Review methods in Brazilian educational publications: applications and silences (2000-2016)

Abstract

The following work presents the results of our research in the field of review studies, in which we apply the systematic review method to identify and analyze evidence found by a selected number of predetermined set of sources, which were chosen by specific criteria. The study undertakes a social comprehension of this typology and seeks to overcome the overlap between quantitative and qualitative methods. The corpus consisted of three types of publications, in the period from 2000 to 2016 – books, essays from national journals registered with SciELO, and the Estado do Conhecimento series, prepared by the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Anísio Teixeira (Inep). Criteria for corpus composition included the presence of terms alluding to review and/or bibliographic analysis in the title and keywords of the source texts. A total of 113 publications were mapped, and within this universe, the proposed selection highlighted 37 of them, given the distance observed in relation to the rules shared by the specialized literature that guided the reported research. It became evident that, despite the increasing usage of review methods, not all publications share
the aspects featured in a significant part of the bibliography, including typologies, their differences, and their applications in the field of education, thus, resulting in different levels of depth, notably in terms of the problematization of competing research concepts.