Literature review

A literature review is a summary of books and articles that have already been written about a certain topic. It can be a whole scholarly paper or just a part of a book or article. It tells the researcher and readers what people already know about the topic. A good literature review has a clear question and helps show where the new study fits in with what we already know. It usually comes before the main parts of a study.

Students in school often need to write literature reviews. They are part of making a thesis, dissertation, or a journal article. Literature reviews are also used in a research proposal before starting a big project.

Sometimes, a literature review is a type of review article. This means it is a scholarly paper that shares what we know about a topic, with important points and ideas. These reviews are secondary sources because they do not talk about new experiments. You can find them in academic journals. They are different from book reviews, which talk about just one book. Literature reviews are used in almost every subject for research.

Types

Since the 1970s, people have talked about two main kinds of reviews: narrative reviews and systematic reviews. Narrative reviews can be evaluative, exploratory, or instrumental.

A systematic review is a special type that looks at a specific question. It finds and puts together all the good research on that question. A meta-analysis is a way to use numbers to combine results from many studies and get a clearer answer.

An integrative literature review tries to create new ideas by looking closely at many studies on a topic. Some other types of reviews include:

1. Exploratory or scoping reviews look broadly at a topic.
2. Systematic or integrative reviews bring together studies on one subject.
3. Meta-narrative reviews compare different groups of research.
4. Problematizing or critical reviews offer new ways to think about a topic.
5. Meta-analyses and meta-regressions use numbers to find patterns in studies.
6. Mixed research syntheses mix different review styles in one paper.

Process and product

Shields and Rangarajan (2013) talk about two parts of looking at past studies: the process of checking what has already been written, and the finished work called a literature review. The process of looking at past studies happens all the time and helps with many parts of a research project.

Looking at past studies needs many different kinds of work and ways of thinking. Shields and Rangarajan (2013) and Granello (2001) connect this work to ways of thinking such as remembering, understanding, using ideas, breaking things down, making decisions, and creating new things.

Use of artificial intelligence in a literature review

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how people look at past studies in many subjects. Tools such as ChatGPT are often used by students and teachers to help with reviews. Since 2023, many new tools using AI have been made to help create literature reviews. However, using ChatGPT can be tricky because it sometimes makes up information. People are working on ways to fix this problem. For example, Rad et al. (2023) used a tool called ScholarAI to help with reviews in cardiothoracic surgery.