Research in physical medicine and rehabilitation. II. The conceptual review of the literature or how to read more articles than you ever want to see in your entire life

The purpose of the literature review is to place your research question in the context of the existing scientific literature. This article will help you to develop an overall conceptual framework to allow you to sort through the mass of published material in a focused way. The conceptual review differs from the individual article review in that it is guided by your understanding of the basic issues rather than by your knowledge of research methodology. The goal of this paper is to help you develop a conceptual framework starting from your clinical knowledge. A specific search strategy is presented to help you determine which articles are highly relevant to your topic and to locate all of these published within the past 5 years. Articles are classified into three types: those that are obviously highly relevant, other less relevant articles and articles that are potentially relevant. Guidelines are given on how to start looking, when to stop looking, how to organize the articles you find so that you can review them in a reasonable amount of time and how to read in depth the most pertinent ones you find.