While much has been written about the methods that should inform narrative and systematic reviews, far less consideration has been given to their purpose. While the narrative review is a common text type in higher education research, relatively little is known about how these reviews seek to make a novel contribution. Reviews can play a role in facilitating knowledge mobilisation, bridging the gap between academia and end-user purposes for professions, industry, government and the public. Our article reports on a content analysis of a sample of narrative reviews in higher education collected through a systematic method in order to determine if narrative reviews in higher education make a novel knowledge mobilisation contribution, and if so, the kinds of contributions they might make. Findings suggest that most of the contemporary reviews in higher education in the sample included a novel knowledge mobilisation contribution that had been extracted and developed during the review process, demonstrating a common willingness to engage with the review findings to derive practical implications, and these contributions targeted a broad range of topics and potential end-users in higher education.