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Research Literature Reviews: Types?

Types of Literature Reviews

Scope:

  1. 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: 
    1. justify research design decisions
    2. provide theoretical context, or
    3. identify a gap in the literature
       
  2. 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:
    1. aggregation
    2. interpretation
    3. explanation, and/or
    4. integration

Format: 

  1. 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
    1. Narrative Reviews - persuasive presentation of literature to support overall conclusions;  lacks a formal data extraction process
    2. Textual Narrative Reviews - various study characteristics are pulled out & compared for similarities & differences;  more rigorous due to standardized data extraction process
    3. Metasummary - adds a quantitative element to the summary through systematic data extraction & calculation of effect sizes
    4. Meta-narrative - identifies research traditions relevant to the research question and included studies
    5. Scoping Reviews - extracts as much relevant data from each reviewed piece of literature - comprehensive
      1. identify conceptual boundaries of field
      2. size of pool of research
      3. types of available evidence
      4. research gaps
         
  2. Test - looks to answer a question about the literature or test a specific hypothesis
    1. Meta-analysis - quantitative data extraction; summary statistic common to each study extracted as the dependent variable (or effect size); meta-regression synthesis 
    2. Bayesian meta-analysis - addresses qualitative data - calculates prior and posterior probabilities to determine the importance of variables on an outcome
    3. Realist review
  3. Integrative Review – find common ideas & concepts from reviewed material

Method:

  1. Narrative Review – qualitative
  2. Systematic Review - tests a hypothesis based on published evidence, gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias
    1. 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 Research39(1), 93-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X17723971

 

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