What if my topic is too broad?
For a literature review, it is important that your topic is sizable enough to find relevant articles, but not so broad that you will find too many articles. Keeping your health behavior, associated health outcome(s), and population in mind will help you in this process.
For example, perhaps you know you are interested in maternal health. Maternal health as a topic is too broad. To help narrow your topic, think of what health behaviors, health outcomes, or populations you would like to focus on in terms of maternal health.
If you're having trouble narrowing your topic down, try performing a broad search to help you come up with ideas.
To begin, head to Google Scholar, Academic Search Complete, Scopus, PubMed, or another information repository of your choosing. Then, search for your broad topic in the search bar. Read through the articles that show up and determine whether any of the health behaviors, health outcomes, or populations that you notice in the titles and abstracts are of interest to you. Check out the example below for an illustration of this process.
What if my topic is too narrow?
Just as much as it is important not to have too broad of a topic, it is also important not to have too narrow of a topic. If your topic is too narrow, it will be difficult to find relevant articles for your literature review, and you will have a hard time completing the assignment.
One strategy is to return to the concepts you've chosen for population, health behavior, and associated health outcome, then try broadening one or multiple of those concepts. For example, try "community health interventions," instead of "community breastfeeding interventions," or "diet during pregnancy" instead of "vegan diet during pregnancy."
Another strategy is to selectively search for your concepts. For example, if your search is producing zero results, you might want to try searching for your population and your health outcome, but not your health behavior. Or your health outcome and your health behavior, but not your population. Once you start seeing more results, you can broaden your topic accordingly. Don't be afraid to shift your topic as needed!
