Before you can begin a literature (or narrative) review, you must decide its purpose.
- Are you attempting to give an overview of the current research on a topic?
- Do you want to address areas that need more research?
- Are you looking to synthesize the research and come up with a model or hypothesis based on current research?
In general, a lit review is a carefully designed overview, summarizing and synthesizing a topic or research question. The purpose determines how rigorous and comprehensive your search needs to be in order to conduct a high quality literature review.
Types of Literature Reviews:
- Narrative Review: attempts to give an overview of the current literature, may cover a wide range of topics, usually is chronological.
- Scoping Review: preliminary assessment of the research literature on a specific topic; used to identify the nature and extent of the available evidence.
- Rapid Review: a rigorous "review of reviews" on a focused question, with less sophisticated search strategies and quality appraisal than a full systematic review.
- Critical Review: a critical analysis of the research literature from which the authors derive a hypothesis or model.