who had previously received this
consented to participate and were interviewed. So, they interviewed these 10 people and they
gathered data and wrote this article based on that. O.K. That's not a literature review, this
is an individual piece of literature. This is an individual study but it's primarily going
to tell you about the data that they gathered for this. Here's another example. O.K. This is
screening accuracy of a 14-day smartphone ambulatory assessment of depression symptoms
and mood dynamics. So, this is a very specific research article about this one specific thing.
O.K. And they give you, they're telling you here they, they selected these people to be studied
and they found this strong relationship with, with depression in this group of people. O.K. That's
not a literature review. That's one individual study. For your course where they're asking you
for a literature review, they're kind of looking, they're wanting you to find a peer-reviewed
article that's a review of a lot of these different things to give you more of an overview.
So, here's an example, and it's still very specific, association of opioid misuse with
anxiety and depression a systematic review of the literature. O.K. So, for this they're really not
gathering any original data, what they're doing if you read through this article, they're going
to review a whole bunch of these studies, these individual studies that they've done,
that they have done in their literature review. They've looked, done a bunch of searching and
found what they think are the most significant studies on this and they're reviewing it and
kind of summarizing what, what we know about this based on the literature that's out there
right now. So, it's, it's completely different and it's more of giving you a general idea.
It's great if you don't know a lot about a topic these other ones are going to be frustrating
if you jump in and you're trying to learn kind of some of the basics of what's going on, you're just
going to get this or this study. O.K. So, I think you understand hopefully, you understand what that
is. It's not too hard of a concept. Let's talk about how to find them O.K. What I just said,
that's the hard part to understand that. Finding them is very easy. Here's the library website.
I'm going to jump right into advanced search here to search all of our databases at once.
And this is really very easy to do. I'm going to type in depression. I'll probably put that
in the titles of the articles. Now this, it's really this easy. You type in here
"literature review" and I'm also, going to put that in the title.
and when it comes back, every, and I have the peer-reviewed limiter on by default,
So, all these are going to be peer-reviewed. And you notice all of these are literature reviews.
O.K. That's really, you notice, this one's a little further down into it, but
all of these are literature reviews. So, it's really that easy to do that. You could also,
say here in "literature review" you could say or "review of the literature."
sometimes you'll see, now we have 388 there
when we put or "review of the literature" it just about doubled. So, you could also, do that
and some of them will say a review of literature a systematic review of the literature.
So, that's the basics of how you find literature reviews. It's really that easy. I would put in
the topic that you're looking for, you can put it in the title if you want or not. I put it in
title just because that's the most specific way to search. You could also, do subject you could just
leave it blank, "select a field," or you could do subject and then I would put in the title
in the second box, "literature review." Notice I put that in quotation marks. I don't. I want
"literature review" or quotation marks "review of the literature." It is really that simple
and every one of these articles that will come back will be peer reviewed,
but they'll be reviewing a lot of different studies instead of just giving you one study,
and that's what your instructor is looking for. That's the basics of how to find a literature
review. It's really that simple. As always, please let me know if you have any questions,
I'd be happy to work with you on this topic or any other. Thanks a lot for watching.