33  Navigating the literature

It may be useful in your journey of running a trial to conduct a literature review of existing articles. Literature refers here to a collection of published materials on a particular area of research or topic, such as books and journal articles. A literature review seeks to summarize the information that existing studies have gathered on these issues. It will help you answer the following questions:

• What studies have already been done in this area?
• Are there gaps in the evidence?
• What are some of the general lessons that emerge from the many different studies?

You can search for articles using existing databases through your institutional library or with sources such as Google Scholar.

Once you have selected the studies, it is important to be able to read or skim-read them in an educated way. Over the following pages, we will discuss this more in-depth and provide you with examples.