Writing narrative style literature reviews

TLDR

Reviews synthesize published literature and guide clinical research, yet narrative reviews lack formal guidelines unlike systematic reviews such as those following PRISMA. The study seeks to establish best‑practice recommendations for preparing narrative reviews in clinical research. The authors suggest improving narrative review quality by adopting systematic review methods to reduce selection bias, using effective bibliographic strategies, and outlining the dynamics, organization, analysis, and synthesis of the review process. They present a set of best‑practice recommendations for narrative review preparation.

Abstract

Reviews provide a synthesis of published literature on a topic and describe its current state-of-art. Reviews in clinical research are thus useful when designing studies or developing practice guidelines. The two standard types of reviews are (a) systematic and (b) non-systematic or narrative review. Unlike systematic reviews that benefit from guidelines such as PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) statement, there are no acknowledged guidelines for narrative reviews. I have attempted to define the best practice recommendations for the preparation of a narrative review in clinical research. The quality of a narrative review may be improved by borrowing from the systematic review methodologies that are aimed at reducing bias in the selection of articles for review and employing an effective bibliographic research strategy. The dynamics of narrative review writing, the organizational pattern of the text, the analysis, and the synthesis processes are also discussed.