Según el artículo Towards Rigor in Reviews of Multivocal Literatures: Applying the Exploratory Case Study Method (1991), una revisión de literatura multivocal (review of multivocal literature) es:
The method we describe applies to reviews of what we term multivocal literatures. Multivocal literatures are comprised of all accessible writings on a common, often contemporary topic. The writings embody the views or voices of diverse sets of authors (academics, practitioners, journalists, policy centers, state offices of education, local school districts, independent research and development firms, and others). The writings appear in a variety of forms. They reflect different purposes, perspectives, and information bases. They address different aspects of the topic and incorporate different research or nonresearch logics.
La necesidad de este tipo de revisiones se fundamenta en la siguiente idea:
Systematic investigations (i.e., empirical studies that identify the conceptual perspectives or orienting questions that guide the research, specify the methods used to carry out the research, explicate the procedures employed to address validity and reliability, and offer the explanations for the findings of the research) represent only one of the varied forms of writings and constitute only a small portion of the literature base.
En ingeniería del software, Vahid Garousi defiende en The need for multivocal literature reviews in software engineering: complementing systematic literature reviews with grey literature (2016) defiende que las revisiones tradicionales muestran el "estado de la investigación", pero no dicen nada sobre el "estado de la práctica":
While SLR or a SM studies are valuable, other SE researchers have recently reported that “the results of a SLR or a SM study could provide an established body of knowledge, focusing only on research contributions” [3]. Since those studies do not include the “grey” literature (non-published, nor peer-reviewed sources of information), which are constantly produced by SE practitioners in a great scale, those studies do not provide insight into the “state of the practice” in SE. For a practical (practitioner-oriented) field such as SE, synthesizing and combing both the state-of-the art and –practice is very important. Unfortunately, it is a reality that a large majority of software practitioners do not publish in academic forums [4], and this means that the voice of the practitioners would be limited in review studies if we do not consider grey literature in addition to academic literature in those studies.
Y explica el origen de multivocal literature review:
SLRs which include both the academic (formal) and the grey literature were termed as Multivocal Literature Reviews (MLR) in other fields, e.g., education, e.g., [5, 6], in the early 1990’s. The main difference between a MLR and a SLR or a SM is the fact that, while SLRs and SMs use as input only academic peerreviewed articles, MLRs in addition also use sources from the grey literature, e.g., blogs, white papers and web-pages [3]. Furthermore, for fields “characterized by an abundance of diverse documents and a scarcity of systematic investigations” [7], multivocal synthesis is highly recommended as an appropriate tool for investigations. Researchers also have reported that: “another potential use of multivocal literature reviews is in closing the gap between academic research and professional practice” [8].
Vahid Garousi propone en Guidelines for including grey literature and conducting multivocal literature reviews in software engineering (2019) un método para realizar una revisión multivocal de la literatura en ingeniería del software:
- Search process
- Source selection
- Study quality assessment
- Data extraction
- Data synthesis
En este artículo se incluye la siguiente clasificación de los diferentes tipos de literatura:
Algunos ejemplos de revisión multivocal de la literatura son: