Narrative Reviews: Flexible, Rigorous, and Practical

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Narrative reviews are a type of knowledge synthesis grounded in a distinct research tradition. Narrative reviews do not aim to be systematic syntheses that answer a specific, highly focused question; instead, they offer carefully thought out and rigorous interpretations of a body of knowledge.

🔑 Key Findings

• They are often framed as non-systematic, which implies that there is a hierarchy of evidence placing narrative reviews below other review forms.1 However, narrative reviews are highly useful to medical educators and researchers.
• While a systematic review often focuses on a narrow question in a specific context, with a prespecified method to synthesize findings from similar studies, a narrative review can include a wide variety of studies and provide an overall summary, with interpretation and critique.1 Examples of narrative review types include advanced, critical, and integrative reviews, among many others.Narrative reviews are situated within diverse disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.
• Most forms of narrative reviews align with subjectivist and interpretivist paradigms.

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