Systematic Literature Review
Starting with students admitted Fall 2025: For a literature review to qualify as your IP, it will have to be systematic. That means planning in advance the criteria that you’ll use to survey the literature on your topic. We do this to reduce bias in the selection of articles, and also so readers can trust that your review is both comprehensive and up-to-date. Current 2nd-year students are encouraged to do a systematic review, as it is an important skill, but it is not required.
Key Components
- Appropriate topic choice
- Focused research question
- Method section describing search strategy
- Inclusion / Exclusion criteria
- Flow diagram of study selection process
- Discussion of findings
The whole story: Unlike literature reviews typically written as class assignments, a systematic review follows a clear step-by-step process for finding studies, as well as choosing which of those studies to include and which to exclude from the summary. Documenting each step of this process makes it replicable; another researcher could repeat your search and come up with roughly the same conclusions. Another goal of the process is to avoid “cherry picking” studies and keep any bias to a minimum. A popular method for this search and selection process is the PRISMA guidelines.
Note that a systematic review is acceptable for your IP only when there is a substantial body of research and no major recent review on the same topic. Keep these principles in mind:
- Do not propose a systematic literature review if a major systematic review or meta-analysis on the same topic has been published within the past five (5) years.
- Do not propose a literature review if the topic is too new, too broad, or too rarely studied, such that a systematic search will not yield enough literature to support an Integrative Project.
A systematic review should begin with a focused question that connects to a theory or a real-world issue in clinical psychology. Your question may specify outcomes (e.g. symptom relief) of certain interventions (e.g. group therapy) with specific populations (e.g. people with depression). These basic question aspects often shape an initial scoping review as you learn more about your topic and refine your search criteria. As you read, you’ll want to note things like study design, sample types, and any possible sources of bias.
To prepare for a systematic search, students plan the search terms they use (e.g., “eating disorder,” “bulimia” “anorexia”), where they look for studies (e.g., databases: PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, Google Scholar), and their inclusion and exclusion criteria. Common inclusion criteria are type of study, participants, interventions used, outcome measures used, or timeframe. Exclusion criteria are anything that disqualifies a study from consideration. The quality of a study is often an important criteria. For example, experimental studies without a control group might be deemed low quality and be excluded from some reviews.
That said, students sometimes assume they can only include the most rigorous study types, like randomized control trials. This is not true. You can include quantitative or qualitative studies of varying rigor – it all depends on your research question. Whatever your inclusion criteria, a systematic review carefully documents this search and selection process and presents it as a flow diagram. Several online tools exist to help in creating your flow diagram.
The results section of a systematic review should go beyond describing each study one by one. It should look at the studies together to discuss patterns, themes, or differences, helping to create a clear overall picture of the general consensus about the topic. The discussion should ultimately answer three key questions: What is known? What remains unclear? And what should be studied next?
All systematic reviews must follow a clear academic structure (e.g., abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, references), include well-organized tables or figures where appropriate, and be written in APA style. Because no new data is collected, IRB approval is not required.
So you know: Meta-analysis is an additional statistical technique for combining results of quantitative studies in a review, while Meta-synthesis is a similar technique for combining qualitative results. Neither of these is required for your systematic review to be a good IP.
To learn more:
- A simple example using water fluoridation to illustrate the review process.
- A published systematic review on minority experiences in the armed forces, with a nice flow diagram.
- Useful guidelines for writing a systematic review.
- For the adventurous, the APA provides detailed outlines of a quantitative meta-analysis (not required) and a qualitative meta-synthesis (also not required).
Relevant Courses at TC:
- Research Methods in Clinical Psychology (CCPX)
- Advanced Research Methods in Clinical Psychology (CCPX)
- Workshops on Lit Reviews periodically run by the Gottesman Library and the Graduate Writing Center
Please see our Research Methods Concentration for a full list of courses