Crystallizations of constructs: Lessons learned from a literature review

Returning back to work following maternity leave, I was feeling a bit out of touch with the current literature on clinical reasoning, a literature with which I am generally quite familiar. I teamed up with a few colleagues, and drafted a proposal to synthesize the literature on the operationalization of clinical reasoning: If someone has claimed to measure, document, observe or demonstrate the presence or quality of clinical reasoning, what did they report as ‘data’? To our pleasant surprise, the project was funded, and we embarked on designing the search strategies, planning which databases to query, and taking steps to ensure we were engaging in high-quality synthesis work. We were lucky to have a strong academic librarian on our team, who invested time in helping me learn the ins and outs of a ‘rigorous’ review methodology. We did multiple iterations of the search strategy, we ran pilot searches for feasibility, and we ‘tested’ the database of articles generated by our search strategy. Once you have devised a search strategy, there are different ways to test its quality. You can ask peers to review the strategy itself [1], or you can generate a list of articles that you think a good search should capture—be they seminal works of scholarship, works that have been written by particular expert authors, or articles that you know have captured the essence of the literature you are scouring. If the initial list of generated articles does not include this collection of key works, the search is adapted and strengthened