Thinking of conceptual reviews and systematic reviews

The usefulness of literature review in qualitative research and the humanities needs no elaboration for the readership of this journal. Yet, I would like to contribute to the discussion on ‘systematic review’ started by Dr. Sally Thorne with her editorial published recently in Nursing Inquiry (Thorne, 2018). I thank Dr. Thorne for sharing her concerns and suggestions, as she foregrounds an important case regarding the status of superior scholarship attributed (erroneously) to that type of work. It also invites us to question the spurious hierarchy of reviews (systematic over narrative) and avoid possible misunderstandings related to the particular contribution that each can make. In this regard, both the emphasis and the thinking style may vary significantly. Systematic review often looks for scientific explanations—notably, causal explanations—or how a variable actually varies depending on the (inferred) influence or co-occurrence of other variables. Although useful, it is a philosophically narrow model. By contrast, narrative review and conceptual review tend to focus on interpretation—or how explanations are put in perspective when we think more universally. In interpreting, we oftentimes trace a notion; we explore its variations, usages, equivalences and connotations across time, its geographies, disciplinary traditions, and schools of thought, among other things. As a result, the notion being researched is situated within an intricate network of meanings in an open-ended process. Think how little or how much of an attribute is measured at any given time, and interesting though they may be, the figures may become meaningless if the attribute's name has changed, disappeared, diversified or moved to an entirely different semantic field. Also think, for example, of all the difficulties in assessing nurse-to-patient ratios across countries without first looking at the conceptual variations of the term ‘nurse’. See? This is something to be considered in any comparison. But there is something to be said for methodological consideration as well. Although deeply reflective—and sometimes highly personal—conceptual review is not any less systematic. By way of example, I am sharing here the approach I developed in my own doctoral research (Ayala, 2015), which is by no means meant to be a recipe-led procedure. Unlike the type of review that is referred to as ‘systematic’, conceptual review is not limited to searches by strict terms on the Web of Knowledge. In building conceptual families, a typology of the retrieved sources grouped by the social and historical contexts in which they were produced begins to form. This is very helpful in framing the research problem theoretically. Generally, the review unfolds by stages: (a) adopting a receptive attitude towards concepts; (b) reading the retrieved literature critically; (c) mapping institutional affiliations of the authors and their records of publications; (d) examining the conceptual scaffolding used in the literature; (e) identifying citing papers and cross references; (f) tracking cognate concepts; (g) reading across mainstream and alternative research outlets; and (h) reflecting on the assembly of sources. Certainly nonlinear, this eight-step approach favours interpretation. In the case in point, the analysis looked at the functionalist sociology concept ‘occupational situs’ (Benoit-Smullyan, 1944; Morris in other words, conceptual clarity. This enhances both reliability and systematicity of the research. In a sense, the term ‘systematic review’ may have a judgemental connotation as well, because the reader might infer that other types of analysis—thus, of researchers—will necessarily be unsystematic. Despite the insights derived from it and its usefulness in sifting evidence from large datasets, ‘systematic’ review often fails to capture much of which is not contained in—sometimes narrowly defined—keywords, which makes it especially vulnerable to external manipulation. It goes without saying that this can lead to a deterministic, blinkered scrutiny of scholarship (Munro, 2014). The same holds for ‘scoping’ reviews. Of course, those approaches are not to be discarded. It would be thought provoking to explore more often how the different understandings provided by all these types of reviews could interact. One venue would be, for example, to uncover unseen connections between concepts and empirical evidence, and how this might lead to the reordering of assumptions, hypothesis and answers we formulate. Another might be the entanglement of variance-oriented explanations with contextually pertinent interpretation. There is, nonetheless, much to discuss about the systematicity of reviews more generally, and still an awful lot to appreciate in ‘non-systematic reviews’. By building conceptual reviews, our ways of experiencing the literature could be enhanced.