What is Empirical Review?

your supervisor says I want an empirical review, not a theoretical one. But you don't know what that means. Let me tell you what it means and how to actually write one. Let's start with the word empirical. Empirical means based on actual data. It could be observation, experiments, surveys or any kind of measurements. These are real evidence collected from the real world. So an empirical review is a literature review that focuses specifically on studies that collected and analysed real data. These are not philosophical arguments or opinion papers. They are studies where someone actually went out, collected evidence and presented what they found. These are the kind of studies to review in an empirical review. Let me tell you the difference. A theoretical paper will say something like, social media may reduce students capacity for deep cognitive processing because of its fragmented attention switching format. Now this is an argument, it's a plausible one but there is no data. An empirical paper is something like, a survey of 840 undergraduate students found that those who spend more than four hours on social media scored significantly lower on sustained attention tasks. Now this is empirical, someone studied something, measured something and reported it. So an empirical review synthesizes sources like the second option, not the first. An empirical review includes things like who was studied, what was measured, how was it measured, what was found and what it means. You are not saying that someone found that social media was bad. You are saying how they found it, how strong the evidence is and the limits that they found. Because just saying that researchers argue that social media reduces intelligence is one thing. But when you bring different sources that actually measured the impact of social media on students, you will be presenting something that is very defensible. So an empirical review synthesizes sources that collected real data. I hope you have learned something.