Producing a literature review is often part of a graduate and post-graduate requirement, included in the preparation of a thesis, dissertation, or a journal article.
Literature reviews are also common in a research proposal or prospectus (the document approved before a student formally begins a dissertation or thesis).
In this sense, it is a scholarly paper that presents the current knowledge including substantive findings as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to a particular topic.
A meta-analysis is typically a systematic review using statistical methods to effectively combine the data used on all selected studies to produce a more reliable result.
They also propose a model for selecting an approach by looking at the purpose, object, subject, community, and practices of the review.
[7] Shields and Rangarajan (2013) and Granello (2001) link the activities of doing a literature review with Benjamin Bloom's revised taxonomy of the cognitive domain (ways of thinking: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating).