The systematic literature review as a research genre

Abstract

The “systematic literature review” as a research genre was first formulated in the field of medicine; the basic approach has since been adapted to serve the differing needs of a wide range of disciplines. The systematic literature review was intended to improve the synthesis of research by introducing a systematic, transparent, and reproducible literature-review process. This paper first characterizes the systematic literature review as practiced in medicine and as modified for use in other disciplines. Then, drawing on the example of a systematic literature review conducted by the authors, it explains and illustrates the entire systematic-literature-review process: the development of a review protocol, selection of databases and creation of a set of search terms, definition of inclusion/exclusion criteria, characterization of the corpus, and synthesis of the findings. The paper closes with an evaluation of the method's strengths and weaknesses in the context of our field's characteristics.