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.
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:
Further information
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
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