Guidelines and open-source toolbox for systematic literature reviews in the field of urbanism

Literature reviews are key components of academic research, to gather, examine and assess existing knowledge. Systematic literature reviews (SLR) in particular help with summarising, analysing and interpreting the evidence on a topic in an organised, transparent and reproducible way. However they can be long and difficult to implement in large interdisciplinary fields such as urbanism. In this paper, we propose a set of guidelines and tools to design and automate several steps of systematic literature reviews, so that urbanists with limited experience in SLR can concentrate on the tasks of reading, understanding and synthetizing the knowledge collected. We operationalise our guidelines with recent examples from the field of urbanism and reusable snippets of R code.