Welcome to this tutorial on doing literature reviews in health sciences! I say “doing” a literature review rather than “writing” one, because before you can write a literature review essay you have to first do a literature review, which is a special type of systematic search you do to get a representative view of the current state of research in a field. This tutorial is about how to do the research part of a lit review, not about writing the essay. Literature reviews are different from most research papers in that you will spend far more time on the research process than you will writing about your findings. In fact, if you do it right, by keeping organized, staying focused, and effectively analyzing the hundreds of papers you’ll need to sift through, writing the actual lit review at the end should be fairly easy. The goal of this tutorial is to help you navigate this process as smoothly as possible.

This tutorial is still under construction, so please be patient with any rough spots. If you find something that seems broken, please let me know at cameron.nielsen@utahtech.edu. Good luck on your project!

Sincerely,

Cameron Nielsen (Health Sciences Librarian, Utah Tech University)