Conducting Literature Reviews Hermeneutically

Abstract

It is well understood that conducting high quality literature reviews provides an important and solid foundation for research studies. While there is an abundance of resources available about how to conduct literature reviews for quantitative research, there are fewer publications available about how to conduct literature reviews for qualitative research, particularly research that is guided by hermeneutic philosophy. Rather than detailing how to conduct a hermeneutic literature review, in this paper we make the subtle, yet necessary, distinction that literature reviews included in research studies that are guided by hermeneutics should be conducted hermeneutically. We begin by reviewing the few resources that are currently available about conducting literature reviews for hermeneutic research and detail three different literature review processes for three hermeneutic studies. We then discuss how researchers, who are using hermeneutics to guide their research, might determine what literature should be included in their literature reviews. We close the paper by addressing the significance of rigour in literature reviews that are conducted hermeneutically.