Review articles analyze earlier works on a specific subject. It is not accurate to equate a review article with describing prior research because the goal of a literature review is to provide a critical assessment of prior studies. Review articles bring together the findings of various original articles to create a coherent explanation of a subject. Review papers occasionally draw novel findings from existing articles. There are several sorts of articles in this category, including:

Systematic review: This type of review concentrates on a single subject and attempts to address it by examining all relevant, reliable data in a systematic search. In this kind of paper, the author systematically examines the prior works and summarizes them, which may sometimes lead to new scholarly insights.

Narrative review: In a narrative review essay, the author qualitatively gives a story of researchers' work in a certain topic. These reviews are not systematic, and the author lacks a clear model, hypothesis, or data gathering indications.

Review of best evidence: In this kind of essay, the author picks outstanding prior experiences and reports them. These studies are typically connected to the best experiences in a specific field.

Critical review: Contrary to the aforementioned, the author of a critical review conducts a thorough search in order to criticize the selected prior researches. The outcome, which is generally constructive, should result in the presentation of a model or alternative hypotheses that can be looked at in future studies.

Meta-analysis: To produce more precise and generalizable results, the author of this sort of publication statistically compiles the findings of prior studies. The results of various studies are combined and examined as a single data set in a meta-analysis or meta-research. In this kind of work, the findings as well as the shortcomings of the earlier studies are contrasted, and a new contribution is presented based on the findings of earlier studies.