Literature review
A synthesis of the existing research on a question, organised by theme or argument rather than as a list of studies.
A literature review establishes what is known, where the disagreements are, and what gap your work addresses. The word that distinguishes a good one is “synthesis”: it groups studies by what they say and puts them in conversation, rather than walking through them one at a time.
The list-of-summaries version — “Smith (2019) found… Jones (2020) found…” — is the standard failure mode. If a paragraph does not make a claim about the literature, it is a summary rather than a review.
A systematic review is a stricter genre: a pre-registered protocol, explicit search strings, stated inclusion criteria, and a reported screening count, all so that someone else could repeat it.