Clarifying differences between review designs and methods

By D. Gough, James Thomas, Sandy Oliver. Systematic Reviews, 2012

968 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper argues that the current proliferation of types of systematic reviews creates challenges for the terminology for describing such reviews. Terminology is necessary for planning, describing, appraising, and using reviews, building infrastructure to enable the conduct and use of reviews, and for further developing review methodology. There is insufficient consensus on terminology for a typology of reviews to be produced and any such attempt is likely to be limited by the overlapping nature of the dimensions along which reviews vary. It is therefore proposed that the most useful strategy for the field is to develop terminology for the main dimensions of variation. Three such main dimensions are proposed: (1) aims and approaches (including what the review is aiming to achieve, the theoretical and ideological assumptions, and the use of theory and logics of aggregation and configuration in synthesis); (2) structure and components (including the number and type of mapping and synthesis components and how they relate); and (3) breadth and depth and the extent of ‘work done’ in addressing a research issue (including the breadth of review questions, the detail with which they are addressed, and the amount the review progresses a research agenda). This then provides an overarching strategy to encompass more detailed descriptions of methodology and may lead in time to a more overarching system of terminology for systematic reviews.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1375acf8ab165034648564137c2ded9401fd9044

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Citations in the corpus

Human well-being impacts of terrestrial protected areas (2012, background): “There are three distinctive approaches to synthesising findings from research: aggregating the findings of very similar studies where the key concepts are clearly defined in advance; configuring the findings of dissimilar studies by investigating the implications of the differences in their methods,”
Using Qualitative Evidence in Decision Making for Health and Social Interventions: An Approach to Assess Confidence in Findings from Qualitative Evidence Syntheses (GRADE-CERQual) (2015, background): “The large number of approaches to qualitative synthesis range, in terms of purpose, from those that aim to identify and describe major themes to those that seek more generalizable, interpretive explanations that can be used for theory building [7].”
Synthesizing information systems knowledge: A typology of literature reviews (2015, background): “Rather than providing a basis for the researcher’s own endeavors, it creates a solid starting point for all other members of the academic community that are interested in a particular topic [9,16].”
Convergent and sequential synthesis designs: implications for conducting and reporting systematic reviews of qualitative and quantitative evidence (2017, methodology): “[45], some configurative synthesis can include aggregative component and vice versa.”
Systematic Literature Reviews: An Introduction (2019, background): “What meaning do designers attribute to X? or How do designers do Y?), and for which other methods than the traditional SR have been developed (Gough et al., 2012).”
What kind of systematic review should I conduct? A proposed typology and guidance for systematic reviewers in the medical and health sciences (2018, methodology): “Gough and colleagues [9] provided clarification between different review designs and methods but stopped short of providing a taxonomy of review types.”
Children’s understanding of personal data and privacy online – a systematic evidence mapping (2019, methodology): “nature of the research field in order to inform the conduct and interpretation of a subsequent synthesis of findings (EPPI-Centre, 2018; Gough et al., 2012; Grant & Booth, 2009).”
A Framework for Guiding and Evaluating Literature Reviews (2015, neutral): “Indeed, “clarity about the dimensions along which reviews vary provides a way to develop review methods further and to make critical judgments necessary for the commission, production, evaluation, and use of reviews” (Gough et al., 2012, p. 8).”
Theories of behaviour and behaviour change across the social and behavioural sciences: a scoping review (2014, background): “As Gough, Thomas, and Oliver (2012) have suggested, there is a clear distinction between aggregative systematic reviews that are ‘about seeking evidence to inform decisions’ and configurative scoping reviews which are about ‘seeking concepts to provide enlightenment through new ways of…”
Does student agency benefit student learning? A systematic review of higher education research (2021, methodology): “The systematic review deployed was informed by guidelines developed by Littell, Corcoran, and Pillai (2008) to produce a configurative review aimed at exploring the effects of agency whilst seeking to enlighten research into the construct (Gough, Thomas, and Oliver 2012).”
Using text mining for study identification in systematic reviews: a systematic review of current approaches (2015, background): “Whilst they are often associated with medical research and randomised controlled trials, they can be used to address any research question using any relevant type of research [3].”
The impact of augmented reality on cognitive load and performance: A systematic review (2021, methodology): “For our systematic review, we had to define a search string and inclusion/exclusion criteria as wells as had to decide, where to search to identify relevant studies (Gough et al., 2012; Newman & Gough, 2020).”
RAMESES publication standards: meta-narrative reviews (2013, background): “A number of relatively new approaches are available to those seeking to undertake ‘mixed method’ literature reviews that combine qualitative and quantitative evidence, explore the nature and impact of complex interventions, and identify the mechanisms by which programs achieve their goals (or why th”