Is it possible to do a literature review in the IMRaD format? The IMRaD format (Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion) seems to be the gold standard in publishable scholarly articles in certain fields. I am wondering if I could get my literature review published if I modified it to fit this format. It’s not a systematic review and uses a lot of grey literature (unpublished project reports and presentations, newspaper articles, working papers) as it is on a topic which has very little research.
Introduction

People sometimes wonder what they can or should write in the IMRaD format (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion).  For example, should a literature review be written this way?  In this answer, we will examine a toy model for this question, namely stackexchange  answers, to produce evidence that although anything can be written in IMRaD format, it is not necessarily helpful.

Method

We prepared an answer on academia.stackexchange.com, wrote it up in the IMRaD format, and submitted it to the website.

Results

The answer appeared on the site, but the IMRaD format yielded no apparent benefits in organizing the answer and it looked eccentric.

Discussion

Stackexchange answers are not a perfect model for literature reviews, but they share one key similarity: they could be written in IMRaD format but usually are not.  Our experiment suggests a mechanism to explain this observation.  Genuine experimental results fit the "method, results, discussion" paradigm, but most other academic contributions do not.  Unless you are carrying out a formal meta analysis for which you can document a precise method, I see no good reason to use the IMRaD format for a literature review (and it would be actively harmful if you had to distort your account to make it fit this organization).