Methods for Literature Reviews

What is a literature review? Literature reviews are foundational to research proposals, theses and dissertations, as well as scholarly books and articles. In addition to their place within larger pieces of writing, literature reviews are also published as a type of free-standing article. Let’s use a simple definition for a literature review: “a systematic syntheses of

Different types of literature review and brief illustrations

Our classification scheme is largely inspired from Paré and colleagues’ (2015) typology. Below we present and illustrate those review types that we feel are central to the growth and development in management. 1. Narrative Reviews The narrative review is the “traditional” way of reviewing the extant literature and is skewed towards a qualitative interpretation of

Introduction to Literature review as a research methodology

Building your research on and relating it to existing knowledge is the building block of all academic research activities, regardless of discipline. Therefore, to do so accurately should be a priority for all academics. However, this task has become increasingly complex. Knowledge production within the field of business research is accel­erating at a tremendous speed

2 Comments

Types of literature review

Consideration of prior, relevant literature is essential for all research disciplines and all research projects. When reading an article, in­dependent of discipline, the author begins by describing previous re­search to map and assess the research area to motivate the aim of the study and justify the research question and hypotheses. This is generally referred to

1 Comment

The process of conducting a literature review

Independent of what approach will be used to conduct the literature review, a number of steps that must be taken and decisions made to create a review that meets the requirements for publication (for specific considerations in relationship to each step. See Table 3). In the fol­lowing, the basics steps and important choices involved in

1 Comment

Assessing the quality of a literature review

Literature reviews need to be assessed and evaluated as strictly as empirical articles, but is this always the case? Palmatier et al. (2018) suggest that a quality literature review must have both depth and rigor, that is, it needs to demonstrate an appropriate strategy for selecting articles and capturing data and insights and to offer

6 Comments