Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A senior researcher's review of the conceptual history of a field over 50 years, in a major journal's invited-review series
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A protocol-driven, registered review with full PRISMA flow is not a narrative review (it is a systematic review)
Editorial commentary
Narrative reviews remain a legitimate publication type for synthesising broad topics, generating hypotheses, and offering scholarly perspective, but should be labelled as narrative rather than systematic. They are particularly valued in fields where the literature is too diverse for a focused systematic search.
References
- Greenhalgh et al. 2018 ‘Time to challenge the spurious hierarchy of systematic over narrative reviews’ Eur J Clin Invest
- Sukhera 2022 ‘Narrative Reviews: Flexible, Rigorous, and Practical’ Journal of Graduate Medical Education
Also known as
Traditional review · Literature review (narrative)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
xml
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Narrative review"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/narrative-review" />json
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "Narrative review",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/narrative-review",
"description": "A literature review that synthesises existing scholarship on a topic through expert judgement and discursive argument, without using the pre-specified protocols, reproducible search strategies, or quality-appraisal frameworks that characterise systematic and scoping reviews.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-outputs-expanded/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/narrative-review",
"sameAs": [
"Traditional review",
"Literature review (narrative)"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
