Effective collection and selection of research articles for a systematic review

Abstract

The first step in any research work is to gain a better understanding of selected research topic and its placement in the research field. To achieve this a Systematic Review (SR) is usually performed in one of two forms. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) addresses a specific research question by providing insight into selected literature, while a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) uses a principle of classification of a large number of collected articles to present a wider picture of the research topic. In both cases, the collection and selection of proper articles are crucial. Due to a lot of available articles from different sources and its diverse quality, a lot of tedious (often manual) work is required. This article addresses the issues of effective collection and selection of an appropriate set of articles. First, the importance of using suitable guidelines for conducting an SR is presented. Then, the practical considerations for the collection of articles are shown with an emphasis on effective search in Digital Libraries (DLs). Finally, the issues connected with an effective selection of an appropriate set of articles (from all collected) is described. In this part, we advise to collect as many articles as possible and perform sequential three-step selection to efficiently eliminate the obviously incorrect ones without a tedious manual screening of entire article contents.