Guest Editorial: Reading literature and literature reviews

Most scholars would probably agree that literature reviews are key building blocks of good research articles in Library and Information science (LIS). Yet current practices in conducting these reviews may not necessarily be conducive to innovative research because they emphasize the science of the process rather than the art. At the beginning of the 21st century, the act of doing a literature review is typically conceptualized according to rigid principles of research in the sciences and social sciences. There is little room for thinking of it as a process requiring a modicum of art—the art of browsing and reading widely in journals and books that may have little relationship to one's specific area of research interest and that may, in addition, be considered old (i.e., published before 1990). Certainly, science should always be a significant component of the literature-review process, but art should also play a crucial role. Infusing art into the review process and imaginatively incorporating the review's findings into the fabric of a research project may be the difference between a ground-breaking study employing unique perspectives gleaned from highly diverse sources and an ordinary study that confines itself to easily located, predictable, and therefore pedestrian sources. The scientification of the literature review can be seen in a popular text such as Conducting Research Literature Reviews (Fink, 2005). Here, a good review is defined as “a systematic, explicit, and reproducible method for identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing [an] existing body of completed and recorded work” (p. 3). The ability to replicate the review is of singular importance, since “[t]his enables someone else to reproduce [the reviewer's] methods and to determine objectively whether or not to accept the results of the review” (p. 17). This type of review is contrasted with “more subjective examinations of recorded information,” which “tend to be idiosyncratic” because “[s]ubjective reviewers choose articles without justifying why they are selected, and they may give equal credence to good and poor studies” (p. 17). In other words, research professionalism is inseparable from a science-based approach. For Fink, then, there is no doubt which type of literature review is better, and she outlines a series of steps to ensure its achievement. Summarized in a flowchart that appears in every chapter, these steps include: choosing acceptable bibliographic databases and Web sites to be searched; selecting the search terms to be used so as “to get appropriate articles, books, and reports”; and setting rigorous “practical” and “methodological quality” screening