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The role of reporting standards in producing robust literature reviews

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 444–447 (2018)Cite this article

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Literature reviews can help to inform decision-making, yet they may be subject to fatal bias if not conducted rigorously as ‘systematic reviews’. Reporting standards help authors to provide sufficient methodological detail to allow verification and replication, clarifying when key steps, such as critical appraisal, have been omitted.

The production of scientific research is growing exponentially1 and rigorous synthesis of this ever-increasing evidence is becoming an urgent necessity for many researchers and decision-makers, both in policy and practice. A literature review is a textual summary of a topic designed to bring together individual concepts, theories or studies in a digestible overview while generating something new. This is the act of synthesis. Reviews are as diverse as they are numerous, ranging from narrative primers of broad issues to quantitative syntheses using meta-analysis of focused research topics (see Supplementary Table 1)2. This difference is driven by the nature of the review authors’ aims, the intended users, the requisite level of rigour and comprehensiveness, and the resources available. In primer-style reviews the aim is to provide a novel, digestible summary of a topic, while other types of review synthesize to improve precision, reduce bias in estimation, increase comprehensiveness, raise transparency and accountability or generalize findings across a broad range of contexts. The choice of methods used to identify, screen, appraise and synthesize studies and their findings has a critical impact on the reliability of the review produced3.

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Fig. 1: Increasing interest in systematic reviews over recent years.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mistra EviEM, Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

    Neal Robert Haddaway & Biljana Macura

  2. Africa Centre for Evidence, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Neal Robert Haddaway

Authors
  1. Neal Robert Haddaway
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  2. Biljana Macura
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Correspondence to Neal Robert Haddaway.

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Haddaway, N.R., Macura, B. The role of reporting standards in producing robust literature reviews. Nature Clim Change 8, 444–447 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0180-3

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