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Conducting Health Sciences Review Articles

This is a guide for helping students to develop and write literature reviews.

What are review articles?

Review articles are full-length articles that summarize or review multiple articles, books, studies, or other types of information. There are many types of review articles. Each type of review article is created using different processes including:

  • what information to summarize
  • how to find the information to summarize
  • the breadth and depth of the summary
  • the number of authors involved

The processes used to create the review affect the validity of the review. See the table below comparing processes and uses for literature reviews and systematic reviews.

This guide covers understanding and creating systematic reviews and literature reviews (both manuscript-length literature reviews and paragraph-length literature reviews) and brief information about other review types.

Systematic Review vs. Literature Review