What Makes a Good Review Article? Empirical Evidence From Management and Organization Research

There is a long tradition of literature review articles in management. Despite attempts to establish consensus around what constitutes a high-quality literature review, there remains significant dissensus. To explore conflicting views empirically, we draw on a mixture of topic modeling and abductive qualitative analysis to conduct an extensive meta-level review of literature reviews. We find 10 different kinds of literature reviews in practice, each of which has a different purpose. This makes management different from other disciplines that have been subject to more standardization. Further, we note that our findings largely do not overlap with existing classifications of literature reviews. The key distinction we propose is identifying a review article’s purpose, as determined by differences in reflexivity and substantive focus. We use these two dimensions to develop a directional space that will help authors fit their articles to the status of the field they are reviewing, instead of blindly following a single idealized model or procedure. Looking into the future, we argue that as advances in artificial intelligence will likely make some review purposes redundant, scholars should develop new reviewing practices. Technologically infused and collective ways of reviewing the literature could help make researchers’ engagement more reflexive, dynamic, and impactful.