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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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
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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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