Literature Review
Preparing an III Petition for a Literature Review
The III petition should be brief, generally 1-2 typed pages, but should provide enough information to give the committee a good idea of what you plan to do. The intent of the committee is to spare you the grief and heartache that come from discovering at the end of your third year that your III project is too ambitious, is giving you uninterpretable data, or is in some other way ill-conceived.
A good petition (and a good study) begins with a simple, clear purpose. This purpose should be reflected in each of the components of the study described below. The purpose will dictate which subjects to choose, what study design to use, what variables to measure, and what analyses to perform.
The III committee is diverse in terms of medical and technical background. Therefore, write your petition for a general audience. Avoid using jargon, and define any technical terms you can't avoid. If the information can be better presented in non-narrative form (graph, bulleted list, flow diagram, etc.), by all means do so.
Below are some guidelines for what to include. Because each study is different, not all of the items below will be pertinent to every study.
Background
Provide a brief introduction to the problem you are investigating. This might include:
- Why is the problem important?
- How would the results of your analysis be useful to a practitioner?
- What is already known about the problem and what remains unknown?
- What methodological issues might influence the results of individual studies?
Methods
- What will be your strategy for finding relevant articles? What databases will you use? What key words will you use for searching those databases?
- What criteria will you use for choosing which articles to include
in your analysis? Possible criteria might include:
- Publication date
- Sample size
- Patient profile (i.e., urban Mexican-Americans)
- Study design (i.e., controlled clinical trial)
- Overall quality of study
- Exact treatments used (i.e., dose of drug)
- Outcome measures used
- How will you use the information you collect to arrive at a solution to your research question?
For good information on evaluating the quality of research articles, see:
- How
to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence Based Medicine
(http://www.bmj.com/collections/read.shtml)
Articles about appropriate research methods for different types of studies from BMJ. - Journal
Reading Tricks and Tips
(http://www.biostat.washington.edu/biostat/jctips.html)
How to make efficient use of your reading time. - User's Guides to the Medical Literature in JAMA
Common problems
The majority of III petitions require some tweaking before they are approved.
- The study is not adequately described. You must present sufficient detail about what you want to do and how you will do it.
- There is no hypothesis. Your goal is to review the literature regarding a specific unresolved question. Make sure your question is specific and clear.
- Topic is too broad. Constrain the scope of your project to make it manageable. You can do this by using restrictions for various aspects of the study such as patient characteristics.
Click here for Sample petition
Preparing the Petition | Methodological Standards (Users' Guides) | Sample Petition | Final Report