How to conduct a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis in social sciences: A new practical guide for scholars

Over the past few decades, scholars' dedication to addressing global challenges, including social, economic, management, and environmental issues, has grown. This has led to a surge in scientific publications, especially review studies that aim to provide meaningful theoretical, practical, and policy-level implications for addressing these challenges. Despite this development, the rapid growth has raised concerns among researchers about the originality, transparency, reproducibility, reliability, and validity of the conclusions of these review studies. To help address this issue, particularly in the social sciences, this study contributes to the extant literature by presenting a detailed methodological framework that builds on current approaches and guides the conduct of high-quality systematic literature reviews and bibliometric analyses. To help scholars appreciate the differences among review types, we provide an overview of various review articles—including narrative reviews, systematic literature reviews, scoping reviews, integrative reviews, bibliometric analyses, meta-analyses, scientometric analyses, informetric analyses, webometrics, and patent analyses—and their characteristics to enhance understanding. We then demonstrate, through a practical example, how to integrate emerging digital innovation tools, such as VOSviewer and the R package Bibliometrix, to extract, process, and manage large datasets that can complement systematic literature reviews. More importantly, we illustrate, with an example, how scholars can leverage the specialized functions of bibliometric tools, such as co-word analysis, bibliographic coupling, word clouding, thematic mapping, and co-authorship (social collaboration) analysis, to identify research gaps and themes while adopting some of the best practices that can contribute to knowledge advancement within the social science field. For standard and high-quality reviews, we argue that this study will broaden scholars' and information managers' perspectives and promote a paradigm shift, guiding the growth and development of the academic landscape. It also serves as a resource for early-career researchers, seasoned scholars, journal reviewers, and policymakers, especially those new to this type of research.