literature-review_skill

Overview

This skill helps you plan, run, and write rigorous literature reviews and research syntheses. It guides search strategy development, screening workflows, synthesis formats, and citation management. Use it for systematic reviews, scoping reviews, narrative syntheses, and preparing literature review sections for papers or theses.

How this skill works

The skill walks through five phases: planning, searching, screening, synthesis, and writing. It recommends database choices, Boolean search templates, screening procedures, quality assessment tools, and output formats like thematic syntheses and comparison tables. It also covers citation management and PRISMA-style documentation for reproducibility.

When to use it

• Designing or preregistering a systematic or scoping review protocol
• Running comprehensive academic searches across multiple databases
• Screening large sets of results and extracting study-level data
• Synthesizing findings thematically or quantitatively (meta-analysis)
• Building a bibliography and preparing the literature review section

Best practices

• Define a clear research question and inclusion/exclusion criteria up front
• Use multiple databases and well-crafted Boolean queries with synonyms
• Document every step (search strings, dates, inclusion reasons) for reproducibility
• Use two independent reviewers for screening and data extraction when possible
• Assess study quality with appropriate tools (Cochrane RoB, NOS, CASP)
• Pre-register the protocol and update searches before submission

Example use cases

• Conducting a systematic review of clinical trials on a specific intervention using PICO
• Performing a scoping review to map research on a new technology across disciplines
• Synthesizing qualitative studies to identify common themes and research gaps
• Creating a comparison table and thematic narrative for a literature review section
• Preparing a PRISMA flow diagram and complete methods section for publication