One of the first steps to writing a literature review is developing a research question.
Your research question will help you with the following steps of the literature review process:
Clinical/Foreground questions:
Background/Exploratory questions:
Questions might investigate: prevention, cost-effectiveness, quality of life, clinical findings, prognosis, aetiology, or therapy, among others. The question asked determines the types of evidence searched.
When formulating your question, it is important to ensure that your question is both answerable and novel.
Answerable research questions
An answerable research question is one that is appropriate in scope (not too broad or too narrow). If your research question is too broad, you may find too many sources and have difficulty determining which to include or exclude. A research question that is too broad may also include too many concepts to cover in one paper. If your topic is too narrow, you may not be able to find enough sources to include in your review, or you may not have enough information to be able to write a review.
See Developing Research Questions from the Michener Institute of Education for more guidance on broadening or narrowing your research topic.
Novel research questions
A novel research question is one that has not been addressed in a previously published literature review. If there is already a review on the topic you are addressing in your research question, you will need to change your scope to answer a new question.
There are many research question frameworks to help researchers clearly state their question and ensure that the scope is appropriate. Using a framework can help you identify and articulate important concepts, like the population involved, the setting, and the problem or intervention you are interested in researching. The framework you choose will depend on your research focus and discipline. A few of the most common research question frameworks include ECLIPSE, PEO, PICO, SPICE, and SPIDER.
| Framework | Components | Disciplines | Type of Question |
| ECLIPSE | Expectation, Client, Location, Impact, Professionals, Service, Exposure | Management, services, policy, social care | Qualitative |
| PCC | Population, Concept, Context | Health & medicine, policy | Qualitative, Exploratory |
| PEO | Population, Exposure, Outcome | Qualitative research | Etiologic/risk/cause |
| PICO | Patient/Problem, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome | Clinical medicine | Quantitative, Interventional/effectiveness |
| SPICE | Setting, Perspective/Exposure, Intervention, Comparison, Evaluation | Library and information sciences, health sciences | Qualitative |
| SPIDER | Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type | Health sciences | Qualitative/Mixed methods |
| WWH | Who, What, How | Interdisciplinary | Qualitative |
Table adapted from
Foster, M. J., & Jewell, S. T. (Eds.). (2017). Assembling the pieces of a systematic review : a guide for librarians. Rowman & Littlefield.
Hosseini, M.-S., Jahanshahlou, F., Akbarzadeh, M. A., Zarei, M., & Vaez-Gharamaleki, Y. (2024). Formulating research questions for evidence-based studies. Journal of Medicine, Surgery, and Public Health, 2, 100046-. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.glmedi.2023.100046
Sources
Booth, A., Noyes, J., Flemming, K., Moore, G., Tunçalp, Ö., & Shakibazadeh, E. (2019). Formulating questions to explore complex interventions within qualitative evidence synthesis. BMJ Global Health, 4. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2018-001107