Overview
Narrative literature reviews fail when they become annotated bibliographies — summarizing each source in sequence ("Smith (2019) found that... Jones (2021) found that...") without synthesis. A review structured as sequential source summaries reports what each author said but does not reveal what the literature collectively argues, where camps of thought form, where contradictions emerge, or what questions remain unanswered. Synthesis requires organizing by theme and argument, not by author.
The Narrative Literature Review Framework builds the argument structure before searching, organizes sources by theoretical position, and writes a critical synthesis that reveals the structure of the scholarly conversation — not a sequence of what individual authors said.