Reviews range from a flexible narrative synthesis to a registered systematic review with dual screening and risk-of-bias assessment. Choosing the right type is the first decision, and it shapes everything after it.
The review types here differ mainly in purpose. A narrative or integrative review builds an argument about what a body of work means. A systematic review answers a focused question, often about effectiveness, using a protocol, exhaustive searching and critical appraisal. A scoping review maps the extent and nature of evidence on a broader topic. A bibliometric analysis uses publication and citation data to show how a field is structured and how it has changed.
If you are unsure, ask what you will do with the result. If you need to know whether something works, choose a systematic review; if you need to know what research exists, a scoping review; if you need to argue for a research gap in a thesis, usually a well-organized narrative review; if you want to show intellectual structure and trends across hundreds or thousands of publications, bibliometrics. Statistical pooling of results is covered by our meta-analysis service in the data analysis pillar.
Support for non-systematic reviews that still need rigor: planning searches, organizing sources in a synthesis matrix, choosing a structure and building a critical argument, with feedback on your drafts.
Methodological support across a systematic review: a registrable protocol, reproducible database searches, dual screening, piloted extraction forms, risk-of-bias assessment and PRISMA 2020 reporting.
Support for scoping reviews from the PCC question and protocol through searching, screening, data charting and PRISMA-ScR reporting, following Arksey and O'Malley and current JBI guidance.
Performance analysis and science mapping of a research field: a documented Scopus or Web of Science search, cleaned records, co-citation, bibliographic coupling and co-word networks, and help interpreting what the clusters mean.
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