Political Science

Finding relevant materials for a literature review can often be a time-consuming, difficult process. A literature review examines primary and secondary scholarly literature of a topic, including books, journal articles, working papers, and other scholarly materials. A literature review can be as brief as a one-page summary or as comprehensive as a full-length scholarly article such as those found in the Annual Reviews. Literature reviews provide scholarly, informative overviews of published literature that help researchers remain up-to-date in their disciplinary areas and also do the following:

• Acquire a better understanding of the current state of knowledge in a particular discipline or field of study, providing context for a research project.
• Identify key concepts, theories, methodologies, and other findings related to their research topic, which helps researchers in build theoretical frameworks based on established theories and concepts.
• Identify gaps in a disciplinary area where there is a lack of research or conflicting findings, and highlight major questions that should be addressed in further literature.

There are different types of literature reviews, and it's important to understand their differences:

• Narrative literature reviews provide a general, qualitative summary of the literature. Narrative reviews focus on only a few studies that describe a topic of interest and are not systematic. 
• Systematic reviews follow a structured, rigorous methodology to systematically gather, analyze, and synthesize all relevant studies on a specific literature topic. They use specific criteria to decide what literature to include. Systematic reviews are primarily used in the medical and psychological literature.
• Meta-analyses combine empirical statistical analysis research and data from multiple studies. The terms meta-analysis and systematic review are often used interchangeably.
• Scoping reviews map the literature broadly to identify key themes and gaps. Unlike systematic reviews, which have a narrow focus, scoping reviews are broader in scope and explore the diversity of the available literature in a given field.

Published literature reviews of all types are found in a variety of research databases. It is important to search different databases to locate relevant reviews. Regardless of the databases used, the following searches can be helpful:

• "literature review" OR "review of the literature" AND "your research topic/question/key terms"
• "systematic review" AND "your research topic/question/key terms" 
• "meta analysis" OR "meta-analysis" AND "your research topic/question/key terms"
• "scoping review" AND "your research topic/question/key terms"