Review Research: Inquiry Based on Published Studies
What is Review Research?
Review research is an broad term that describes various types of review articles. Kunisch et al. (2023) define it as
a class of research inquiries that employ scientific methods to analyze and synthesize prior research to develop new knowledge for academia, practice and policy-making.
The key defining feature of review research which makes this type of research distinct from other empirical inquiries and conceptual research is that it uses prior knowledge as its source of data to develop new knowledge.
What do researchers have to say about how to conduct review research, and why it is important?
A feature topic in the Organizational Research Methods journal, Rigorous and Impactful Literature Reviews, offers an array of perspectives and practical advice. While the journal focuses generally on business research, this collection is relevant to researchers in any field of study. The articles are open-access, so take a look! Watch interviews with contributors to this collection and explore related resources to learn more.
Learn from contributors to the feature on Rigorous and Impactful Literature Reviews.
In this interview Dr. Marc Anderson explains how and why to use citation context analysis to track impact of scholarly publications over time.
Dr. Brian Fox explains why systematicity is important in literature reviews.
In the article “Theorizing Through Literature Reviews: The Miner-Prospector Continuum” Dermot Breslin and Caroline Gatrell pose an intriguing question: do you approach the literature review as a miner or as a prospector? They discuss options in an interview.
How do decide what literature you need for a review? See this post featuring an interview Martin Hiebl and related open-access article about sample selection.
Garima Sharma and Pratima (Tima) Bansal discuss ways to engage with managers, professionals, or practitioners to learn from the literature using a systematic review process.
In this interview Dr. Herman Aguinis and Dr. Ravi Ramani discuss the article they wrote with Dr. Nawaf Alabduljader, “Best-Practice Recommendations for Producers, Evaluators, and Users of Methodological Literature Reviews.”
In this interview Dr. Matthew Cronin discusses the article he wrote with Elizabeth George, “The Why and How of the Integrative Review.”
How can you use published literature as data? In this Methodspace interview Dr. David Denyer explains how and why to use review research.
Review research has become a credible and legitimate form of scientific inquiry in various fields of science including management and organizational sciences. Find open-access articles with practical advice about planning a review study.
Related Sage Research Methods Community posts about literature reviews and studies using documents
Find tips for organizing and synthesizing methodological sources for your literature review.
A critical step in planning and designing research entails reviewing literature to situate it in a research tradition.
Want to design and plan a review study? Find open-access examples of systematic reviews, meta-syntheses, meta–analyses, and integrative literature reviews. Also, learn more with related SAGE books.
Dr. Kara discusses the usefulness of secondary data.
What is archival research like in the digital age? When do you need to visit a physical archives and look through paper documents?
What kinds of documents or archived materials fit your study?
See this research discussion with Wyke Stommel and Lynn de Rijk about ethical use of online data.
Kunisch, S., Denyer, D., Bartunek, J. M., Menz, M., & Cardinal, L. B. (2023). Review Research as Scientific Inquiry. Organizational Research Methods, 26(1), 3-45. https://doi.org/10.1177/10944281221127292
In this interview David Antons and Oliver Salge discuss the roles humans and machines can take to plan and conduct computational literature reviews.