Critiquing the past for solidifying the future: Understanding the synthesizing facet of reviewing the social studies: Critical approach

• Main Author: Abdulla Alajami
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021-11-01
• Series: Current Research in Behavioral Sciences
• Subjects: Literature review; Narrative review; Systematic review; Knowledge gap
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666518221000346

The concept of literature review has several dimensional operations, including reading, analysis, criticism, and synthesis. It is also related to the concept of knowledge gap. In addition, literature review raises many technical issues that may confuse researchers and students at the beginning of their research path, or when their research would be evaluated. Is it possible to always prefer systematic reviews to narrative ones? Could narrative review always be subject to a bias error? How narrative reviews can appear more neutral. In general, what is the fundamental notion to conduct a literature review? To address such issues, this current review paper seeks to draw the attention to a better comprehensive/practical conducting of literature reviews. It might be difficult to discuss abstract issues such as the concept of literature review. However, this issue is a central variable that holds a prominent position in research projects. This paper tries to illuminate several facets of the literature review process. Furthermore, it elucidates the complexity of this process and simplifies this complexity altogether.