Literature Review

A literature review is both process and product. The literature review process entails a systematic examination of prior research, evaluation studies, and scholarship to answer questions of theory, policy, and practice. Literature review as a product persuasively presents new knowledge synthesized from prior inquiries. Its value lies in the opportunities it affords for articulating continuities and contradictions across diverse groups of studies, for reflecting on the quality of normative understandings and methods, and for facilitating discourse among research and evaluation communities that might not communicate directly.

In its most familiar role, literature review prefaces proposals for and reports of new empirical investigations. As a preface, a literature review articulates a context of antecedent investigations for the new inquiry, demonstrating how the new work can make important contributions to current understanding of a problem. The preface identifies communities of inquiry and stakeholders to which the new research seeks to speak.

A literature review can also constitute an independent evaluative and scholarly achievement. In one form, often called integrative review, a reviewer looks for consistent findings across approximate methodological replications addressing a common question. When statistical or mathematical tools are used to evaluate these consistencies, the integrative review is called a meta-analysis. A literature review also can be used to build or evaluate theory. Conclusions drawn across many individual studies can be used to create more encompassing constructs or to determine the strengths and weaknesses of a conventional theory to describe real events adequately. A literature review also can articulate and reflect on the ways in which practical interventions—and research or evaluation methods—are implemented and how innovation might be introduced to practice conventions. Finally, a literature review can elucidate historical trends, chronicling social factors that led to current norms of understanding, policy, and practice. Needless to say, these roles intertwine, and a given literature review might serve several purposes simultaneously.

The literature review process entails a number of methodological paradoxes. Selection and analysis of prior studies serve predetermined questions, but these predetermined questions often change as the reviewer interacts with the available studies. Second, although more comprehensive reviews might be more convincing, larger collections of studies are more difficult to interpret and may be unnecessary if limited or tentative proposals are the persuasive intent of the review. Third, a reviewer's biases are more likely to operate in study selection that is more exclusive, but including all research regardless of quality of method or relevance risks the persuasiveness of the reviewer's arguments. Finally, the best reviews will capitalize on the diversity of the studies they collect, synthesizing new knowledge from an apparently inchoate mass, but the greater the diversity of the studies, the more difficult it is to identify convincingly common themes and patterns.

Literature review demands a disciplined balance, acknowledging both consensus and contradiction, [Page 232]creating knowledge in the process of criticizing current understanding and practice, requiring commitment to significant questions with flexibility to allow those questions to change, refining the quality of evidence but continuing to invite ideas and contrary indications even from remote and unlikely sources. Literature review requires rigor, integrity, and transparency to draw new illumination from old coals.

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