Thinking about literature review…

Abstract

Thinking about literature review. .. Writing an editorial offers the opportunity to ruminate and reflect on a topical methodologi-cal problem. This topic arose from my experience both as a reviewer of papers for journals and as a would-be published author. One comment, from an anonymous reviewer set me thinking again, about the International Journal of Pharmacy Practice (IJPP) policy and its expectations of the literature in research report articles and from there to the debate about literature review as a method in itself. The reviewer wrote: 'There is virtually no literature review-whether this is acceptable depends on what the journal's expectations are (and of course there is similarly no mention of a search strategy'. My first reaction was defensive-few IJPP papers have a literature review (usually one or two paragraphs with stringing sources) or describe their search strategy-so this is an unreasonable comment. But at the same time I too am frequently disappointed when reviewing pharmacy practice papers at the poor summaries of existing knowledge in the core subject-the literature review. In the social sciences, empirical research studies always start with a review of the literature, helping to place the study in its social, economic, clinical or policy context. This raises other questions-what purpose does the literature review in an empirical pharmacy practice report serve, what should it consist of, how long should it be? If the journal has an IMRAD style or word limit of 4000, how much space can you devote to the review? Secondly, it is remarkable how quickly the expectation that there should be a description of the search strategy has become established. But this change seems to be variable across academic disciplines: what does and does not count as acceptable or knowledge varies markedly. The trouble is no-one teaches us how to write a literature review or how to write for journals. You are expected to pick it up as you go along, presumably learning by an osmotic process from colleagues and reading from others' work. But this is a sterile process, lacking innovation or improvement, nothing changes. In the methodological sense we are looking at desk research, secondary analysis and all the caveats that are applied to that secondary type of research. An earlier method-ological review noted the 'how to review literature gap' and addressed it for pharmacy. 1 A useful definition of literature review for health care is 'the whole process of bringing together a body of evidence which can be drawn from research and other sources, relevant to a particular decision in a policy or management context', and synthesis refers to 'the stage of the review when the evidence extracted from the individual sources is brought together in some way'. 2 I checked again (a pragmatic activity not systematic-they just happen to be on my bookshelf) to see what textbooks advise. In Conducting your pharmacy practice research project, Smith notes that the first major task of any research project is the literature review, 3 first because it aids in the development of the study aim and objectives, and then it helps the researcher devise a suitable methodology for meeting those objectives. So it is of practical use in the design of a project, to help to build on knowledge, identify facts and the perspectives of stakeholders. But that is not much use in my query about journal papers. Next I consulted Writing for academic journals; 4 that didn't help either; literature review is not featured at all. Interestingly this whole debate has prompted change in the management research field, Bryman and Bell have just added a chapter on literature review to their second edition text. 5