Reviews – a journey on innovation from the past into the future

Reviews of literature including systematic meta-analysis are invaluable to advance science and guide directions for future research. The premise for conducting reviews is well established (Dickersin & Berlin, 1992; Glass, 1976). Systematic reviews in a field gather scholarly efforts on a topic, theme, population, setting and treatment conditions to identify peculiarities and generalizations across subsets. Reviews thus increase power and precision of causal inferences and estimates of relationships between constructs and help manage literature “blind spots” by increasing reliability and validity of results from widely dispersed regional and global studies. The advantage of reviews is thus especially noticeable in cases where occurrence rates of conditions or events are particularly low or where small effect sizes equally matter (e.g. in medical research) (Lau et al., 1992). The cumulation of diverse perspectives in a review offers nuances that cannot be found from a single study. This is mostly because each study is shaped by researcher’s cognitive capabilities and is influenced by the characteristics of research design including selection criteria for participants, research context including treatment conditions and sophistication of methods employed (Light & Pillemer, 1984). A formal meta-analysis of reviews in this view is more likely to detect small but significant effects than a single review performed by a researcher using traditional methods (Rosenthal, Cooper & Hedges, 1994). More specifically, for innovation management a review of literature is needed to reduce large amounts of scientific conceptualization, data and interpretations into manageable segments for meaningful integration. A benefit of this exercise is that it allows for critical reflection, examination and synthesis of literature, allowing for identification of insignificant and redundant outputs from salient and noteworthy research (Morgan, 1986). Moreover, a critical task for innovation

researchers is to integrate key constructs to explain the theoretical basis for phenomenon found in practice.A review can help researchers manage time and effort by avoiding paths which have already been widely explored (see Rosenbusch, Brinckmann & Bausch, 2011).Researchers use reviews to develop propositions and hypotheses, recognise limitations of previous work, refine data collection methods including sampling approaches and delineate results that call for further research.Likewise, policy makers rely on estimates of critical integrators revealed in systematic reviews to gather thoughts, engage stakeholders and develop calls for specialised actions (Garfield, 1987; Lederberg, 1986).Last but not the least, focused reviews on questions of relevance to innovation practice and management decisions can help formulate behavioural intervention mechanisms to shape current perceptions, processes and practices towards a desired future (Cook, Possingham & Fuller, 2012).In this editorial we analyse how publication on innovation has evolved along time.To this end, we conducted a search on 10 January 2019 on SCOPUS database and limited to documents classified as "Reviews".The results on number of documents by subject are identified in table 1 and a graph of documents by year is depicted as figure 1.In this table is it interesting to confirm that the first four areas (Medicine, Business, Management and Accounting, Social Sciences and Engineering) cumulate to 53,9% to the total number of documents.In face of the overwhelming number of documents, this first analysis was followed by the extraction to Microsoft Excel™ worksheet of only the records in the SCOPUS database since 2008 using the successive search terms: KEY (innovation) AND PUBYEAR AFT 2015 AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "re")) The journals listed in Table 1 are responsible for publishing 25,83% of all papers in the database.With this list, we went through a final document filtering, extracting from the database all documents published in the above journals.Further, to make the analysis of keywords feasible: • Papers with no "Author Keywords" or "Index Keywords" were excluded • The "Author Keywords" or "Index Keywords" were concatenated, thus leading to the possible duplication of some keywords.These duplicates were not removed as: 1) only very few keywords are in fact duplicated and 2) some papers have don't even have duplicated keywords.The overwhelming number of keywords led to the need to restrict this keyword analysis.Finally, the search was limited to the last two years, 2017, 2018 and the few papers already available for 2019.This resulted in 195 papers published in the Journals listed in table 3, representing the total of 2286 keyword occurrences.triple bottom line We acknowledge that hours of work spent in developing, conducting and interpreting a study, ultimately, is only a part of the much larger puzzle.In this editorial we aimed to identify the intricacies and peculiarities of reviews conducted in various fields.Our results identify the diverse and widely distributed nature of innovation research.From the various tables, subsets of how innovation research has proliferated academic research can be gleaned.

This study has obvious limitations
For the sake of feasibility, there was a need to remove some contributions and, in this context, exclude some relevant journals and papers, and consequently, exclude relevant keywords.Out of curiosity, in the annex one may find a table with the list of the first most used 100 "Author Advantages of reviews are many, and one of them is that reviews are most likely to be cited.
For JIM, we welcome reviews, addressing the multidisciplinary nature of the innovation perceptions, processes and practices, combining principles and concepts originating from a myriad of scientific areas, from social sciences to technology research and development.
As we aim at covering a wide range of topics, from economics and social science areas to technology and science and product innovation management, new Editors are being added to our Board whenever we need a new area of competence to cover a new specific topic submitted to this Journal.Your contribution is therefore most welcome.

Table 1 .
Number of documents per subject area in SCOPUS using the search: KEY (innovation) AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "re"))

Table 2 .
Journals representing less than 26% of the total number of Reviews (the H Index was extracted from the Scimago Journal Rank 2 ).PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics.

Table 3 .
Journals whose selected papers were the target of the keyword analysis.

Table 4 .
Occurrences of 71 Keywords representing 25% of the total occurring in the 195 papers