Public & Social Policy

A literature review may be conducted in order to inform practice and/or policy, serve as a basic element in a thesis or dissertation or as part of a proposal to obtain funding. The process can be divided into a series of steps:

• Choose a topic. Look at recent literature for ideas and do a bit of preliminary searching of the existing literature.

• Clarify your review question and the scope of your review

• Brainstorm search terms to use and think about your search strategy

• Begin searching for articles. I strongly recommend you keep a search log to document which databases you searched and what search terms you used.

• Capture and manage search results. You may want to export results to Endnote or other citation management tool (see Managing Citations tab in this guide)

• Screen results for inclusion based on criteria you define

• Evaluate the  the articles. A worksheet which includes the bibliographic information about the article and summarizes elements of the article such as research design, interventions, findings, main variables etc. may give you a helpful overview

• Synthesize results (this is the whole point!).