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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.
Ramey et al. (Sat,) studied this question.