Come and look over my shoulder: Literature Review

I have been asked to write a literature review as an article in a journal for midwives and doulas. I thought you might find it helpful to "look over my shoulder" as I select a topic, do the literature search, and organize and write the paper. Today, I will talk about the topic selection and literature search, I'll save writing for a later time.

The journal editor asked me to pick a topic on the subject of child obesity that would be relevant to childbirth educators (e.g., midwives, and doulas). Let's start by doing a search in the Walden library in Psycinfo, Cinahl (a nursing database) and Medline. I like to start searches as narrow as I can; I want to link child obesity closely to pregnancy – since that is the readers' interest - so I start with the search term of infant obesity. We find a variety of topics, many focused on interventions and assessments; we read through the titles and abstracts. One topic that particularly appeals to me is the relationship of maternal obesity to child/ infant obesity. Our next step, is to make sure there is sufficient literature in this area to write a literature review on the topic. Let's do a search using the terms maternal obesity and infant obesity, hmmm, only 3 articles. Let's try the terms maternal obesity and child obesity. There were a number of articles on this, so let's narrow it further and add in the term review- which will find us any previous literature reviews of the subject, and there are 3 recent ones.

Our next step (at least my typical next step) is to go to Amazon.com and search for any reference books on the subject. Let's search using maternal AND child obesity. There are a couple of books on the topic, they have the tables of content available, so we double-check and yes, there are chapters on the topic (I add the books to my Amazon wish list to save them for now). I now know there is a reasonable literature available on the topic. Now let's double check that the editor is interested in the topic. I send her an email and yes, she likes the topic.

Now we go back to the Walden library and extend the search to maternal obesity and long term effect. I also run the searches again in the Psychology Sage database. I download any articles that seem appropriate and save them on the computer, I end up with 10 articles. We also go back to Amazon and buy the best two books on the subject. I will probably need more articles when I start to write, but this is enough to get me started and familiar with the topic area.

Now I need to go read what we have found. How did the process we went through relate to your dissertation searches? Ours was a smaller version of your literature search. You can start with same basic search technique: 1) Discover whether there is sufficient literature for your proposed topic. 2) Start very narrow in the search and then broaden it. You will have specific variables that you are interested in, so include those as you broaden the search. 3) Download (or print) your articles and be sure to check if there are reference books available on the topic. Walden's library has some ebooks available, but they often are out of date and may not directly relate to your topic. 

Next time, I invite you to look on as to I write my article. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu