Visual Literature Reviews

Literature reviews or synthesis is an important activity in any scientific discipline. It allows scientific communities to digest, simplify, and give structure to the scientific literature on which the community builds and points to future research direction. In this paper, we propose a novel form of visual literature review, in which we combine systematic literature reviews, meta-analysis, and social network analysis to propose the visual meta-analysis. The goal of the method is to extract findings from studied constructs and relationships found in quantitative studies to construct a network representation of the nomological network. We present ways in which such visualization could be utilized to synthesize the literature and extract useful insights for the broader community. We conclude by discussing the limitations of the method and future potential.