Writing narrative literature reviews.

Narrative literature reviews serve a vital scientific function, but few resources help people learn to write them.As compared with empirical reports, literature reviews can tackle broader and more abstract questions, can engage in more post hoc theorizing without the danger of capitalizing on chance, can make a stronger case for a null-hypothesis conclusion, and can appreciate and use methodological diversity better.Also, literature reviews can draw any of 4 conclusions: The hypothesis is correct, it has not been conclusively established but is the currently best guess, it is false, or the evidence permits no conclusion.Common mistakes of authors of literature review manuscripts are described.Narrative literature reviews form a vital part of most empirical articles, theses, and grant proposals, and of course many articles and book chapters are devoted specifically to reviewing the literature on a particular topic.Literature reviews serve a scientific field by providing a much-needed bridge between the vast and scattered assortment of articles on a topic and the reader who does not have time or resources to track them down.Reviews also present conclusions of a scope and theoretical level that individual empirical reports cannot normally address.For individual researchers, writing a major literature review article is a very infrequent but often a very important career contribution.Yet, despite the importance of narrative literature reviews, no easy and available way to learn to write them is known.Research methods textbooks do not usually explain how to do them, even though reviewing literature is an important research method.Most graduate seminars in research methods likewise devote little or no time to them.Apprenticeship with an accomplished literature reviewer seems to be one possible strategy to learn this technique, but such specialists are rare, and moreover it is generally considered more important for stu-