Research skills 2 - Literature skills

Question 1

Are you allowed to use dissertations or theses in your systematic literature review? Why?

Answer 1

FOR OUR COURSEWORK: No, because they are not peer-reviewed and most of them get published at a later stage anyway

Question 2

Reviewing literature

Answer 2

selectively discussing the literature on a particular topic to make the argument that a new study will make a new and/or important contribution to knowledge.

Question 3

What is the definition of a systematic literature review?

Answer 3

“A review of a clearly formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify, select, and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review”

Question 4

Where do you keep track of all of your steps done prior to your systematic literature review and you have to upload that as part of your coursework?

Answer 4

The PRISMA flow diagram

Question 5

What happens during the planning stage of the literature review?

Answer 5

Formulate search terms, and inclusion and exclusion criteria and justify them. Create record-keeping systems

Question 6

What is the next step after you completed the literature search

Answer 6

screening the title and abstract of the papers

Question 7

What’s gray literature?

Answer 7

any literature produced in electronic or print format that has not been controlled by commercial publishers, like technical or research reports from government agencies, reports and working papers from scientific research groups and committees, doctoral dissertations, conference proceedings, and official publications.

Question 8

What are Boolean search operators and how do they work?

Answer 8

AND, OR, NOT
- AND will search for all of your search terms
- OR will search for at least one of your search terms
- DO NOT USE “NOT”

Question 9

What did you do wrong if your saved searches don’t show up in the folder?

Answer 9

You forgot to sign in into EBSCO

Question 10

What are truncation symbols and how do they work?

Answer 10

*
- * adds different word ending (weigh* -> weighing, weight)
- * adds a word in between (midsummer* dream -> midsummer night’s dream)

Question 11

What are wildcard symbols and how do they work?

Answer 11

, ?

• ? when character is unknown: (wom?n -> woman, women)
• # when there MIGHT be another character (colo#r -> color, colour)

Question 12

How do you select the languages for the papers you want to include on PsycInfo?

Answer 12

holding the SHIFT key

Question 13

What can you put as a limitation in PsychInfo but not PsychArticles?

Answer 13

language

Question 14

What types of studies - quan/qual - does the meta-analysis synthesize and analyze?

Answer 14

Quantitative

Question 15

Types of qualitative research synthesis

Answer 15

narrative reviews and meta-syntheses

Question 16

What does the Acronym SALSA stand for?

Answer 16

S - Search
A - Appraisa
L - AppraisaL
S - Synthesis
A - Analysis

Question 17

What is the definition of meta-analysis?

Answer 17

Set of statistical procedures designed to accumulate research results across studies in order to estimate the relations between variables

Question 18

What is the main difference between meta-analysis and a narrative literature review?

Answer 18

Meta-analysis is a technique for hypothesis testing, while NLR are useful for hypothesis generating

Question 19

How are the results of a meta-analysis presented?

Answer 19

Graphical and tabular with narrative commentary

Question 20

Which review methods don’t typically use a quality evaluation?

Answer 20

Meta-synthesis/ summary, narrative review

Question 21

What are the five goals of a narrative review

Answer 21

Theory development
Theory evaluation
Surveying the state of knowledge on a topic
Problem identification
Providing a historical account of theory development/research in an area.

Question 22

What are the purposes of a Meta-summary?

Answer 22

makes the “sum”; Quantitatively oriented aggregation of qualitative findings

Question 23

Should a good narrative review arrive at a single answer to the research question?

Answer 23

No

Question 24

What are the purposes of a meta-synthesis?

Answer 24

not only “sum”; presents new perspectives on topics through interpreting findings from different qualitative studies to create ‘meta-themes’

Question 25

What are the most important and distinct goals of a meta-synthesis

Answer 25

Novel interpretation of findings Arriving at a conclusion about the stage of knowledge in an area

Question 26

What are the five steps of conducting a systematic literature review?

Answer 26

1. scoping 2. planning 3. searching 4. screening & assessing eligibility 5. assessing quality

Question 27

What are the differences between a narrative review and systematic literature review?

Answer 27

SLR seeks to generate cumulative knowledge and generalize while the NR is unsystematic and non-reproducible and instead uses a more subjective approach.

Question 28

What is a third order construct?

Answer 28

An overall theme created by the author of a Meta-synthesis

Question 29

What are similarities between the narrative review and systematic literature review?

Answer 29

Both seek to summarize or synthesize evidence to answer a specific research question and use a collection of diverse studies

Question 30

What does effect size measure?

Answer 30

the strength of the relationship between two variables

Question 31

What value do narrative reviews still have nowadays?

Answer 31

- Collection of diverse study - Broader or more abstract question - Easier and less time consuming: similar to introduction of an article