Literature Reviews: A Boring Term for a Powerful Learning Tool
One of the solutions we’ve been asked for a fair bit recently is a literature review. When we mention that to other potential clients, though, they sometimes don’t recognize the term.
So, what is a literature review?
A literature review is a systematic way of finding, reading, and synthesizing previously completed scholarly research on a particular topic. If done well a literature review creates a solid foundation for program development, organizational change, or other important decisions.
Literature reviews can be very powerful because they can:
Synthesize a lot of knowledge from different research disciplines and geographic areas
Point to specific challenges that need addressing
Highlight best practices (ie. what is being done right?)
Identify subject matter experts
Determine which research methodologies work best for which questions
Unveil questions that still need answering (that is, a literature review can point to areas that need more investigation to be more fully understood)
In addition, we have had our clients tell us that they have found literature reviews useful because they can often offer irrefutable evidence for what they already know to be true – perhaps evidence for realities that haven’t been given weight or attention in their organization yet. That is, sometimes getting evidence from an external – and neutral – body can be very useful.
A good literature review, however, takes time and skill. For one, literature reviews are normally made up of scholarly/academic work. That is, the articles reviewed for a literature review are usually peer-reviewed journal articles, increasing the chances that they are of a higher research quality than your average magazine article, for example. Once the person doing the literature review feels they have satiated all that they can learn on the subject, then they take summaries of the articles and synthesize, curate, and describe in writing the biggest and most important themes that arose (and sometimes also point to what was missing!).
Other kinds of reviews, like environmental scans, also have their benefits, as they examine unpublished and publicly available works like organizational reports, publications, and websites. We are sometimes asked to do both a literature review and an environmental scan to ensure that clients can learn from both academic and non-academic works.
If you feel your organization would benefit from knowing more about an equity, diversity, or inclusion-related topic contact us to chat about how your organization can understand a topic more fully through a literature review.
Wouldn’t it be great to have the confidence to move forward knowing your organization’s actions are based on evidence?