HSC 480: Health Sciences Capstone

Always follow the details of your Literature Review assignment:

• Fall 2025: A literature review is a descriptive summary of research on a topic that has previously been studied. Reasons for conducting a literature review include informing readers of significant knowledge established on a topic; comparing, contrasting and connecting findings across related work; and to lay a foundation for areas of future research on a topic or programming for a specific community.
• This assignment will focus on your ability to research a topic of study so you can learn to: (1) identify and formulate a research question; (2) apply your knowledge about locating and reading research articles; (3) analyze information found in journal articles published in peer-reviewed academic literature; (4) synthesize knowledge into a literature review that could be used to advance research and/or policy.
• For this assignment, you will complete a literature review that will provide tentative answers to a research question.
• At least 10 peer-reviewed journal articles must be selected, retrieved and directly incorporated into your review (each source must be cited in a dedicated “References Cited” section at the end of the paper).
• Your sources should be as current as possible and should have been published within the past 10 years.
• Half (50%) of your sources must use primary data (i.e., original research studies that use an observational or interventional design, not a systematic review).

Activate your ILLiad Interlibrary Loan account by logging in with your Pace username and password and completing the short registration form:

Often, Google Scholar will show the citation for an article, but the full text of the article is not available for free online.  You can configure Google Scholar to link you to the full-text of articles available from the Pace databases.  If we don't have the article available, you can also request it through InterLibrary Loan.