Unexpected advantages of qualitative methods: A (valid?) Support for scientific literature reviews.

For the past few years (very few in fact) we have been witnessing a revolution (new evolution) and use of qualitative research approaches and techniques as an aid to bibliographic research and more specifically to systematic reviews. Whereas until recently, bibliographic review was a procedure that basically relied on a tentative, trial-and-error approach, today the method has been refined both through the potential increase in bibliographic search algorithms and with respect to the refinement of certain approaches typical of qualitative research. Thus we can read articles reporting bibliographic reviews (even very sophisticated ones) in which the "Methods" paragraph summarizes the principles of Grounded theory or Thematic analysis or Narrative analysis. From these premises we intend to describe the advantages and possible limitations of these approaches, including with research examples (personally conducted by the Authors). In one of these studies, we conducted a systematic review of how empirical lifestyle studies in the field of energy and climate operationalise the lifestyle concept and structured their approaches by using the “Grounded Theory” approach. This approach allows considering a broad range of characteristics of reviewed literature, relating them to each other and identifying key dimensions that jointly form a framework into which future work may be categorised. Moreover, the potential of newest release of main data analysis software (in terms of Artificial Intelligence) are discussed.