Networked information technology has made this the best and the worst of times for literature review assignments. Positively, information science experts continue to refine our understanding of literature reviews, highlighting how systematic and rigorous review essays can provide crucial clarity in an age of widespread misinformation. Less positively, those promoting AI tools claim generative artificial intelligence technologies can produce ‘literature reviews’ from nothing more than a well-designed query. This blog suggests ways to update literature reviews and annotated bibliographies with scaffolded activities to leverage the benefits of widespread information access and help students learn and practice synthesis without falling prey to AI hype, temptation, and over-reliance.

“Reference to prior literature is a defining feature of nearly all academic and research writing.” Christine B. Feak and John M. Swales, in Telling a Research Story.

Lessons from the SALSA Framework: Search, Appraisal, Synthesis, Analysis

Scholars of information synthesis have identified a range of types of review.¹ Statistical meta-analyses, for instance, represent the most literal form of research synthesis and are often regarded as the gold standard for scientific research. Systematic, scoping, and rapid reviews meet the practical demands of scientific and clinical audiences through highly structured processes of selection and inclusion, addressing the practical needs of these audiences. Narrative reviews, used in many qualitative disciplines, bring together multiple sources to advance thematic observations or identify gaps within current approaches to a topic. Annotated bibliographies may be among the least synthetic of the review genres, typically presenting an alphabetized series of summaries and citations that do not require broader connections among the selected resources.

In analyzing reviews in health sciences, Grant and Booth (2009) identified several core features present in many types of reviews, which they labeled SALSA:

• Search: Where and how resources were collected, search terms used, and the criteria for inclusion and exclusion
• Appraisal: An explanation of resource contents and their quality, which includes both a summary and an assessment of individual resources
• Synthesis: Narrative or graphical representation of all resources and their salient features
• Analysis: Assertion of some overall claim about the resources, with the strength of the claim depending on the mode of analysis

These features of reviews reflect their important role in scholarly work: to provide a systematic, reliable overview of the current state of an academic conversation and guide evidence-based decision-making. Outside academic contexts, however, the term “review” is widely used to describe aggregated individual impressions of a product (think Amazon ratings or Rotten Tomatoes scores) or expert assessments (think movie reviews or Wirecutter testing). Thus, for many undergraduates, the concept of a review is likely associated with personal taste and judgment, an association that may interfere with their understanding of the functions of review genres in scholarly and clinical contexts.

Exploring the components of academic reviews and the common review genres in your field can help students understand their valuable role in documenting new insights and identifying unanswered questions. Scaffolding students through a systematic review process, rather than simply assigning them to “write a literature review,” can both deepen the benefits they receive from these assignments and make it more challenging to rely on technological substitutes for their intellectual engagement in synthesis.

Assigning Review Genres: SALSA Is All About Ingredients and Technique

For students, the core learning from review assignments is more clearly revealed in the review process than in the final written artifact. Explicitly incorporating aspects of the SALSA framework in your assignment can help students make their learning visible and, ultimately, produce stronger synthesis.

Search Tasks for Review Assignments

• Ask students to record their search strategies, including the databases and aggregators they used, search terms they employed, and limiters (e.g., article type, year of publication, only peer-reviewed articles, etc.) they used. In class, contrasting results from a robust research database in your field with popular alternatives like Google Scholar or Research Rabbit can help students understand why AI tools will miss large swaths of the best available research, which is often behind paywalls. Illustrating use of limiters such as year of publication can reinforce disciplinary values like recency.

Appraisal Tasks for Review Assignments

• Recommend a standard reading/note-taking practice: Ask students to follow a particular reading/note-taking protocol for the resources they include, highlighting discipline-relevant features of the research. For example, the population, intervention, comparison, and outcome are standard features of medical research studies, providing valuable information for comparisons. In other fields, a topic, thesis, purpose, and methodology can serve as a helpful summary. This practice can also be expanded to include peer response or social annotation, where students can be paired or grouped with colleagues to assess the accuracy and quality of their reading.
• Require students to compile their selected resources in a Google folder. Being required to download their resources means that students are less likely to be misled by AI-generated hallucinations. They will also gain a better understanding of the distinction between AI-generated “citations” and the practices of attribution in academic fields. These resources can also provide multiple examples of acceptable citation styles and common attribution practices.

Synthesis Tasks for Review Assignments

• Require students to create a table or spreadsheet that identifies the included resources and some excluded items. Ask students to observe patterns—for instance, do a few names show up repeatedly?
• Invite students to draw connections, literally. While spreadsheets are excellent at creating orderly composites, other visual organizers, such as mind maps, flowcharts, timelines, and story maps, can help students understand the connections among their resources and explore potential themes. These techniques can be especially helpful for students who are still organizing their knowledge or need to overcome prior misconceptions.

Analysis Tasks for Review Assignments

• Ask students to regularly update their hypotheses and research questions. As students are confronted with additional information, their speculations and assumptions may be challenged. Remind students that narrowing or redirecting research questions, or modifying and qualifying their initial hypotheses, are signs of success. Ideally, conclusions should arise from the evidence, rather than seeking evidence to support a prior assumption.
• Encourage students to find contradictory opinions and disconfirming information. Similar to the prior recommendation, seeking out contradictory positions can be extremely helpful in assessing information quality. Exercises that ask students to compare the features of credible resources with available misinformation can help students become more critical consumers of information. 

More Information

Efron, S. E., Ravid, R., & ProQuest. (2019). Writing the literature review : a practical guide. The Guilford Press.

Feak, C. B. and Swales, J.M.  (2015). Telling a research story: writing a literature review (4th printing, Vol. 2). The University of Michigan Press.

Grant, M. and Booth, A. (2009). A typology of reviews: An analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 26, 91-108. 

Image credit: "Delicious Salsa" by ginnerobot is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

¹Grant and Booth identified 14 different review types in health sciences. Other taxonomies are even more specific.