Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences: Home

Narrative Reviews.

Also referred to more generally as literature reviews.  This kind of review examines the current literature on a topic at various levels of completeness and comprehensiveness.  The type of topic for this kind of review is wide-ranging.  Narrative reviews often do not report the literature search methodology and do not typically include statistical analysis, but rather tend to provide a narrative synthesis.

Systematic Reviews.

"Seeks to systematically search for, appraise and synthesis research evidence, often adhering to guidelines on the conduct of a review" (Grant & Booth, 2009, p.95)  Systematic reviews can synthesize quantitative, qualitative or a combination of qualititative and quantitative literature.

In a systematic review methodologythe following steps are taken in a rigorous, systematic and transparent manner:

1. define a clear and answerable research question
2. develop and conduct a comprehensive literature search
3. select and document studies to be included/excluded
4. extract data
5. assess quality and bias
6. synthesize and analyze data
7. write-up

Scoping Reviews.

Scoping reviews are relatively new and do not yet have a clear definition, although the steps are very similar to those of a systematic review.  Here is a flavour for some of the definitions...

"Definitions commonly refer to ‘mapping,’ a process of summarizing a range of evidence in order to convey the breadth and depth of a field. Scoping studies differ from systematic reviews because authors do not typically assess the quality of included studies [3-5]. Scoping studies also differ from narrative or literature reviews in that the scoping process requires analytical reinterpretation of the literature." (Levac, Colquhoun & O'Brien, Implementation Science 2010, 5:69)

"The ‘scoping’ study comprises a further type of literature review, [...]  So what might we consider to be the main differences between a systematic review and a scoping study? First, a systematic review might typically focus on a well-defined question where appropriate study designs can be identified in advance, whilst a scoping study tends to address broader topics where many different study designs might be applicable. Second, the systematic review aims to provide answers to questions from a relatively narrow range of quality assessed studies, whilst a scoping study is less likely to seek to address very specific research questions nor, consequently, to assess the quality of included studies." (Hilary Arksey & Lisa O'Malley, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 2005, 8:1, 19-32)