How to conduct a good systematic literature review — To do the best research
Before going through the SLR conducting procedure Let’s see why we need to conduct SLR,
Identify the research Gap
When it comes to the major objective of the research is to do the novel thing or find out the novel thing, which means, that thing needs to find out the reality and facts which are unknown and not exposed. So we must study the current status of our research domain to identify the gap. That’s why this literature survey/ literature review comes into play.
In the above figure 1.0, you can see the flow chart of research conducting the general process and it is essential to conduct the broad literature survey at the very early stage of research not only that the opinion of research experts point out that it needs to conduct the literature review while ending the whole research study.
When we deep-dive into the literature review, there are two major types of literature reviews we can recognize that are:
- Conceptual literature: Consisting of concepts and theories that are associated with proposed research problems.
- Empirical literature: Find out and extract the information about previous research studies that are similar to the proposed research problem.
Then what is a systematic literature review and what are the differences between a literature review and a systematic literature review?
Systematic reviews pose a particular inquiry about the efficacy of treatment and respond by summarising data that fits a set of pre-specified criteria. And the major difference between those two is, that e systematic literature review is conducted nonbiased and transparently. But the literature review is focusing on the particular research topic fully narrowed and evaluates only the related aspects of the research domain.
The flow of conducting the systematic literature review:
Step 1:
Defining the research questions
The major objective of this research question is to depict a general view of the research studies. Further, it is essential to describe all and every research question and that helps to determine what aspect of the research problem this focuses on.
Step 2:
Study selection
This is one of the most important parts of this process. Through this process, we can collect the relevant research studies that are focusing on the same research problem or research domain. Generally, this process consists of four major sub-processes as mentioned below.
- Defining the terms and search string
This can be identified as the identification of the core of proposed research problems. Defining the key areas and terms of the research problem and then preparing the search string with relevant logic terms according to the data source.
- Select the source for searching
Find out the research studies there are many more data sources out there and some of the data sources are specialized for a particular research domain.
Ex: PubMed for the medical domain-related research
Sample data source:
- IEEE Xplore (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org)
- SpringerLink (https://link.springer.com/)
- Compendex (http://www.engineeringvillage2.org)
- ACM Digital Library (http://dl.acm.org)
- ACM Digital Library (http://dl.acm.org)
- Defining the inclusion and exclusion criteria
This means you need to identify what type of research studies need to be considered and what is rejected. To do this sort it helps to make the inclusion and exclusion criteria. For example, you can’t read a research paper that is published in a foreign language and you have to omit that paper, so you can define that as one of your exclusion criteria.
Ex :
Inclusion criteria:
- The research study needs to be concerned with all key research domains.
Exclusion criteria:
- The study does not have an abstract
- The study just published an abstract
- The study was not written in English
- The study is an older version of another study already considered
- The study is not a primary study, such as editorials, summaries of keynotes, workshops, and tutorials.
- Record the selected studies
All search results need to be stored anywhere without can easily access. And also the most important thing is that it needs to be separately recorded in a similar format. For example, it is better to record the publication year, keywords of studies, the title of study, abstract of the study, the conclusion of the study, and general overview of the study. You can record those details on excel sheets or whatever you wish.
Step 3:
Data extraction and synthesis.
After recording all the selected studies you must remove the duplicate results which you are getting from the data source. Then you can find out and extract more research studies that are relevant to your subjective research topics by snowballing. The means of snowballing the primary study references, as well as by directly searching publications from researchers and research groups of the studies previously selected. Snowballing is a process that checks if the selected studies cite other relevant studies, retrieves those studies and continues this process until no more relevant studies are found.
Step 4:
Report findings for each research question.
Step 5:
Record limitations and challenges that have been identified
Step 6:
Conclude the result and present the findings.
