Dear friends, I shall be sincere. I up voted - not so much the question but the very answers I' ve just read.

Sensible and sensitive, knowledgeable and accurate, dear friends, I could not agree more with your answers. Thank you very much. It is indeed so!

If you do, remember to cite RG: "Public communication"

Dear Prakash,

This is a good idea, however – unfortunately – most of the comments cannot attain the literary standard.  Another trouble would be the copyright too.

You have to improve the average standard of English encountered! Through "fair use" you can quote or paraphrase material found on RG as long as you cite it correctly. Remember to include the date of posting and the poster's name as there are many posts on a topic. Don't just use RG. There is a bigger world out there! Remember too, that as researchers we have a very biassed and jaundiced view of life! We are not very representative of the full population. {Me especially!}

I think that in general, basing a literature review or any of its main parts on discussions or literature recommendations found on RG would be methodologically faulty and systematically biased towards opinions and preferences of researchers active on RG. However, if you have a research question which is connected to the content published on RG or similar digital scholarly networks than you will have to include RG discussions, after checking them against pre-determined criteria for eligibility and relevance. Otherwise, you should have very good reasons to include RG among the list of searched items which usually consists of various indexes, databases or (a set of) individual journals.

@Janos: Spot on answer!

@Prakash: What is more conventional is to ask your supervisor and your librarian for some references. Then do a Google Scholar etc. search. Then ask RGers if they can think of any other references for you.

Remember that RG limits the number of fields you can ask your question in. So choose your threads carefully.

I'll admit to using RG questions to conduct my "negative" literature review.  If I ask a question and don't get anything counter to what I was expecting, I'll take that as an indication that I'm not missing anything.

@Stephen: Your (good) approach is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to establishing prior art. This is because:

Dear friends, I shall be sincere. I up voted - not so much the question but the very answers I' ve just read.

Sensible and sensitive, knowledgeable and accurate, dear friends, I could not agree more with your answers. Thank you very much. It is indeed so!

I think that although the answers in the threads of RG may be quite insightful and useful at times, I would be careful as to what I should include in a literature review. I tend to think that a literature review that is based on publications that have been rigorously peer reviewed is likely to be more credible. This is because the research process that leads to such publications -as sources of knowledge- would have gone through a series of verifications and formal procedures that conform to the conventional practice of science (including its flaws).

I tend to agree with Mohamed Benmerikhi. Because RG posts have not been refereed, they are not research literature. They are merely opinions by researchers. Nevertheless you can mine them to see the shape of the field, and perhaps get a good quote or paraphrase to cite. The posters may give good links to the literature, which contents do become part of your critical review of the literature.

My current book has 19 references to RG posts. By themselves, they are too thin to be a review. They include useful turns of phrase, paragraphs and passages that I usually have paraphrased. They serve to fill in the gaps between my experience, book and journal references, Web sites, and my lecture notes. 

I'm not sure where I stand on this and I'd like to read more opinions.  It would depend on full acknowledgment of the sources, and probably the topic and discipline.

I would only refer to RG discussions in the event of lack/scarcity of literature (book, journal, conference paper).

Our published monograph about a single RG forum question has:

70 pages and

20 subsections.

Quotes and paraphrases from RG Respondents from 26 countries with varying degrees of English abilities, representing 14 main disciplines with different vocabularies were collected, collated, catalogued,

culled and then commented upon.

The number of paraphrases necessary was 63

The number of quotes used and polished was 110.

In addition, the monograph contains a short list of 29 RG poster-provided references,

14 references provided by us, plus

5  items provided by us for further reading.

This is not for the faint-hearted or the lazy!

I tend to use RG discussion information cautiously to complement my literature review.  Think we also need to consider the reviewer / examiner reaction when we cite something from RG in which they are not members of RG or never heard about what is RG.

I use RG for the following in my literature review:

1) search the RG content and ask questions to discover whether I'd done comprehensive literature review - to my amazement, for questions that I posed I received answers beyond what I'd expected (this had broaden my literature review horizon & directions)

2) based on the good comments and discussion points provided by RG scholars / SMEs, I will do another round of literature review to verify the comments' validity & originality (hope to find literature & theoretical frameworks etc that support those comments)