- Brandel Library
- Research Guides
- NURS 5990: Nursing Capstone
- Literature Review
NURS 5990: Nursing Capstone
This guide provides resources for graduate-level nursing students completing their capstone research projects.
Literature Review
The purpose of your literature review is to:
- Set the background on what has been researched on a topic.
- Show why a topic is significant to a subject area.
- Discover relationships between ideas.
- Identify major themes & concepts.
- Identify critical gaps & points of disagreement.
What is a Literature Review?
This following video covers what a literature review is, how to review the literature, and steps in writing a literature review.
(10 min. video)
Literature Review: An Overview for Graduate Students, by North Caroline State University Libraries.
Finding Systematic Reviews
Systematic Reviews are scholarly articles that identify and synthesize the literature available to answer a particular research question. A systematic review may include a Meta Analysis, which is an analysis of data from several different trials.
- Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews provides high quality systematic reviews of research in health care and health policy.
- CINAHL and MEDLINE also contain systematic reviews. To find them, add either "systematic review" or "meta analysis" as a keyword in your search.
sample search for a systematic review
- A collection of full-text articles, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses that provide key resources for evidence-based medicine.
- Comprehensive research reference tool for nursing and allied health professionals; includes the full text of more than 1,300 journals.
- Full-text articles from academic journals in the fields of medicine, nursing, and biology.