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The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Literature Reviews, Systematic Reviews & More for Health Sciences

tips for students in all School of Public Health and Health Sciences departments and the College of Nursing

Guide Overview

This guide contains resources and links about various types of reviews: literature, systematic, scoping, integrative, meta-analysis, etc. The target audience for this guide are students in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and College of Nursing. For more general audiences, check out the Literature Review Tips & Tools guide.

Please contact me if you have specific questions, or use the Schedule Appointment link under my picture to set up a meeting.

Your Librarian,

Ellen

Need some help on how to interpret a research study? This brief from the Guttmacher Institute was written about social science research, but most of the questions to ask apply to all types of research.

Different Types of Reviews

Not sure what the difference is between various types of reviews? These articles describe many types of reviews, what they are used for, and the differences between them. They are long and details, so for a quicker overview, check out the tables, which provide good summaries.

Literature Review Workshop Slides & Recording

NOTE: Current captions on the video were auto-generated by YouTube. We will be editing those captions when time permits.

Ellen's Tips for Doing Comprehensive Literature Searches

In this video, I share tips on methodology, performing searches (including a sample search), documenting searches, and mention a few tools that might be helpful. The document underneath covers the same content in written form.

Getting Started

The best place to start your search is with the databases of academic literature for your discipline. Here are a few used across many science and health science disciplines.

To find additional sources, check out the Subject Guides for your discipline. Look for the Find Articles tab to get a list of suggested databases, but remember that, depending on your topic, you may want to consult additional sources. Feel free to contact me if you are unsure of what databases to use.

Exporting Large Results Sets to Citation Managers

Here is my handout with instructions on how to export large results sets to be able to import into Citation Managers and remove duplicate items. I also made a video showing how to export results from PubMed, EBSCOhost databases, Web of Science, and ProQuest database.

NOTE: This procedure is also the one to follow to get files with results to upload to Rayyan for screening articles.

Exporting Large Results Sets to Excel

Here is my handout with instructions on how to export large results sets to be able to import into Excel and remove duplicate items. I also made a video showing how to export results from PubMed, EBSCOhost databases, Web of Science, and ProQuest database.

(NOTE: I am still working on editing the CC transcript for this video!)

Evaluating Studies

Finding Grey Literature & Data