To save the research literature, let's make literature reviews reproducible

Last week the Impact Blog featured a post from Richard P. Phelps, in which he proposed that journals get rid of their requirement for a literature review. Arnaud Vaganay agrees with much of what Phelps said, literature reviews are erratic and self-serving, but suggests doing away with them altogether is likely to make science less efficient and less credible. Instead, literature reviews and their component parts should be thought of as reproducible research assets, just like the protocol and dataset used in the empirical part of a study. Cumulative literature reviews should be based on a methodology that is more systematic, reproducible, and reusable than the traditional, narrative literature review.