How to Perform a Literature Review
Written by Alisa Malyavko
There are many important skills for medical students to develop early on which will be helpful throughout their medical careers.
As a medical student, you are learning a lot of physiology, pharmacology, and pathology that you may not have heard of before. As a resident, you will come across a case where you may not have the best answer to the patient’s questions or may need to see what new evidence-based recommendations are available. Both of these scenarios present great opportunities to utilize various resources your medical school or institution provides to dig deeper into topics of interest.
Literature reviews are a great way to gain more information about a confusing or interesting topic and will be vital to constructing informative presentations during your preclinical and clinical years.
Below is some advice to perform literature reviews and then use that information to create strong presentations.
Literature Reviews:
PubMed and Google Scholar – PubMed is a great resource for literature reviews. There are many ways to narrow down your search using various filter functions. Additionally, PubMed provides citations in different formats. Google Scholar can be useful for a broader literature search.
Online Textbooks – if you are looking for more background information about a topic, textbook chapters are good resources for comprehensive overviews of the subject of interest.
Notes – having a uniform way of note-taking for a literature review is important to stay organized and have an easy reference when creating a presentation or writing a manuscript. Making a table to keep track of the author, year published, and a summary of the study is beneficial.
Reference List – keeping track of author name, PubMed Identification (PMID) number, and a full citation will be helpful when adding references to the final manuscript.
Literature Review Presentations:
You may get an opportunity to present your literature review to the research group you are working with. This is an exciting time to present your findings and get feedback from attending physicians. Below are some tips to improve your literature review presentations.
Choose a simple background for your slides, have an “Outline” slide, and always end with “Key Takeaways” – this will make your presentation easy to look at and keep it organized. The “Outline” lets your audience know what to expect from your talk and the “Key Takeaways” reminds the audience which points you want them to remember.
Know your audience – take into account the level of education and knowledge the audience has to determine how much background information you need to include.
Less is more – keep your slides simple and avoid long paragraphs. This will bring the audience's attention to what you’re saying rather than reading the slides.
Include tables and diagrams – there are a lot of individuals who are visual learners and would benefit from the information being presented in various modalities. Additionally, being able to describe a table or diagram shows your knowledge of the topic.
Practice, practice, practice – it can be nerve-wracking to stand at the front of a room or up on stage, therefore being confident is important to successfully deliver your presentation. I recommend either practicing in front of a mirror or a small group of individuals. This will help you practice the pace and tone of your talk as well as help you identify weak areas that need improvement.
