Literature Reviews

1. LITERATURE REVIEWS
Felipe Abarca
Camila Barrera
Carolina Hinojosa

2. WHAT ARE THEY USEFUL
FOR?
 -Showing the history of a field (background)
 -Reviewing the work done in a specific time period.
 -Plotting the development of a line reasoning
 -Integrating and synthesizing work from different research areas
 -Evaluating the current state of evidence for a particular viewpoint
 -Revealing inadequacies in the literature and point to where further
research need to be done.

3. STRATEGIES FOR
PRESENTING RESULTS IN
REVIEWS
 1.-The narrative review: writers research around a particular topic and then write
a review of the field, selecting evidence. this kind of review is most common in
textbooks and popular journals.
 2- The narrative review with scoreboard: writers strengthen the arguments of
their reviews by supporting the claims made with tabular scoreboards.
 3- Scoreboard plus details: in a scoreboard more details can be provided and it
enables the reader to trace the studies should they wish and to see if any have been
omitted.

4.  4.- Scoreboard showing critical features: it is a method of summarizing results to
provide a table listing the key features of the studies being discussed. The information
provided is not omitted.
 5.-Meta- analytic “scoreboards”: it involves pooling the results that can be found from
all the known studies on a given topic. The aim of this is to arrive at an overall summary
of the result for the topic in question.
 6.-Evidence-based “scoreboards”: With the “evidence-based” approach, more studies
are excluded on particular methodological grounds when making the overall summary of
the results. It is used, for example, in medical researches. The importance of the evidence-based
approach becomes more obvious when the overall picture obtained from RCT’s
(randomized controlled trials) is different from that obtained from studies using others,
less stringent methods.

5. SOME PROBLEMS
 - File-drawer problem: it is easier to publish studies that have statistically
significant findings than it is to publish ones that do not.
 -Problems of interpreting; there might be problems of interpreting the
findings of the published studies and seeing if these findings are relevant to
your review.
 -Qualitative studies; related to these it is important to mention that is very
difficult to summarize the results adequately.

6. OTHER ASSUMPTIONS
THAT DO NOT WITHSTAND
CLOSE SCRUTINY
 1- Different dependent variables are of equal validity.
 2- The results obtained in one culture are directly relevant to another one.
 3- The results obtained in one period are the same as those that would be
obtained today.
 4- The results obtained for limited samples apply to wider population.
 5- The results obtained in simplifying experiments apply to the much more
complex.

7.  One solution to some of the problems presented, is to examine in
more detail the original papers and particularly the original materials
used in the papers being reviewed.

8. LITERATURE REVIEWS
Felipe Abarca
Camila Barrera
Carolina Hinojosa