Midwifery research builds the evidence base for maternal and newborn care. When you design a new study, searching existing literature prevents you from duplicating past efforts and grounds your work in what is already known. You begin by turning a clinical observation into a structured research question using frameworks like PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) or SPIDER (Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type). These frameworks break down your clinical topic so you can pull out precise keywords for database searches.
A robust search requires a mix of electronic databases like PubMed, CINAHL, and African Journals Online (AJOL). You combine your keywords using Boolean operators:
Keep a detailed record of every search string and database you use. Transparency ensures other researchers can replicate your search process.
Not all published papers carry the same weight. Critical appraisal involves systematically examining a study to judge its trustworthiness, relevance, and results. You must look at validity, reliability, and potential biases. For qualitative studies, you assess credibility and transferability. For quantitative studies, you check sample sizes, control of confounding variables, and statistical power. Utilizing standard checklists from organizations like the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) helps you maintain a structured approach.
Once you select your final set of articles, you must extract key information systematically. Using an extraction table helps you organize author names, publication years, study settings, methodologies, and main findings in one place. After extraction, synthesis moves beyond mere summarization. You look across studies to identify patterns, contradictions, and gaps. Qualitative papers lend themselves well to thematic synthesis, where you group similar findings into descriptive and analytical themes that tell a coherent story about your topic.
Theoretical and conceptual frameworks give your study an intellectual home. Framework mapping connects your literature findings to established models of health, behavior, or organizational change. For instance, exploring why pregnant women delay seeking antenatal care might map onto the Three Delays Model. Mapping helps you visualize how independent variables interact with dependent outcomes, guiding both your data collection tools and your eventual data analysis.
Your literature review, synthesis, and framework mapping must culminate in a well-organized narrative within your research proposal. Avoid stringing together isolated article summaries. Instead, structure your review thematically, moving from broad global contexts down to local Nigerian realities. Conclude the review section by clearly highlighting the gap your study intends to fill, which logically leads into your research objectives and hypotheses.