A Practical Guide to Selecting the Appropriate Type of Literature Review
Selecting the appropriate type of literature review for your research project can significantly impact the quality and usefulness of your findings. The choice depends on several key factors: your research goals, available resources, timeline, and the nature of your research question. This article aims to answer your most basic questions to help you get started.
What are literature reviews?
Whether you are an experienced researcher or conducting your very first literature review, you might still be asking yourself: what is a literature review or how do I write a literature review?
A literature review is an examination and synthesis of existing research and publications on a specific topic or research question. It involves searching for, analyzing, and summarizing relevant studies about a topic to provide an overview of current knowledge, identify patterns and gaps in the literature, and establish context for further research. Literature reviews serve as foundational tools that help researchers build upon existing work rather than starting from scratch, while also providing evidence to inform practice, policy, and theoretical development.
This article identifies and explains 6 major types of literature reviews: narrative reviews, rapid reviews, scoping reviews, umbrella reviews, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses.
How to determine what type of literature review to conduct
Let’s start with your goal: Do you want to gather all the evidence on a particular research topic? If your answer is no, you’re likely to perform a Narrative Review. The broad approach of a narrative review gives you flexibility in your search strategies and methodology without following strict protocols. It’s perfect when you want to explore a topic without the constraints of systematic methodology and want to research your particular perspective on a topic.
If you do want to gather all the evidence on a particular topic, you require a more comprehensive approach, but you’ll need to consider your available resources. For example, if you don’t have a multi-person team, a Narrative Review will remain your most realistic option. More intensive and systematic review types require multiple people to ensure unbiased article screening and reduce individual researcher bias. Working alone makes systematic approaches challenging with potentially untrustworthy results. If you do have sufficient team members, you can proceed with more rigorous methodologies.
Choosing a more systematic type of review
Until late 2024, the Medical Subject Headers (MeSH) defined by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) combined several types of systematic approaches to literature reviews under the term ‘systematic review’ which included Scoping Reviews. Scoping Reviews are now an independently classified review type. (You may read more about the 2025 MeSH updates here.)
Scoping Reviews are particularly valuable as preliminary steps before conducting systematic reviews, helping researchers understand whether a full systematic review is feasible and worthwhile. A Scoping Review is often used to:
- Understand what research exists and how much evidence is available on a topic
- Discover areas where research is lacking or incomplete
- Explore key concepts or definitions in a field need or their refinement
- Examine how research in a particular area has been carried out
- Make existing research more accessible to practitioners and policymakers
- Guide where research efforts should be directed next
- Address broad, descriptive questions that require casting a wide net across different types of literature
- Provide foundational evidence mapping for guideline developers
Scoping reviews systematically collect and categorize existing evidence across wide topics or multiple research questions and help identify research gaps and opportunities without attempting full synthesis like traditional systematic reviews. While Scoping Reviews provide an overview of available evidence, they do so without delivering a specific clinical answer.
If your research question is narrow and specific, you might require more targeted review types. Umbrella reviews are particularly valuable when the research landscape is saturated with multiple systematic reviews and meta-analyses, helping to synthesize this higher-level evidence into actionable knowledge. This type of review synthesizes existing systematic reviews rather than individual studies. It’s particularly useful when multiple systematic reviews exist on your topic or when comparing competing interventions.
Umbrella reviews help researchers to:
- Deal with the increasing number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses in biomedical literature
- Provide a consolidated, comprehensive synthesis of findings when there’s an overwhelming volume of individual reviews
- Integrate, evaluate, and synthesize the findings of related systematic reviews
- Organize and summarize abundant information from multiple systematic reviews
- Address wide-ranging questions when investigation of multiple interventions on a specific issue are required
- Support evidence needed to establish new policy or practice
- Allow findings of reviews relevant to a research question to be compared and contrasted
- Handle situations when a substantial body of systematic reviews or meta-analyses addressing overlapping or related research questions is available
- Provide a rigorous and transparent knowledge base for translating clinical research into decisions
If you want to review primary studies directly to answer a well-formulated research question, you will want to consider a systematic literature review (SLR) often abbreviated as systematic review. Before embarking upon a systematic review, you will want to search to see if one has already been performed on your topic to avoid duplicate effort.
Systematic reviews require well-formulated research questions to be conducted effectively. They’re designed to provide unbiased, reproducible evidence for evidence-based practice and policy-making while identifying research gaps. If you have a clear, focused research question which often supports evidence-based decision-making, a Systematic Review is appropriate.
Systematic reviews help researchers to:
- Inform healthcare decisions for individual patients and public health policies with the best available research evidence
- Deliver a clear and comprehensive overview of available evidence on a given topic
- Identify research gaps in our current understanding of a field
- Answer specific research questions of high importance with reduced risk of bias
- Synthesize evidence on a specific research question to better inform policy makers, practitioners, researchers, and the public
If your timeline is short, consider a Rapid Review. This approach applies systematic review methodology but uses strategic shortcuts to meet tight deadlines. While you risk introducing some bias, it’s invaluable when you need evidence-based answers for urgent decisions. If you have adequate time, you can pursue more thorough approaches.
If statistical synthesis isn’t needed, a standard Systematic Review will provide the comprehensive, methodical literature synthesis you’re seeking. However, if you plan to statistically combine quantitative results, you’ll want to conduct a Meta-Analysis. This technique uses statistical methods to objectively synthesize findings from multiple studies. It can be conducted independently or as part of your systematic review.
Making Your Choice
The key to selecting the appropriate type of literature review is to match it to your specific objectives and circumstances. Consider your timeline, team size, research question specificity, and intended use of the results. Remember that more rigorous approaches require greater resources but provide more reliable evidence for practice and policy decisions. Choose the approach that best balances methodological rigor with your practical constraints and research objectives.
Literature Review Tools
When you are ready to get started, Rayyan provides the leading end-to-end workflow and productivity solution for all types of literature reviews. Simply create your free account to get started, upload your searches, and invite collaborators or supervisors to your review by assigning them a role. You can select the review type that you are performing when you create your review. The Rayyan Help Center has tutorials on how to use the many Rayyan tools at your disposal to complete your literature review.
