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Systematic Review Process: Types of Reviews

This guide will assist teammates and researchers at Advocate Health - Midwest who are seeking information on and instructions for conducting systematic reviews.

Narrative vs. Systematic Reviews

People often confuse systematic and literature (narrative) reviews. They both are used to provide a summary of the existing literature or research on a specific topic.

A narrative or traditional literature review is a comprehensive, critical, and objective analysis of the current knowledge on a topic. They are an essential part of the research process and help to establish a theoretical framework and focus or context for your research. A literature review will help you to identify patterns and trends in the literature so that you can identify gaps or inconsistencies in a body of knowledge. This should lead you to a sufficiently focused research question that justifies your research.

A systematic review is comprehensive and has minimal bias. It is based on a specific question and uses eligibility criteria and a pre-planned protocol. This type of study evaluates the quality of evidence. 

A systematic review can be either quantitative or qualitative:

  • If quantitative, the review will include studies that have numerical data.
  • If qualitative, the review derives data from observation, interviews, or verbal interactions and focuses on the meanings and interpretations of the participants. It will include focus groups, interviews, observations and diaries.

Narrative reviews in comparison provide a perspective on topic (like a textbook chapter), may have no specified search strategy, might have significant bias issues, and may not evaluate quality of evidence.

This table provides a detailed comparison of systematic and literature (narrative) reviews.

Comparison table: Literature (Narrative) Review vs. Systematic Review
  Literature (Narrative) Review Systematic Review
Pre-registration (before ther review starts N/A

Can register on PROSPERO or another online repository

Optional to publish a full protocol paper
Searching often is not systematic or exhaustive systematic searches of multiple databases and grey literature/supplementary searching
Research question

Can be a general topic or specific question

"What is the effectivenes of...?   (focuses on answering a specific research question)

Clearly defined and answerable clinical question 

Recommend using PICO as a guide
Guidelines

N/A

Reporting checklist: PRISMA, Guidance for conducting a review, IOM, Cochrane, etc.
Authors

One or more

 Three or more
Timeline

Weeks to months

Months to years

Average eighteen months
Critical appraisal

N/A

Required

Synthesis

narrative

 narrative/tabular, sometimes accompanied by a meta-analysis

Tools to Help You Choose a Review Type

There are other comprehensive literature reviews of similar methodology to the systematic review. These tools can help you determine which type of review you may want to conduct. 

  • The Review Ready Reckoner - Assessment Tool (RRRsAT) is a chart created as an adaptation of Andrew Booth's article on review typology. The chart that describes the features of multiple review types listing characteristics that distinguish each type and including sample of each type of review.
  • The What Review is Right for You tool asks five short questions to help you identify the most appropriate method for a review.

Use this chart to determine the type of review you are interested in writing and to learn the differences in the stages and processes of various reviews compared to systematic reviews.

Source: Yale University

Types of Reviews

The type of review you conduct will depend on the purpose of the review, your question, your resources, expertise, and type of data.

Here are two suggested articles to consult if you want to know more about review types:

Grant, M. J., & Booth, A. (2009). A typology of reviews: an analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies. Health information & libraries journal, 26(2), 91-108. This article defines 14 types of reviews. There is a helpful summary table on pp.94-95

Sutton A, Clowes M, Preston L, Booth A. Meeting the review family: exploring review types and associated information retrieval requirements. Health information & libraries journal. 2019;36(3):202–222. doi:10.1111/hir.12276

References

This Comparison table is derived from a guide which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, and was originally included in a workbook by Amanda Wanner at Plymouth University for Systematic Reviews and Scoping Reviews. Stephanie Roth at Temple University remixed the original version. Many thanks and much appreciation to Amanda Wanner and Stephanie Roth for allowing me to create a derivative of their work.

creative commons logo

Funaro, M., Nyhan, K., & Brackett, A. (n.d.). What type of review could you write? Yale Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.