Literature review

The term can refer to a full scholarly paper or a section of a scholarly work such as books or articles. Either way, a literature review provides the researcher/author and the audiences with general information of an existing knowledge of a particular topic. A good literature review has a proper research question, a proper theoretical framework, and/or a chosen research method. It serves to situate the current study within the body of the relevant literature and provides context for the reader. In such cases, the review usually precedes the methodology and results sections of the work. Producing a literature review is often part of a graduate and post-graduate requirement, included in the preparation of a thesis, dissertation, or a journal article. Literature reviews are also common in a research proposal or prospectus (the document approved before a student formally begins a dissertation or thesis).

Types

Since the concept of a systematic review was formalized in the 1970s, a basic division among types of reviews is the dichotomy of narrative reviews versus systematic reviews. The main types of narrative reviews are evaluative, exploratory, and instrumental.

A fourth type of review of literature (the scientific literature) is the systematic review but it is not called a literature review, which absent further specification, conventionally refers to narrative reviews. A systematic review focuses on a specific research question to identify, appraise, select, and synthesize all high-quality research evidence and arguments relevant to that question. A meta-analysis is typically a systematic review using statistical methods to effectively combine the data used on all selected studies to produce a more reliable result.

Torraco (2016) describes an integrative literature review. The purpose of an integrative literature review is to generate new knowledge on a topic through the process of review, critique, and synthesis of the literature under investigation.

George et al (2023) offer an extensive overview of review approaches. They also propose a model for selecting an approach by looking at the purpose, object, subject, community, and practices of the review. They describe six different types of review, each with their own unique purposes:

1. Exploratory or scoping reviews focus on breadth as opposed to depth
2. Systematic or integrative reviews integrate empirical studies on a topic
3. Meta-narrative reviews are qualitative and use literature to compare research or practice communities
4. Problematizing or critical reviews propose new perspectives on a concept by association with other literature
5. Meta-analyses and meta-regressions integrate quantitative studies and identify moderators
6. Mixed research syntheses combine other review approaches in the same paper