Locate at least seven articles that are related to your DNP topic. Complete a literature review.
Keep in mind the differences between research papers and literature reviews. For this assignment, you are not writing a research paper. You are writing a literature review.
Research papers take a topic and describe all aspects of that topic using current articles and books to support the statements in the paper. A literature review is literally a review of current articles designed to support the topic.
For example, if you wanted to investigate color preference among adult men and women, you would first need to review the current studies that are available on the topic. Your paper would begin with an introduction, or an explanation of the topic. You would find peer-reviewed journal articles and summarize each article. Your summary would include what the researcher found, a brief description of the research design, the advantages and disadvantages of the design used, and how it compares to other articles in the literature review.
Each article is treated in its own paragraph (or two or three) that then leads into the next article. When you have described each of the articles in the literature review individually, you collectively discuss any gaps in the current body of research along with ethical considerations, and validity and reliability concerns (if any). The gap in the existing research is where your research comes in. You are going to be investigating an area with a gap in knowledge. Now you have a literature review that contains an introduction to the topic, a review of each current article, a discussion of where there are gaps in the current literature, and how that fits into the gaps that your DNP project seeks to address. Your literature review becomes the beginning of your research proposal.