Literature review reflects the latest progress, academic viewpoints and suggestions of an important subject in a branch or field. It can often reflect the new trends, new trends, new levels, new principles and new technologies of related issues.
There are at least the following advantages for students to learn to write a review: ① Through the process of collecting documents, they can be further familiar with the retrieval methods and data accumulation methods of medical documents; In the process of searching, we also expanded our knowledge; (2) Searching for literature and writing literature review is the first step of selecting topics and conducting clinical research, so learning the writing of literature review is also a process of laying the foundation for future scientific research activities; (3) By summarizing the writing process, the ability of induction, analysis and synthesis can be improved, which is conducive to the improvement of independent work ability and scientific research ability; ④ Literature review has a wide range of topics, which can be large or small, difficult or easy, and can be freely selected according to one's own abilities and interests.
Literature review is similar to "reading report", "literature review" and "research progress", all of which are summarized from a special research paper or report. However, literature review is different from "reading report" and "literature review". It simply summarizes the first-class literature objectively, and does not only pay attention to the scientific process like "research progress". Its characteristic is "synthesis", which requires comprehensive analysis, induction and arrangement of literature materials to make the materials more concise, clear and logical; "Description" refers to a more professional, comprehensive, in-depth and systematic exposition of the comprehensively sorted literature. In a word, literature review is a scientific paper in which the author comments on the historical background, predecessors' work, controversial focus, research status and development prospect of a certain issue.
Writing a literature review generally goes through the following stages: selecting a topic, collecting and reading literature, drawing up an outline (including induction, collation and analysis) and writing.
I. Selecting topics and collecting reading literature
Literature review is usually written for some needs, such as selecting topics for academic conferences, engaging in a certain scientific research, and accumulating literature for a certain aspect. Therefore, the author is generally clear about the topic of literature review, not as difficult as the topic of scientific research. Literature review covers a wide range of topics, from a field or discipline to a disease, a method or a theory. For the first time, you can write a literature review according to your own needs, especially the topics selected by interns, so that the number of documents is relatively small and it is easy to summarize and sort out when writing. Otherwise, the topic is too big, and it takes too long to consult the literature, which affects the practice and is difficult to summarize and sort out.
After selecting the topic, we should collect the related documents around the topic. The related methods of literature collection have been introduced in the previous chapters, such as reading monographs, yearbook, browsing, snowballing, retrieval and so on. , and will not be repeated here. The more complete the document collection, the better, so the most commonly used method is retrieval. After collecting the references related to the topic, it is necessary to read, summarize and sort out these references. It is very important to choose a representative, scientific and reliable research document from these documents. In a sense, the quality of reading and selecting documents directly affects the level of literature review. Therefore, when reading literature, you should write "reading notes", "reading experience" and "document extract card" Having one's own language to record the inspiration, experience and ideas gained in the reading process and extract the essence of the literature will not only provide useful information for writing a summary, but also help to train one's expression ability and reading level, especially organizing the literature into a document excerpt card, which is extremely beneficial for writing a summary.
Second, the format and writing
The format of literature review is different from that of general research papers. This is because research papers focus on research methods and results, especially positive results, while literature review requires readers to introduce detailed information, trends, progress, prospects and comments in the above aspects. Therefore, the format of literature review is relatively diverse, but generally speaking, it includes the following four parts: preface, theme, summary and references. When writing a literature review, you can write an outline according to these four parts, and then write according to the outline.
The preface mainly explains the purpose of writing, introduces related concepts and definitions, outlines the scope, and briefly explains the current situation or focus of debate of related topics, so that readers can have a preliminary outline of the problems to be described in the full text.
The theme part is the main body of the summary, and the writing methods are diverse and there is no fixed format. It can be summarized in chronological order and compared from different angles according to different problems. No matter which format is adopted, the collected documents should be summarized, sorted, analyzed and compared, and the historical background, present situation and development direction of related topics and comments on these issues should be made clear. In the theme part, we should pay special attention to representative, scientific and creative references and comments.
The summary part is somewhat similar to the summary of the research paper. It briefly summarizes the theme of the full text, and authors who have studied the summarized theme had better put forward their own opinions.
Although references are placed at the end of the article, they are an important part of literature review. Because it not only shows the respect for the author and the basis of the cited documents, but also provides a document retrieval line for readers to discuss related issues in depth. "Therefore, it should be taken seriously. The arrangement of references should be clear, easy to find and accurate. Regarding the use of references, the recorded items and formats are the same as those of research papers, and they are not repeated.
Third, matters needing attention
Due to the characteristics of literature review, its writing is different from "reading notes" and "reading reports", and it is also different from general scientific research papers. Therefore, when writing literature review, we should pay attention to the following questions:
Literature should be collected as completely as possible. Mastering a large number of comprehensive documents is the premise of writing a good summary, otherwise it is impossible to write a lot of summaries by collecting a little information casually, and even the articles written will not be a summary at all.
3. Pay attention to the representativeness, reliability and scientificity of the cited documents. There may be similar views in the collected documents, and the reliability and scientificity of some documents are not the same, so we should pay attention to choosing representative, reliable and scientific documents when quoting documents.
3. Cite documents faithfully. Because the literature review has the author's own comments and analysis, it is necessary to distinguish the author's point of view from the content of the literature when writing, and not to tamper with the content of the literature.
4. References cannot be omitted. Some scientific research papers can omit references, but the literature review must not be omitted, and it should be the literature cited in the paper, which can reflect the whole theme and the author can read it directly.
In short, a good literature review should have complete literature, comments and analysis, and accurately reflect the theme.