Literature reviews have been a fundamental, classic technique for study integration, serving a variety of purposes including generalization of findings, resolving conflicts in the literature, providing a linguistic bridge across studies, critiquing methodology and theory, and identifying key issues and future directions for research (Cooper, 2010). However, given a burgeoning number of studies in clinical psychology, literature reviews are often limited in their ability to adequately describe each contributing study and instead rely on prototype studies, box score summaries (contrasting the raw number of supportive versus non-supportive results), or selective coverage of the literature. These approaches make integrative statements that subsume the broader literature difficult to support and critique. Even when possible, such integrative statements are unable to estimate the strength of a relationship and instead concern whether (and not how much of) a relationship exists in the literature.
