Hello everyone,
I'm considering conducting a systematic review on the English language needs of English as a second or foreing language nurses in a clinical environment. After reading so many articles, I found that almost all of them don't only report the language needs and language-related problems encountered by these nurses, but they also report other challenges related to the style of care delivery, hopital policies, etc. Can I only include the results relevant to my review objectives (results related to language needs) and discard other irrelevant findings( those related to policies and styles of care delivery) from my systematic review?
Thank you so much in advance!
Yes, I believe you must include the relevant results only; nevertheless, if there are findings or confounding that may affect the outcome, you must describe them in the discussion section
If you and your team think that the additional information is really important to build your case regarding the topic, you may opt to include them in the review. However, you must specify in your methods section that the addition and the related objective were performed and conceived post-hoc/after-the-fact rather than an original component of the protocol prior to its implementation.
Your research question should drive your selection of relevant literature and review of respective findings in that literature. So definitely, you need to focus only on your review objectives (i.e. results related to language needs) and largely discard other aspects. You need to consider other aspects only if they are in your opinion somewhat linked with your research question. In such a case you can propose possible relationships among your core research question and related aspects in your review (which may be considered a novelty too of your paper).
Always be strongly guided by good and clear research questions. The reporting of related literature that you have reviewed must not be detached from its contextualization. They help to establish the nature and relevance of the data in relations to essential aspects surrounding it. The trick I suppose is to do a good paraphrasing and summary in a form of complex or compound-complex sentence. When I did a number of studies on ESP and engineering, I always consider the micro and marco aspects within the big picture of students' language needs.
My criterion is that your decision obeys what you have as priorities; In other words, it is a personal decision to consider parts of the content as relevant or irrelevant. You wisely use one keyword: objectives. I think that's the essence: that according to the objectives you specify what you are going to include and what you are going to reject.
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