Find our Scholarly Research tutorial for the basics of research, and general academic and professional writing tips in our Tools for Effective Writing guide before diving into the descriptions of writing in occupational therapy research and practice below. You should also work through our Plagiarism tutorial and reference our APA Citation Resources to ensure you know how to properly credit others in your work.
Review and analysis of others' work is absolutely vital to staying current on research and practice in your field. In literature reviews you gather resources and prepare reports based on the type of review required- usually a narrative literature review or a systematic literature review.
- A narrative literature review is an informal overview of articles in one or more databases that seek to answer a research question or provide general background on a topic. The goal of this type of lit review is to develop an understanding of a topic based on the accumulated data and findings of other people. These are usually written by one or two authors, and while repeatable, the authors' selection bias can change the articles and data included.
- A systematic literature review consists of every single available source from all relevant databases on a specific clinical question. Criteria on what information and data is included must be created and a protocol developed to ensure the review is unbiased and reproducible. These reviews are usually carried out by a team of researchers over a long period of time in order to allow the authors to analyze the data sets to see if they come to the same conclusion to their clinical question as all the researchers who have previously written.
