Research Guides: Literature Reviews: Planning Your Review

What is a literature review?

A literature review summarizes and evaluates a body of writing about a specific topic. A literature review is not an annotated bibliography (when you summarize each article you have reviewed). The literature review should describe and consider all sides of an argument in order to avoid bias, and areas of agreement and disagreement should be highlighted.

Planning Your Literature Review

The literature review process may cover the following steps:

Define your research question.
- use tools like PICO(TT), SPIDER, SPICE or ECLIPSE to create a concise, informative question.
Plan your approach to your research and review.
- What do you know about your topic?
- What's the current status of research in this area?
- How detailed will this review be? Will it be a review of all of the literature or will you focus be on recent materials?
Search the literature.
- Use the library resources to conduct a literature search. Tutorials are available to help you use the databases (PubMed, CINAHL, Embase, etc.).
- Need (or want) help? Connect with your liaison librarian.
Store and organize the results of your searches
- Use citation management tools like EndNote or Zotero to organize and keep track of your results.
Analyze the materials you've found.
Write your review.
- Connect with the Writing Center for assistance with writing your paper.

Getting Started - Resources

A-Z Databases
A complete list of available databases and resources from the McGoogan Library.
Database Tutorials
Tutorials for searching PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Embase, and Scopus.
EndNote
EndNote is a writing tool that helps you annotate, import, export, organize citations, and create bibliographies in different style sets. A UNMC e-mail address is required and requests need to be made through the EndNote request form.
Zotero
Research Guide; Zotero is a freely available, bibliographic management program. Using Zotero, you can easily save and organize literature search results. The Zotero Word plug-in makes it easy to insert in-text citations and create formatted bibliographies
UNMC Writing Center
Staffed by the University of Nebraska Omaha, is open during the Fall and Spring academic terms. Students, faculty, and staff are welcome to work with a writing consultant on any writing project. This free service is appropriate for writing assignments, application essays, business letters, or other projects. Virtual and in-person appointments are available.