Day 12 — Literature review — the systematic approach

Sounds like a boring topic? It shouldn’t be.

At least, not if you’re really into the topic that your studying. Well, it can still get a bit tedious. But the rewards are waiting, if you are willing to take the systematic approach.

Okay, so what’s the big deal about “systematic” approach?

First, let’s think for a moment about non-systematic version. To be honest, this is how I considered literature reviews are done in general. This approach relies on finding most relevant articles you can find and building your understanding and/or text of the literature review section based on that. So what’s wrong about that?

It is not a very robust approach, it turns out. It is not reproducible, because nobody reading your review knows exactly which articles you considered, why or why not, how you evaluated them. Besides, the narrative and findings can be twisted to tilt the “evidence” in one direction or another. Furthermore, do you say what is known and what is not known?

There is a more scientific approach. Let’s treat the literature review as if it was a scientific experiment in itself. Now, you will need to describe your data and explicate the methodology. It should be reproducible (both in terms of results and inferences that is conclusions). It should not only summarize, but also synthesize the findings. You should also address potential shortcomings.

Now, that’s what you can call a systematic literature review.

One the side note, I made an attempt to carry out such work for one of the pre-lecture assignments. I wanted to focus on articles specifically on the process of business model innovation. Results?

I found over 2000 articles, book chapters and conference papers that could be relevant. After further filtering ended up with roughly 1000. It took me whole Saturday to go through all the abstracts and select 70 that seemed matching the criteria for in-depth evaluation.

I managed to read 3 articles before the assignment was due.

It wasn’t a problem, because the proposals we are working on in the class are work-in-progress. It was a worthy exercise.

Aha, before I forget, here’s the book chapter which inspired this post: Briner, R. B. & Denyer, D. 2012. Systematic Review and Evidence Synthesis as a Practice and Scholarship Tool. In D. M. Rousseau (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Evidence-Based Management: Oxford University Press [PDF].