RECONSTRUCTING THE GIANT: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF RIGOUR IN

DOCUMENTING THE LITERATURE SEARCH PROCESS

Literature review has played a very vital role in the field of research. Literature review aims to (1)
survey the literature in your chosen field of study, (2) synthesizes the information in the literature
into a summary, (3) analyses critically the information gathered through identifying gaps in
knowledge, by exposing limitations of theories and points of view and by creating areas for further
research purposes and controversial areas. (4) Literature review also presents the literature in an
organized manner.

The paper Reconstructing the Giant: On The Importance of Rigor in Documenting the Literature
Search Process vehemently argued that the process of literature searching must be
comprehensively described.

Comprehensively documenting the literature searching process means making the literature and
the research valid and/or credible and reliable. In a world were information technology is vastly
evolving, it is deemed a necessity that every procedure used in conducting researches and gathering
scientific information must be properly and comprehensively documented. If the processes are
properly documented, the entire research will be replicable as the other scientists who will conduct
the same researches will be able to trace the tracks as to where the literatures of the scientific
papers came from.

In the field of management, in order to achieve and maintain a Quality Management System
(QMS), the QMS’ rigorous processes must be properly documented – every procedure that the
management undertakes in relation to continually increasing the economic and QUALITY of
PRODUCTS and Services must be rigorously documents. Same also with conducting researches,
the processes that the scientists undertake in order to come up with a scientific paper has to be
properly documented. In searching and gathering of literature data, the processes must also be
documented.

Documenting searches will help the scientist to keep track of what he has done to avoid repeating
unproductive searches, reuse successful search strategies for future papers, describe search process
for manuscripts and justify the search process. Having no proper documentation of the search
process, for me, may lead to the inability of the scientist to justify or validate his scientific or
research output.

However, according to the paper, many scientists failed to comprehensively document the
literature search process due to the following circumstances:

1. IS researchers cannot refer to established guidelines for documenting the literature search
process
2. IS researchers are not fully aware of the importance of rigorously documenting the
literature search. It is the conditions of the publication process that often prevent a detailed
description of the literature search.
Researchers cannot do “a” probably because the scientists were not able to have full access on the
guidelines in documenting the literature search process. Many scientists are used to searching for
literature and directly summarizing such without documenting the searches that were done for
what is important for them is the idea of the literature not the way that they’ve gone through prior
to coming up with the literature reviewed.
1. It is unarguable that there are many journals that do not require documentation of the
literature searches and do not even require literature review. For example, the International
Journal for of Engineering Sciences & Research Technology (IJESRT) only require
Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion, Conclusion and
Recommendations, and References to be included in the paper for publication. I therefore
agree on the third proposition of the authors of the paper Reconstructing the Giant: On The
Importance of Rigor in Documenting the Literature Search Process which states that it is
the conditions of the publication process that often prevent a detailed description of the
literature search. But on the other hand, I prefer that this position would be the first one.
The researchers may be aware of the guidelines in the documentation of the literature
searches but they chose not to include it in the scientific papers that they published
considering that the journals do not require it. The researchers may be aware of the
significance of documenting the search processes, but due to the circumstance that the
journals did not require the documentation, they just did not include it in their paper.

As an IS researcher, I would like to recommend the following propositions:

1. Publications or Journals must require the inclusion of the documentation of the literature
searchers in the papers to be published;
2. Publications or Journals must not limit the number of pages needed for a paper to be
published. The limitation of the number of pages for papers to be published is one of the
reasons why scientists prefer not to include the literature review and the documentation of
literature search processes in papers for publication.
3. Publications or Journals must adhere to the principles of publishing ethics to maintain the
credibility of published scientific papers.

References:
https://www.rlf.org.uk/resources/what-is-a-literature-review/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-quality-management-system-even-small-jenny-
kilburn-/
https://guides.library.vcu.edu/health-sciences-lit-review/document