Sick of doing "article reviews", "book reviews", "short story reviews"?Look at it from a different angle: a literary review is only one of many faces that a review can have. You can do daily reviews on your own mood swings, or manga books, or subway stations.You don't even have to make it structured (unless later on you're planning to have an hours-long argument with someone scrupulous over whether your work is a review or a reflection, but we'll get to that).A review, in oral, written or any recorded form is a great way to add a little something to an ongoing conversation about any subject. If you want to make a good impression, you can call it "a considerable contribution to an existing discourse". Let's start with the most basic typology.Narrative review - as you can guess from the word "narrative", it's rather unstructured. It tends to answer the questions like "why", "how", "who", "what was the purpose", "what do we know so far" etc. The number of sources in a narrative review Systematic literature review - you can find it in dissertations and research articles. Usually it makes up a complete chapter of the work and the goal is to look through what the researchers had to say on that matter before. Has the object been thoroughly researched before - or is there something new to say? Were the results controversial; hence, in need of more evidence?Review (a.k.a literary review, unstructured review, free-writing, feedback, opinion) - is the kind of thing you've got used to starting from school, ending with Yelp.So if you're googling "something + review", you're most likely to land on the last of the three (plain "review"). It's fairly unstructured and intentionally subjective. Although, we should give online feedback forms and websites like Yelp and Omni some credit - they're making the Internet used to structuring users' impressions in a certain way. For instance, there's usually a date - a date when a review was made, or when the product was purchased. There's also the name of the facility or seller, and (more often than not) a location. Besides that, these forms and websites offer to rate one's overall experience star-wise, thus giving the whole feedback an emotional vector. You can't expect a long description of how good the facility was from a three-star feedback, can you?When you're googling something like "gaining muscle in two months scientific evidence", the chances are high that you'll land on a narrative review or a systematic review, depending on whether you're using google.com or scholar.google.com. Ideally, Google Scholar is a target search engine for objective research-based unbiased information (or at least as unbiased as it can get for a wide audience). But if you're new to a subject, a narrative review found on google.com isn't the worst thing to read. Just remember to stay critical.Do's and Don'tsDo your research. Regardless of the kind of review you're reading or writing, spend a minute or two researching it. It's called "eliminating the human factor".Do question the validity. Why did you/author come to these conclusions? What was the background? What was the context? Did anyone ever try to repeat that?Don't put all your hopes and trust on the first review you're reading. Even if it's a structured review found in an established academic journal. The first thing you've read on the subject is excellent for coordinating you in the field, but not enough to get yourself committed to one solid point of view.Don't act subjective on purpose. Even if it's an eBay feedback. Always try to go for a bigger picture - this is what reviews have been created for after all!