The DOI matches its Crossref record; 30 of the 30 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Improving the peer review of narrative literature reviews
Abstract
As the size of the published scientific literature has increased exponentially over the past 30 years, review articles play an increasingly important role in helping researchers to make sense of original research results. Literature reviews can be broadly classified as either "systematic" or "narrative". Narrative reviews may be broader in scope than systematic reviews, but have been criticised for lacking synthesis and rigour. The submission of more scientific manuscripts requires more researchers acting as peer reviewers, which requires adding greater numbers of new reviewers to the reviewing population over time. However, whereas there are many easily accessible guides for reviewers of primary research manuscripts, there are few similar resources to assist reviewers of narrative reviews. Here, I summarise why literature reviews are valued by their diverse readership and how peer reviewers with different levels of content expertise can improve the reliability and accessibility of narrative review articles. I then provide a number of recommendations for peer reviewers of narrative literature reviews, to improve the integrity of the scientific literature, while also ensuring that narrative review articles meet the needs of both expert and non-expert readers.
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“Gasparyan et al. [13], for example, have provided guidance for writing narrative reviews, and Byrne [14] as well as Pautasso [15] has written, from different angles, thoughtful editorials on improving narrative reviews and presented lists of key features of writing a good review—lists that naturally overlap with SANRA items (e.g., on referencing).”
From SANRA—a scale for the quality assessment of narrative review articles (2019) · cites this paper as [14]
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Research works printed but not linked: 1
- Higgins JPT, Green S. Handbook for systematic reviews of interventions. The Cochrane Collaboration, John Wiley & Sons Ltd; 2011.
Cited by
SANRA—a scale for the quality assessment of narrative review articles
Baethge, C., Goldbeck-Wood, S., & Mertens, S. (2019) · Research Integrity and Peer Review · doi:10.1186/s41073-019-0064-8 · Cited by 3,469
Time to challenge the spurious hierarchy of systematic over narrative reviews?
Greenhalgh, T., Thorne, S., & Malterud, K. (2018) · European Journal of Clinical Investigation · doi:10.1111/eci.12931 · Cited by 1,267
Meeting the review family: exploring review types and associated information retrieval requirements
Sutton, A., Clowes, M., Preston, L., & Booth, A. (2019) · Health Information & Libraries Journal · doi:10.1111/hir.12276 · Cited by 570
Templier, M., & Paré, G. (2018) · European Journal of Information Systems · doi:10.1080/0960085x.2017.1398880 · Cited by 180
Building resilience: The conceptual basis and research evidence for resilience training programs
Forbes, S., & Fikretoglu, D. (2018) · Review of General Psychology · doi:10.1037/gpr0000152 · Cited by 99
Metadata
- Authors
- Byrne, J. A.
- Venue
- Research Integrity and Peer Review
- Published
- 2016-09-04
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2058-8615
- PMC
- PMC5803579
- Cited by
- 159
- References
- 30
- Language
- en
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Improving the peer review of narrative literature reviews. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1186/s41073-016-0019-2
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- Byrne, J. A. (2016). Improving the peer review of narrative literature reviews. Research Integrity and Peer Review. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-016-0019-2
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
