Research: Literature Review

­ What Is a Literature Review? ... Aveyard (2019) provides us with a helpful definition: …the comprehensive study and interpretation of literature that relates to a particular topic. When you undertake a literature review, you identify a research question and then seek to answer this question by searching for and analysing relevant literature using a systematic approach. A thorough search and analysis of the literature leads you to new insights that are only possible when all the literature is reviewed together and each piece of relevant information is seen in the context of other information. If you think of one piece of literature as one part of a jigsaw, then you can see how a review of the literature is like the whole completed jigsaw (p.2).

Key aspects of a literature review include:

• A clearly stated question
• A systematic, logical, and transparent search strategy
• Analysis and synthesis of the identified evidence
• A literature review can be described as a way of looking at existing research evidence to identify what is already known about a particular topic...

(Roche & Bennett, 2024, Notes on... nursing research)