Structured Systematic Reviews – Publishable Standard – Research Writing Assignment Help

Assignment Task :

Note: A literature review should be of publishable standard in order to meet the learning outcomes of the dissertation module and to qualify as an alternative for an empirical project. As is the case for research report dissertations, students should model any literature review dissertation on examples of peer-reviewed review articles published in journals relevant to their area of study. 

Introduction 

Most research starts with a review of the literature to gather information about a particular topic, summarise what work has been done before, and critically evaluate this as a justification for carrying out the current work. However, deciding what studies to include in a review can be a difficult task, 

and if not done systematically, can lead to biased evaluations of research. In order to eliminate as much bias as possible it is often suggested that such reviews should be STRUCTURED OR SYSTEMATIC. This means that you carry out the review process according to an agreed set of guidelines or format. 

A full systematic review will often involve identifying, scanning, excluding some studies, evaluating, comparing and summarizing the results of tens or sometimes hundreds of studies, and preparing a detailed synthesis of the results (often including a statistical synthesis or meta-analysis. Systematic review techniques are very useful tools for psychologists in critically evaluating and summarizing research literature, so it is important to understand the process, and to use it as far as possible when tackling a new topic. A summary of the main steps in this process are set out below, with references to further reading where possible: 

1. Setting the Review Question 

You need to decide what the focus of your review is – this can be broad (for example, reviewing the evidence for the effectiveness of CBT for chronic illness) or narrow (reviewing the evidence for the effectiveness of CBT for chronic fatigue syndrome in older women in the UK). For most of your MSc assignments it probably makes sense to have a narrowly focused question – if only to avoid reviewing hundreds of research papers! 

2. Setting the Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria 

You need to make a decision about the types of studies to include in your review, based on what you want to know. Different types of study will provide alternative information. An example from the health domain is as follows: if you want to know about the effectiveness of interventions, then you may want to include only randomized controlled trials (RCTs) which provide the highest level of evidence. If you want to know about the relationship between health behaviours and demographic characteristics you may want to review cross- sectional studies. For detailed information about individuals’ experiences of health care you may choose to review only qualitative studies. You may also decide to include or exclude studies on the basis of demographic or cultural variables, depending on your target group of interest. A good starting point might also to see whether systematic reviews on your topic have already been carried out.