The art of knowing how to write a systematic literature review must be learned, and depends heavily on how well you have acquired the tools of this method beforehand. To ensure the success of your endeavor, I provide you with 7 steps on how to write a systematic literature review in this article.
With these 7 steps, you will become familiar with this particular method and be able to structure your methodological approach from beginning to end. It may sound like a lot, but with such a demanding method, these 7 steps are all necessary.
So grab your favorite organic lemonade, sit back, and enjoy the show.
What is a Systematic Literature Review?
A systematic literature review is a standalone scientific study, meaning it is not intended to be written as part of a larger academic piece. It is confusing, because the background section in a paper or thesis are also often called ‘literature review’.
I will link a tutorial about writing a regular literature review here once it is produced.
What this tutorial is about is the method of conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) or systematic review.
This form of review originated in medicine, where a large number of small studies and results often need to be summarized. However, the systematic literature review has since proven itself useful in almost all other disciplines as well.
You should also not confuse it with other forms of review articles, such as the narrative review, a meta-analysis, and several other forms.
The narrative review, for example, is written from an expert’s perspective and weighs some sources more than others to build the intended argument better.
The focus of a meta-analysis is interested in combining the results of statistical calculations from many individual studies.
But let’s get back on how to write a systematic literature review. The most important characteristic of such a study is in the word “systematic.”
You might have heard that the of a research design is particularly important. In a systematic literature review, you are trying to achieve just this.
If other researchers would want to replicate the analysis of the literature that you did, they get all the information they need from you.
Objectives of a systematic literature review
In a systematic literature review, the literature search is carried out according to a predetermined protocol, so that ideally the same results are obtained upon repeated application.
A systematic literature review can pursue three different objectives:
- To develop an understanding of a research area and to explain a topic in detail.
- To provide researchers with a condensed overview of a large number of publications on a topic.
- To be used as a basis for theory development or testing.
To enable you to create such a review, we will now look at the 7 steps on how to write a systematic literature review. These steps are based on my own experience, as well as the work of vom Brocke et al. (2015) and Durach et al. (2017).
Step 1: Get familiar with the topic
This you can do it in a totally unsystematic way.
Before you can start a systematic literature search, you need to have a basic understanding of the topic. This can be a bit of a challenge, as you are writing the review to achieve this understanding in the first place.
However, you will have an easier entry into the systematic part of your work if you just read in an unsystematic way first (Watch on YouTube: How to Read Papers Fast and Effectively) This is important to be able to come up with the correct search terms later. Here are three things to keep in mind:
- Consider references outside your discipline.
- Look at encyclopedias, Wikipedia, or popular science texts.
- Set a time or page limit to avoid losing track of your objective.
Step 2: Know the reasons for your review
Your work will only be considered good if you can clearly argue why you have chosen a systematic literature review approach and what added value it brings to you and your readers.
If you are not sure where to start, read the methodological descriptions of other successfully published review articles. This will give you an idea of how you can argue your case.
The argumentation you should follow in the methods section also depends on the objective of your work. So, consider which of the aforementioned objectives applies to you the most and argue based on that why you chose a systematic literature review approach and how you established certain criteria for your search process.
Step 3: Define your search terms
Now we come to the “systematic” part on how to write a systematic literature review. Here you have endless possibilities for how you can structure your literature search.
To simplify things a bit, von Brocke et al. (2015) define four dimensions:
Process: Depending on the objective of the literature search, it can either be sequential, meaning “in one go”, or iterative, meaning in multiple passes at different times.
Sources: This includes the databases you select for your search or other metrics such as the frequency of citations, etc. The simplest option is usually to use the most important databases in your field and argue that they cover the research literature on your topic as well as possible.
Coverage: Should your review represent as much literature as possible or focus on the most important works?
Search techniques: These include keyword search, forward and backward search.
Step 4: Define your search parameters
Now we are already in the search process and the previously mentioned techniques.
Typically, you start with a keyword search, that means that you now identify your keywords and several combinations of them. You should choose these in such a way that the search for these keywords spits out the research you actually want.
Let’s say, for example, you want to write a review on “Digital Assistants in Medicine”. Here you would need different variants of “digital assistant”, for example, “conversational agent”, “virtual assistant”, or comparable terms. Depending on the focus, you would then combine this term with “care” or “clinical” or comparable terms.
Step 5: Identify relevant papers
After conducting a systematic literature search and narrowing down the selection of articles and contributions, you need to identify those that are most relevant to your topic and research question.
You can do this by, for example, reading the abstracts of all the papers and eliminating those that don’t quite fit the topic. Of course, this should also be done as systematically as possible.
What remains is a reasonable number of relevant articles that you should read thoroughly and include in your analysis. I am often asked about how many papers one should put in the analysis.
You cannot really predict that because you need to consider all the results you get.
By tightening or loosening your selection criteria, you can vary the number of relevant articles you include in your analysis. But keep in mind: Relevant remains relevant, and sometimes a systematic review yields 10 relevant papers, and sometimes 50. You can still decide how deeply you want to delve into the analysis, depending on the time available to you and the expectations your supervisor has.
In most cases, a thorough analysis with little relevant literature is more valuable than a superficial analysis with many less relevant articles.
Always stick to the most important papers in your analysis. You can usually recognize these by how often they are cited and where they are published.
Step 6: Justify every step of your search and selection process
In a systematic literature review, enormous importance is placed on how consistently the research design was conceived and implemented.
This includes justifications for every step you took. For example:
- Why were these and those databases selected?
- Were certain disciplines, journals, or conferences excluded and why? Which keywords are relevant, and how were they selected?
- Could certain techniques, such as a backward search, have improved the search?
Step 7: Visualize your process
In a systematic literature review, it is essential to use tables and figures extensively. In the analysis, for example, it is often helpful to create a large table of all relevant articles and create a kind of matrix.
Here you can graphically represent which content aspects or research results are present or not in each article.
This way, you can identify areas that have not been sufficiently researched or recognize other patterns that can serve as the result of your work.
Here is an example from Montenegro et al. (2019):
It also helps to create a graphical representation of your search process, for example with a flowchart. Here you can show each step individually. I would place this figure in the section that describes your methodological approach.
Phew, that was a lot of information.
I sincerely hope that you haven’t lost your interest in a systematic literature review. It really offers unique opportunities and can become a truly high-quality thesis or study. If you have any questions about this type of scientific work, please ask them in the comments, I’ll be happy to answer them!
I wish you a systematic rest of the day and say goodbye until next time!