Only Empirical Research Reports Are Included in the Literature Review
Want to publish a literature review? Think of information technology equally an empirical paper
What to consider if you lot desire to publish a literature review newspaper
[Invitee post past CYGNA member Tatiana Andreeva]
When you've been reading a lot on a particular topic – for example, reviewing the literature for your research projection or for your PhD – at some betoken it looks like you have enough material and reflections to publish this slice of work as a divide paper. Recognize this? If you ever tried it, you might know that publishing a literature review newspaper in an academic periodical is a catchy task. The literature review publications come in so many forms, and there is no single cheat-canvass or established format like for empirical papers that you could follow to ensure success in publication.
Through my own journey of trial-and-error on this path, likewise as through reviewing for journals and for PhD students in my course, I came upwardly with an idea that will assistance you to increase the chances of publishing a literature review: call back of a literature review as simply another empirical research projection. Think of it as an empirical study, in which your data comes not from your usual fieldwork merely from the articles that you lot review.
Many literature reviews tin be idea of as a qualitative empirical report, in which the papers included in the review substitute interviews or field observations that y'all would unremarkably collect and code. Some literature reviews, east.1000., meta-analyses, are more like a quantitative empirical paper, in which various numbers you extract from the papers in your dataset substitute your survey data.
Seeing literature review in this way has three important implications for how we think about our literature review, and how nosotros can design it to increment its chances of being interesting to others - that is, of being published.
Starting time with a relevant inquiry problem and an interesting research question
We acquire early on in our academic career that whatever empirical paper should take a clear inquiry trouble and a clear inquiry question. We frequently hear from journal editors and reviewers that just having a gap in the literature, or the fact that something has non been researched before, are not practiced enough to justify doing all the same some other empirical study. They say: you need to have a trouble that your study can address, and you lot need to have a question that we currently don't have an answer to. Only then your empirical study can add value to existing enquiry.
When nosotros think of a literature review as of an empirical study, only with the different type of data at manus, we realize that the very aforementioned rationale applies. From this perspective the arguments that I often see in literature reviews – that there is no literature review in this detail area or that the existing literature reviews are quite dated – are not sufficient in the journal's eyes to justify the publication of a literature review on a topic. If you aim to publish your literature review, commencement by thinking – what is the trouble I would like to address? What would be my research question about this problem, that other readers would find interesting?
Design a methodologically-sound data drove and analysis protocol
When we recall of any empirical study, we know that if we want to have reliable findings that will be accustomed by our peers equally trustworthy, we demand to follow a transparent and well-thought data drove protocol. Nosotros also need to carefully choose and correctly apply relevant information analysis method. This goes without saying, right?
The same applies to the literature review! If we want our readers to trust our conclusions from the literature review, we need to make sure that the data nosotros collect speaks to our research question, is of good quality, representative of the field, etc. The growing attention in business and management field to the systematic approach to literature reviews (Denyer & Tranfield, 2009; Rojon et al., 2021) reflects the rising expectations of the quality of the information used in literature review papers. Indeed, this approach offers exactly that: a clear data collection protocol, transparently communicated, so that someone else could replicate your written report. For example, do the very same thing in 10 years and come across how thinking on the topic has inverse.
In the literature on doing literature reviews you will read that systematic literature review is only one of the types of literature reviews. Yet all recommendations on doing different types of the literature reviews share the thought that the data that y'all base of operations your conclusions on has to exist collected in a rigorous and transparent way (east.m., Callahan, 2014). In this post you tin can find more than references on how to ensure that your literature review "data collection" protocol meets the quality expectations.
So now you have all the papers you have carefully selected, how practise you go nigh analysing them, and then that peer academics would recognize your conclusions equally reliable and robust? This is the trickiest part, and nosotros take limited methodological advice published on this. In this postal service I've mentioned some papers that hash out specific methods of literature analysis. For example, I institute that a sophisticated coding rubric leveraged our literature analysis to a different level (Sergeeva & Andreeva, 2016), just must admit that developing this rubric was one of the most challenging tasks of this review paper. In O'Higgins et al. (forthcoming) we used a combination of qualitative content analysis with Pearson's chi-squared (χ²) goodness of fit test in social club to validate some of our conclusions. The play tricks is - as with any empirical study - your option of the belittling method needs to fit with your research question. In sum, the message is: choose your method for analysis of the selected literature advisedly, apply information technology rigorously, and explicate it transparently.
Think of the theoretical contribution beyond clarification of the findings
When we think of our usual empirical work, exist it qualitative or quantitative, we are well-enlightened that just the description of our data wouldn't do. We know that we need to leverage what our data shows to explain how it informs the broader theory, how information technology compares to previous studies, what is new that we see from this information?
Over again, the same logic applies to the literature reviews. In practice though, we oftentimes detect it hard to utilize this communication to our literature review papers, considering the description of the field in itself seems to be novel, specially if nobody did such a review earlier. In my experience, this argument does not persuade editors and reviewers of the journals, and often rightfully and so.
For example, recollect of a typical quantitative empirical paper: a descriptive statistics table must exist provided, but no 1 would claim a contribution based on it, right? Cropanzano (2009:1306-1307) offers a skilful practise that explains why reviewers oftentimes don't buy the clarification of the field every bit a novel contribution. He suggests: imagine somebody who read all the primary manufactures in your dataset, would they yet acquire annihilation from your literature review? And if the answer is "no", and then it'southward likely that your review paper doesn't have yet the level of contribution that is needed to plough it into a publication.
I think this exercise can also help to stimulate your thinking of what a theoretical contribution of your literature review could be. For example, think – what it is that I see in this literature that others are not likely to see? In this blogpost you can find some papers that offer insights on how to leverage your literature review to have a theoretical contribution.
References
Callahan, J.L. (2014). Writing literature reviews: A reprise and update. Human Resource Development Review, 13(3), 271–275. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534484314536705
Cropanzano, R. (2009). Writing nonempirical articles for Journal of Management: Full general thoughts and suggestions. Journal of Management, 35(half-dozen), 1304–1311. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206309344118
Denyer, D., Tranfield, D. (2009). Producing a systematic review. In Buchanan, D., Bryman, A. (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational research methods (pp. 671–689). London, UK: Sage.
O'Higgins, C., Andreeva, T., Aramburu, N. (forthcoming). International management challenges of professional service firms: a synthesis of the literature. Review of International Business and Strategy.
Rojon, C., Okupe, A., McDowall, A. (2021). Utilization and evolution of systematic reviews in direction research: What practice nosotros know and where do we go from here? International Journal of Management Reviews, i– 33. https://doi.org/x.1111/ijmr.12245
Sergeeva, A., Andreeva, T. (2016). Knowledge sharing: bringing the context back in, Periodical of Management Inquiry, 25, 240-261. https://doi.org/ten.1177/1056492615618271
Related blogposts
- Resources on doing a literature review
- Do you really want to publish your literature review? Communication for PhD students
- How to keep upward-to-date with the literature, merely avoid data overload?
- Using Publish or Perish to practice a literature review
- How to conduct a longitudinal literature review?
- New: Publish or Perish now also exports abstracts
Copyright © 2021 Tatiana Andreeva. All rights reserved. Page terminal modified on Wed 15 December 2021 19:26
Tatiana Andreeva is Associate Professor in Management and Organizational Behavior and Research Director at the School of Business at the Maynooth Academy, Ireland. Her inquiry addresses the challenges of managing cognition in organizations, with a item focus on how and why employees share (or hide) their cognition with coworkers, and what managers tin do to facilitate (or prevent) these behaviours in dissimilar contexts. She is likewise interested in how the shift to remote piece of work and digitalisation of the organisational processes influence these issues. Tatiana teaches a range of organisational behaviour, noesis management and inquiry methods topics, including a PhD grade on "Inquiry problems, literature reviews and theory building in business and management inquiry".
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