Scope:
- Background or Mini-review - short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. Usually serve as background for an empirical study. Generally, these reviews:
- justify research design decisions
- provide theoretical context, or
- identify a gap in the literature
- Standalone or Full-review - advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development. Generally, these reviews attempt to make sense of a body entire of of existing literature through:
- aggregation
- interpretation
- explanation, and/or
- integration
Format:
- Descriptive Reviews – most common - focus on methodology, findings and interpretation of each reviewed study - do not aim to expand upon the literature, but describe it
- Narrative Reviews - persuasive presentation of literature to support overall conclusions; lacks a formal data extraction process
- Textual Narrative Reviews - various study characteristics are pulled out & compared for similarities & differences; more rigorous due to standardized data extraction process
- Metasummary - adds a quantitative element to the summary through systematic data extraction & calculation of effect sizes
- Meta-narrative - identifies research traditions relevant to the research question and included studies
- Scoping Reviews - extracts as much relevant data from each reviewed piece of literature - comprehensive
- identify conceptual boundaries of field
- size of pool of research
- types of available evidence
- research gaps
- Test - looks to answer a question about the literature or test a specific hypothesis
- Meta-analysis - quantitative data extraction; summary statistic common to each study extracted as the dependent variable (or effect size); meta-regression synthesis
- Bayesian meta-analysis - addresses qualitative data - calculates prior and posterior probabilities to determine the importance of variables on an outcome
- Realist review -
- Integrative Review – find common ideas & concepts from reviewed material
Method:
- Narrative Review – qualitative
- Systematic Review - tests a hypothesis based on published evidence, gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias
- Meta-analyses – Systematic Reviews that analyze quantitative results in a quantitative way
Pautasso M.(2013). Ten simple rules for writing a literature review. PLoS Comput Biol., 9(7):e1003149. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149. ; and,
Xiao, Y., & Watson, M. (2019). Guidance on conducting a systematic literature review. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 39(1), 93-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X17723971