It may also provide a theoretical foundation for the proposed study, substantiate the presence of the research problem, justify the research as one that contributes something new to the cumulated knowledge, or validate the methods and approaches for the proposed study ( Hart, 1998 Levy & Ellis, 2006).

This section synthesizes the extant literature and usually identifies the gaps in knowledge that the empirical study addresses ( Sylvester, Tate, & Johnstone, 2013). The most prevalent one is the “literature review” or “background” section within a journal paper or a chapter in a graduate thesis. Literature reviews can take two major forms. Among other methods, literature reviews are essential for: (a) identifying what has been written on a subject or topic (b) determining the extent to which a specific research area reveals any interpretable trends or patterns (c) aggregating empirical findings related to a narrow research question to support evidence-based practice (d) generating new frameworks and theories and (e) identifying topics or questions requiring more investigation ( Paré, Trudel, Jaana, & Kitsiou, 2015). As in any academic discipline, rigorous knowledge syntheses are becoming indispensable in keeping up with an exponentially growing eHealth literature, assisting practitioners, academics, and graduate students in finding, evaluating, and synthesizing the contents of many empirical and conceptual papers.

Literature reviews play a critical role in scholarship because science remains, first and foremost, a cumulative endeavour ( vom Brocke et al., 2009).

We were here together chapter 9