Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A senior researcher's invited review tracing the conceptual history of a field over several decades, published in a journal's invited-review series, drawing on the author's own judgement of which works matter most.
- Is an instance
A narrative review that explicitly states its search was not exhaustive and was guided by the author's expertise, used to generate hypotheses and frame open questions for a field rather than to answer one pre-specified research question.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A protocol-driven, PRISMA-reported review with a documented, reproducible search strategy and formal quality appraisal is a systematic review, not a narrative review, even if it also includes discursive synthesis in its discussion section.
- Not an instance
A scoping review — which uses a structured, documented search and reporting framework (typically PRISMA-ScR) to map the extent and nature of evidence on a broad question — is not a narrative review, despite also covering broad topics; the distinguishing factor is the presence of a pre-specified, reproducible protocol, not topic breadth.
Editorial commentary
A narrative review synthesises existing literature through the author’s expert judgement and discursive argument rather than through a pre-specified, reproducible search-and-appraisal protocol. It remains a legitimate and often valuable publication type — particularly for synthesising broad or conceptually diverse topics, generating hypotheses, and offering scholarly perspective in fields where the literature is too heterogeneous for a single focused systematic search to meaningfully answer. The methodological literature on review types (e.g. Greenhalgh et al. 2018) has specifically pushed back on treating narrative reviews as categorically inferior to systematic reviews — the two serve different purposes and should be judged against different standards, not ranked on a single hierarchy.
What distinguishes a narrative review
The defining feature is the absence of a pre-registered, reproducible protocol: search terms and sources are chosen by the author’s judgement rather than a documented, replicable strategy; there is typically no formal, criteria-based quality appraisal of included works; and the review is not expected to be reproducible by a second reviewer following the same steps. This is a methodological distinction, not a quality judgement — a well-executed narrative review by a genuine subject-matter expert can be more useful to a reader than a narrowly-scoped systematic review, but it should always be labelled as narrative rather than presented as systematic, since readers rely on that label to calibrate how much weight to place on its comprehensiveness.
How it differs from a systematic review
A systematic review uses a pre-registered protocol, a documented and reproducible search strategy across specified databases, explicit inclusion/exclusion criteria, and a formal quality-appraisal framework (commonly reported via PRISMA), aimed at exhaustively answering a narrowly defined question. A narrative review instead makes a selective, judgement-based case for what the significant work in a broader field is. Neither is inherently “better” — a systematic review answers a narrow question comprehensively; a narrative review can cover ground a systematic protocol cannot reach and can incorporate the kind of conceptual synthesis a protocol-bound review is not designed to produce.
How it differs from a scoping review
A scoping review, like a systematic review, follows a structured and documented search-and-reporting framework (typically PRISMA-ScR) — but is used to map the extent, range, and nature of evidence on a broad question, often as groundwork before a future systematic review, rather than to reach a specific conclusion. A narrative review can also cover a broad question, which is why the two are sometimes conflated, but a scoping review’s structured, reproducible mapping process is exactly what a narrative review lacks.
References
- Greenhalgh, Thorne & Malterud (2018), “Time to challenge the spurious hierarchy of systematic over narrative reviews,” European Journal of Clinical Investigation
- Sukhera (2022), “Narrative Reviews: Flexible, Rigorous, and Practical,” Journal of Graduate Medical Education
- Grant & Booth (2009), “A typology of reviews: an analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies,” Health Information & Libraries Journal
Also known as
Traditional review · Literature review (narrative)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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