Systematic review and literature review

Systematic reviews for PhD students and research staff

"Systematic reviews aim to identify, evaluate and summarise the findings of all relevant individual studies. They adhere to a strict scientific design based on explicit, pre-specified and reproducible methods." (Centre for Reviews and Dissemination 2008, p5.)

"SLRs (systematic literature reviews) by their very definition differ from traditional literature reviews: their scope is to address a highly specific research question (e.g., 'what works' or 'what works best') for which evidence from the literature is sought. SLRs thus do not aim to provide what traditional literature reviews do: an assessment of a state of knowledge in a problem domain and identification of weaknesses and needs for further research." (Boell and Cecez-Kecmanovic 2015)

Systematic reviews follow an explicit protocol to identify ALL the available evidence on a particular research question. They are complex, high quality and rigorous reviews, which aim to:

  • Identify all relevant published and unpublished evidence on the specified review topic;
  • assess the quality of studies and select for inclusion;
  • synthesise the findings from all of the studies in an unbiased way, in order to present a balanced summary of the findings;
  • can take 18 months or longer to complete; and
  • are usually carried out by three or more researchers or a research team.

University of Bradford library offers a systematic reviews advisory service for PhD students, staff and researchers undertaking full systematic review.

References

Boell SK and Cecez-Kecmanovic D (2015) On being 'systematic' in literature reviews in IS.Journal of Information Technology. 30(2): 161-173.

Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (2009)Systematic Reviews: CRD's guidance for undertaking reviews in Healthcare.https://www.york.ac.uk/media/crd/Systematic_Reviews.pdf. Accessed 14 Aug 2019.