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Nursing: Literature Review

Provides resources, strategies and information on finding information and conducting research in nursing.

Resources in our collection

Writing your review

How to write a literature review

Talbot, L., & Verrinder, G. (2008). Turn a Stack of Papers intWriting your reviewo a Literature Review: Useful Tools for Beginners. Focus on health professional education: a multi-   disciplinary journal, 10(1), 51-58.

Communicating evidence is an essential competency for all health professionals and literature reviews form part of this process; however, a succinct and coherent review does not automatically emerge after downloading a stack of papers. This paper provides an in-depth outline of techniques, including two simple conceptual diagrams, to assemble findings of a literature search that will be especially useful for health professionals. The grid and the funnel are visual concepts that assist students and health professionals new to the field to synthesise literature. Students find the visual concepts to be very useful in practice.

Why undertake a literature review

A literature review enables you to demonstrate your knowledge of previous work in your field of study and to establish your own research in the context of this work.

A literature review can have a number of purposes, these include:

  • to show gaps in the research
  • to justify your own research
  • to demonstrate your understanding of your field of study
  • to generate new research hypotheses
  • to place your own research in its context
  • to summarise and evaluate past research
  • to show similarities and differences in previous research
  • to give an overview of differing opinions or debate in past research

Further information

QUT Write

Literature Review tutorial (RMIT)

Citing Resources and Style Guides

Referencing (or citing) is acknowledging the sources of information that you have used in your written work.
Citing a reference acknowledges the work of the author you have consulted and enables others to locate the item that you have cited.
To cite correctly, you need to use a referencing style: a standardised way of recording the elements of a book or journal article, or web site.

Citing Medicine
Patrias, Karen. (2007). Citing medicine: the NLM style guide for authors, editors, and publishers. (2nd ed.) National Library of Medicine (US).

Style Manual

Cochrane Style Manual
Australia. Style Manual
Queensland Health Style Manual

Disclaimer

Before relying on this material for any important matter, staff should carefully evaluate its accuracy, currency, completeness and relevance to ensure it is appropriate for their purpose. Links to websites and online resources are provided for convenience and do not constitute endorsement of material or of any associated organisation, product or service.

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