Strategies for completing a successful integrative review

Abstract

Reviews of the literature provide a way of summarizing individual research studies and other types of articles to integrate existing knowledge about a topic. As the volume of nursing and healthcare research has increased over the years, clinicians and researchers rely on reviews to synthesize individual studies to better understand a topic and identify what is known and unknown about it. Reviews provide evidence to answer clinical questions and to guide practice and policy decisions and allow researchers to identify gaps in knowledge as a basis for further study. Over the years, many types of reviews have evolved, and they have become more systematic in their methodology. There also has been greater recognition of the need for complete and accurate reporting of the methodology underlying reviews for readers to judge the quality of the review and ensure it is reproducible. This article describes one type of literature review—an integrative review—and provides a framework and some guidelines for conducting an integrative review.