Are second-level literature reviews reliable? An assessment through bibliometric and network analysis
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It has been estimated that in the last 30 years over 64 million scientific manuscripts were published, with the number of publications recently showing an exponential growth. Therefore, it becomes crucial to find effective ways to synthesize and systematize in a reliable way all the knowledge produced and published so far, also to identify new potential research gaps. Among the various methods devised to organize the scientific literature (narrative reviews, integrative reviews, systematic literature reviews, meta-analysis, meta-synthesis, bibliometric reviews, etc.) second-level literature reviews – that is literature reviews of previous literature reviews – represent an increasingly diffuse practice. But how reliable is this method in representing the underlying literature of the field under inquiry? Investigating the second-level literature review on flexible work arrangements (FWAs) by Toscano and Zappalà (2020) as a paradigmatic example and taking advantage of bibliometric and network analysis tools, we corroborate this research practice. With this study, we prove that second-level literature reviews are a reliable method to provide an overview of the core knowledge within a given research field, including management and organization studies.
