In the exponential growth of scientific publication output and the growing maturity of the marketing discipline, doing literature and research reviews has become more than just a research convention, but rather a proper form of research. However, despite increasing attention and the number of published guides and handbooks, review methodologies tend to evolve in the direction of statistical meta-analyses, thus not only neglecting the knowledge-advancing potential of qualitative work, but also contributing to the widening of the qualitative-quantitative divide. By bringing attention to qualitative review methodologies and introducing a categorization of "meta" approaches informed by the insights from the sociology of knowledge, this critical review paper suggests that a stronger focus on text-based methods applied to the analysis of (marketing) literature can enrich (marketing) research, both in terms of methodologies and new knowledge generation.
Keywords: Review methodologies, meta-analysis, meta-synthesis, discourse analysis, sociology of knowledge, qualitative-quantitative divide.