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> Any literature review must be reproducible.

That's totally at odds with my understanding, but perhaps this differs between fields.

Quite probably there are differences between fields. In biomedical literature reviews the search terms and databases are detailed, and (in systematic reviews) a PRISMA flowchart [0] provided. The theory being that other researchers could repeat the searches and the in/out decisions and get the same stack of papers to review.

[0] https://www.prisma-statement.org/prisma-2020-flow-diagram

Okay yeah that sounds closer to what I'd call a meta-analysis. In linguistics (which is the field I was in) "literature review" just means "someone looked around and read some papers they thought might be related". There's no expectation that it will be systematic in any replicable way.

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