Systematic reviews: inducting research students into scholarly conversations?

Abstract

First paragraph: Systematic reviews are common in disciplines such as medicine, nursing, and health sciences and students are increasingly being encouraged to conduct them as a component of their thesis (Pickering & Byrne, 2014). Fortunately, the tedious old days of writing a thesis by gathering mountains of hard-copy papers are long behind us. Privileged modern-day students can access the latest research papers through a simple tap of the keyboard – connecting to databases through the Internet. The ease of accessing scientific papers makes the process of conducting systematic reviews more streamlined and efficient. However, undertaking a systematic review can present many challenges, particularly for novice researchers, and the trade-offs between systematic and non-systematic literature reviews are still debated in research communities (Gough, 2013). In this piece, we discuss the challenges in conducting systematic reviews in the context of our research experience as students in a health science discipline. In doing so, we describe how the process of learning to conduct systematic reviews has helped to induct us into scholarly conversations.