The Systematic Literature Review
as a Research Genre
Judith Ramey
University of Washington
jramey@uw.edu
Abstract - 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.
Index Terms – research genre, systematic literature review.
INTRODUCTION
The “systematic literature review” as a research genre
was first formulated in the field of medicine in response
to the exponential growth in medical research–growth that
had made it almost impossible to synthesize findings on a
given topic so as to guide the formulation of new research
studies or inform practical treatment decisions [1].
Existing approaches to literature review had come to
appear biased, idiosyncratic, or even haphazard; the
systematic literature review was intended to improve the
process by synthesizing research in a transparent and
reproducible way to support evidence-based decision-
making.
The basic approach has since been adapted to serve the
differing needs of a wide range of disciplines, e.g.
management sciences, software engineering, and (though
rarely) technical communication. The key characteristics,
however, are the same: the reviewer makes explicit the
values and assumptions that will govern the review;
978-1-61284-779-5/11/$26.00 ©2011IEEE
978-1-61284-779-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
Priya Guruprakash Rao
University of Washington
priya.guruprakash@gmail.com
provides an audit trail of decisions and procedures for
inclusion of materials; and finally assembles the evidence,
collates and characterizes the findings, and presents the
results in a form useful to decision-makers.
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 (e.g. diverse research approaches
and methods) and infrastructures (e.g., unregulated
keyword practices). We conclude that, although the
method does not perform as predictably in our field as it
does in some others, it nevertheless can help us develop
more inclusive, robust, replicable literature reviews.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE METHOD
The formulation of the original systematic literature
review procedure in medicine was grounded in the
perception that literature reviews as they were then being
conducted offered incomplete coverage of the literature,
chose studies for inclusion based primarily on the author’s
biases, and interpreted the data in idiosyncratic ways.
There was a growing fear that the lack of rigor in
surveying the literature was leading to inaccurate
recommendations for action (in this case, medical
treatment plans). The proposed solution to the problem
was a system that would make completely explicit the
choices and assumptions underlying the review and
standardize the processes followed. It was felt that
providing reviews that were systematic, transparent, and
reproducible would enable practitioners to assess the
reliability of the conclusions reached and make decisions
on the best evidence available.
Systematic literature reviews are often paired with
meta-analysis: statistical processes for analyzing data
aggregated across two or more studies to achieve greater
reliability. Statistical meta-analysis is possible only
because there is a high degree of convergence in medicine
about the specifics of research design and data collection;
the “gold standard” research method in medicine, the
double-blind randomized controlled trial, produces data
that can be analyzed in this fashion across studies. One
important goal of the systematic literature review was to
draw conclusions on the best evidence available, so
systematic literature reviews privilege studies that use this
method. In the 1990’s the rules and procedures for doing
systematic literature reviews in medicine, often with
meta-analysis of the data, were agreed upon and then
formally codified by several organizations, notably the
Cochrane Collaboration (established in 1993) [2].
Systematic literature reviews were intended to guide
clinical practice; many examples of the effort to educate
practitioners about their best use can be found. For
instance, Tseng et al. [3] introduce urologists to
techniques for critically appraising such reviews to guide
their clinical decision-making. They emphasize that
“valid systematic reviews of high quality studies can
increase the confidence with which urologists and patients
make evidence-based decisions. Thus, urologists need to
recognize the inherent limitations understand the results,
and apply them judiciously to patient care.” This desire to
aid practitioners by providing rigorous evidence-based
guidance resonated across numerous other disciplines.
Independent of the need to apply results in practice,
many fields also found themselves similarly suffering
from fragmented, interdisciplinary bodies of research,
with literature reviews often distorted by the author’s
disciplinary “blinders” or implicit biases. (For instance,
technical communication research has frequently been
overlooked by scholars in related fields like
communication, business, or computer science.) Many
saw an answer to these problems of incompleteness or
bias in adapting the systematic literature review. But
rather than using the method to illuminate what was
known about a drug’s effects or the efficacy of a
treatment strategy, in fields such as the social sciences the
method was often used simply “to map and to assess the
existing intellectual territory, and to specify a research
question to develop the existing body of knowledge
further” ([4] p.85; [5]). Pettigrew [6] points out that
“systematic reviews have always included a wide range of
study designs and study questions, have no preferred
‘biomedical model,’ and have methodologies that are
more flexible than is sometimes realized” [p. 99].
The method was adopted in forms most like its original
in fields that (like medicine) privileged the positivist
scientific tradition and its norms of research; in other
fields with a lower degree of consensus about the forms
and characteristics of research, the systematic literature
review was modified to be less quantitative, less
aggregative, and more interpretivist.
For instance, in the software engineering domain, [5]
defined the goals of a systematic literature review
straightforwardly as “identifying research issues and gaps
in the literature.” Unertl et al. [7], in the field of
biomedical informatics, used the method to do an
extensively cross-disciplinary map of workflow research,
focusing explicitly on developing a conceptual framework
of workflow terminology. The use of the systematic
literature review in technical communication can be
represented by Isabelle Thompson’s interpretivist 1997
article [8] on women and feminism in technical
communication. The article used a systematic process to
select the body of literature to be considered, then
analyzed the literature using qualitative content analysis.
(Incidentally, published with that article was an
exchange between Thompson and another scholar that
illustrates some of the difficulties that can arise from a
rigorous application of the method. Beverly Sauer, one of
whose works was cited in Thompson’s review, in taking
issue with the way Thompson characterized her
arguments, suggests that Thompson had conflated two of
her publications, one of which was not cited in the
Thompson article [9]. In a response, Thompson points out
that she did not overlook the uncited article; it was
“regrettably not included because its title did not contain
any of the relevant keywords” [10].)
Tranfield et al. [4] provide an excellent comparison [p.
213] of the differences between medical research and
research in their own field of management sciences that
underlines the fundamental changes that the method
undergoes when imported into a different research culture
with different norms and goals. Specifically, they contrast
the quantitative, formulaic procedures of the original
practice with the qualitative, narrative, necessarily
emergent and interpretivist character of the practice in
their discipline.
But, whether close to the original form or heavily
adapted, systematic literature reviews (especially in the
age of e-libraries and extensive online bibliographic
databases) follow certain procedures intended to make
their coverage as complete and unbiased as possible and
to make their process explicit enough to be replicable. In
the case of the systematic literature review conducted by
the authors, we searched very widely across numerous
disciplines for articles that drew on evidence, derived
from data collection and analysis, to make
recommendations about designing for non- or semi-
literate users of mobile phones in the developing world. In
the following section, we detail our process, within the
frame of a description of the standard process.
THE SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW PROCESS
Following [4], we break the systematic literature review
process into three phases: planning the review,
conducting the review, and reporting and dissemination of
the findings. We limit our discussion to the first two
phases; in the following discussion, we first characterize
each step in the process, then discuss how we instantiated
it in our own study.
In the first phase, planning the review, the researcher
specifies the research question or topic to be explored.
Scholars typically go through several iterations of
defining the study, doing test runs of the emerging
definition (paired with selection of search keywords)
against bibliographic databases, and then refining the
scope or focus of the study to improve the results. As an
example of the complexities that can be encountered in
this phase, in our study, we initially intended to review
published work about the use of mobile phones
exclusively by non-literate populations in the developing
world; later, after test runs of our database search strategy
revealed that this focus might exclude some interesting
work, we broadened the focus to include semi-literate
people. The product of the planning phase is a precise
statement of the topic of the systematic literature review,
combined with a list of keywords that will actually effect
the search in the targeted bibliographic databases.
In the second phase, conducting the review, the scope,
focus, and other characteristics of the study are ultimately
codified in a review protocol—an exact, explicit
description of the steps that will be taken. The description
should be detailed enough to enable another researcher to
replicate the study. The review protocol is an “algorithm”
of databases to be searched, database search terms to be
used, and selection rules that will be applied to the
materials retrieved in the search. But the fact that it is
algorithmic doesn’t mean that it is simply mechanical;
again at this step, iterative work and even tinkering must
be done to craft a protocol that allows you to meet what
can turn out to be competing goals of the study.
We encountered an instance of this reality during the
identification of our keywords and exact search terms and
the identification of the bibliographic databases to be
searched. In our study, because the topic was highly
multi-disciplinary, we wanted to search as wide a range of
databases as possible to be sure that we avoided
disciplinary bias. But in practice, because the databases
had very different search features and behaviors, this
meant that we had to simplify our keyword search strings
and make them more generic, to ensure that they would
work on all of the databases we wanted to search (for the
specific search terms we ultimately used, see “Use of
Mobile Phones by Non-literate and Semi-literate People:
A Systematic Literature Review,” in this volume). This in
turn led to the identification of a larger number of “false
positives”—articles that matched our search terms but,
upon closer inspection, not our topic more narrowly
defined. So we accepted the burden of processing these
“false positives” in return for greater certainty that we had
searched the literature of as wide a range of disciplines as
possible.
Beyond the use of topic keywords, we used search
engine options to constrain the scope of our search in
several other ways. Given that mobile phone usage is
relatively new, we limited our search to articles published
between 2002 and 2010. We wanted to look at articles
that would be accessible to the widest audience; at
present, articles published in English are most widely
disseminated, so we restricted our search to articles in
English. But because we wanted to be sure that we
retrieved all relevant articles, we chose options in each
database for searching the full text of documents for our
keywords, as opposed to title and abstract only, which
again widened the search.
In the formal definition of the process, the set of all
articles retrieved by the search strategy is then subjected
to a step-by-step winnowing process defined by the
selection rules and steps defined in the review protocol.
To facilitate this process, we imported into Excel the
citations for the set of 536 articles retrieved by the search
described above. Before applying our study-specific
criteria for inclusion, we first suppressed all the exact
duplicate entries of articles that had been retrieved, which
left us with a set of 329 unique items.
One major goal of a classic systematic literature review
is to look at the best research available. In our field there
is no “gold standard” comparable to the status of the
method of large double-blind randomized controlled trials
in medicine. In our own study, we decided that the one
“quality” criterion available to us that would function
approximately the same way across all the disciplinary
literatures we surveyed was the process of peer review.
Therefore, we excluded all articles that had not undergone
formal blind peer review, (Other researchers, e.g. [5],
have also used this quality criterion.) This left us with a
set of 294 scholarly articles.
Next, we applied our selection rules related to the
content of the articles. In choosing these selection rules,
we adopted a fairly conservative stance aligned with the
method’s original focus on evidence-based research. We
required that articles report empirical studies, although we
were open to a wide range of methods, qualitative as well
as quantitative, within that broad epistemology. We used
four criteria for inclusion: (1) the article had to address
our two key ideas of mobile phone usage and low- or non-
literacy; (2) it had to be concerned with the user interface
of the device and usage patterns and behaviors, rather
than the technology itself; (3) it had to be based on
empirical research (data collection from a specified user
group); and (4) it had to describe the research
methodology in sufficient detail to demonstrate that the
findings were drawn from an analysis of evidence. As
Burrell and Toyama [11] say, “what helps most to instill
confidence is transparency and soundness of method. . . .
Explicit information—whom we talked to, where we
went, what we observed, what questions we asked . . . and
how we otherwise collected the data on which our
analysis rests—helps to increase confidence in the
research.” [p. 85]
Typically, a systematic literature review proceeds
through two or more levels of analysis. We followed this
strategy in applying the selection rules related to content.
Working with the set of 294 scholarly articles, we applied
these rules in a first pass to the titles and abstracts of the
articles, and then in a second pass to the full text of the
articles that had survived the title/abstract inspection. The
first pass excluded a very large share of the corpus—268
articles. Of the remaining 26 studies, a further 17 were
excluded after examination of the full text, leaving us
with nine articles that met all of our criteria for inclusion.
We recognize that there is an apparent anomaly in our
procedure; we arrived at our selection of articles through
full-text search, so retreating to an examination of only
the title and abstract at this stage may seem to open the
door to overlooking articles that actually would have met
our criteria, had we examined the full text. But we
concluded, after inspecting the titles and abstracts, that the
articles we rejected were quite far from our intended
focus. It appeared that their inclusion resulted from
passing references to our topic in the text, not any
substantial treatment of the topic.
To be sure that we had not overlooked any related
scholarship, we then expanded the corpus to include 13
citations in these nine articles that had not appeared in our
original search. But when we applied our selection rules
to these 13 new articles, all 13 were excluded. So we went
forward to the next phase with a corpus of nine articles.
The next step in a systematic literature review is “data
extraction,” a process of examining the items in the
corpus and recording their features of interest related to
the original research question or topic. The process is
usually done using a form—more or less a tally sheet—
that ensures that each item is covered in the same way.
(We accomplished this by specifying a column in our
Excel spreadsheet for each feature of interest.) We noted
the usual bibliographic items (author, title, publication
venue, pages, date of publication) as well as discipline or
domain addressed in the study (e.g., health); the location
of the study (e.g., India); the population (non- or semi-
literate, or both); the methodology (e.g., focus group); the
type of use of the phone (e.g. information creation,
information access, etc.); and presence/absence of design
recommendations.
We then proceeded to Tranfield’s [4] final step in
conducting a review—data synthesis. In this step, the goal
is to summarize and integrate the findings reported in the
corpus of articles reviewed. The most common form is a
narrative review, which can range in approaches from
more purely aggregative (e.g., summarizing the main
findings across the set of articles) to more interpretivist
(e.g., drawing out implicit theoretical linkages or
following inductive, hermeneutic processes). In our study,
we conducted a thematic analysis on the nine articles and,
focusing especially on the implications for practice,
summarized the design guidelines drawn by the
researchers from their investigations. We also conclude,
based on the very small number of articles that met our
criteria, that the field would benefit from the wider use of
“design ethnographic” and other methods intended to
generate evidence-based designs for this audience and
technology and from more systematic evaluative studies
of prototypes.
EVALUATION OF THE METHOD’S STRENGTHS AND
WEAKNESSES
In following the procedures of the formal systematic
literature review, we encountered many of the same
problems reported by other practitioners of the method.
Thus, we close with a consideration of the strengths and
weaknesses of the method.
I. Strengths
The best argument for using the systematic literature
review in our highly interdisciplinary field is the support
it provides for searching for resources outside of the
boundaries of our own literature. Unertl et al. [7] provide
an excellent example of the power of the method for
interdisciplinary topics. They themselves are located in
university departments of biomedical informatics and
medicine, but they wanted to build a unified conceptual
framework of the terminology of the study of workflow, a
study pursued in a very large number of disciplines.
Therefore, they searched databases that covered
engineering, basic sciences, healthcare, and social
sciences. The model that they constructed from this wide
base provides a flexible explanatory frame for workflow
studies across all these disciplines.
The method is also a good fit for our field because as a
discipline we value applied research and strive to build
bridges between our research and practitioner
communities. The method’s original impetus was to get
high-quality research results into practice (albeit in the
higher-stakes world of medicine). If we apply the method
in the spirit of that tradition, it is possible that we can
increase both the knowledge base of our practitioners as
well as their ability to take action with confidence based
on our research.
At the very least, the use of explicit methods allows
assessment of what was done and increases the ability to
replicate results or repeat the study (e.g., for later time
periods). It also creates greater confidence that the range
of work to date has been accounted for and thus increases
the credibility of the identification of gaps in the literature
that can motivate future research agendas. As Mulrow [1]
points out, the value of any single study is derived from
how it fits with and expands previous work, as well as
from the study's intrinsic properties.
II. Weaknesses we ran into a number of technical problems. Most of them
arose because of the differences between the search
The weaknesses of the method fall into two main
infrastructure in medicine and that in other fields,
categories: strategic problems and technical problems.
differences that are only confounded when doing a
These weaknesses can also be considered markers of the
systematic literature review on a topic that crosses
assumptions and biases built into the method itself; we
numerous disciplinary boundaries.
discover them primarily as we struggle to adapt a useful
In medicine, the National Library of Medicine created
method to a different research culture.
the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) vocabulary system
[15] in 1960. Currently, it governs not only search terms
Strategic problems
and the organization of medical databases, but also the
selection of keywords by authors of articles in all the
The goals of the systematic literature review grew
medical journals. It is a cornerstone of the knowledge
organically out of the needs and characteristics of the
infrastructure of the broad field of medicine.
discipline that created it: to analyze a complete body of
Most fields have nothing remotely as thorough and
research findings (that shared methodology, data types,
robust as the MeSH system. A number of disciplines are
etc.) on a given topic so as to support decision-making in
working toward such a system (for instance, by providing
the medical/health domain (“does this treatment work? At
a “closed vocabulary” of descriptors for members to
what dosage levels? How confident of this conclusion can
describe their specialization or for authors to keyword
I be?”). When we export the method, we can run into
their manuscripts), but without the relatively
problems.
homogeneous culture of medical research, the results are
We had a less fraught goal for our systematic literature
not as reliable or robust as MeSH. And of course the
review: we wanted to bring together what was known
situation is greatly complicated by attempting research
about the intersection of two topics–mobile-phone usage
that spans several disciplines with very different research
and non- or low-literacy–so as to support design decision-
cultures, levels of stability, and degrees of codification of
making. But by restricting our search to articles that
their disciplinary knowledge. This means that authors
focused on just the intersection of mobile phone usage by
often just make up the keywords they attach to their
non- or low-literates, we excluded a number of seminal
articles, with little understanding of how this will affect
articles about the uses of mobile phones in the developing
the retrieval of their work by search engines. Even if the
world (e.g., [12], [13]) that might have helped
keywords are chosen with care and precision, when they
readers/users of our systematic literature review frame the
are chosen at the author’s discretion, synonyms
topic in a broader understanding of the cultural context of
proliferate, and likewise interfere with retrieval.
phone usage in this setting. That is, designers in this space
Many problems also originate with the indexing
probably need to have a broader understanding of general
databases and digital libraries; there are large variances in
mobile-phone usage in the developing world, as well as a
features and implementations, and often either no
broader understanding of oral-culture characteristics (for
keyword controlled vocabularies, or sketchily
instance, strategies for learning), to make good choices
implemented ones.
about mobile interaction design for these users. A
Brereton et al. [5] talk in very helpful detail about the
literature review that selectively included what were in
encounter with this problem in the field of software
the researchers’ judgment the best articles to provide that
engineering. As Brereton explains, “the lack of
“survey” knowledge might have met our goals better.
conformity, especially in terms of searching facilities,
Also, in our case, our criterion requiring that a paper
across commonly used digital libraries is a hindrance to
include a description of a formal study might have
systematic literature reviewers in the discipline.” [p. 582]
conflicted with the need to be flexible in the choice of
It is worth exploring his encounter with this problem in
research methods when working with a rural, oral culture
more detail, because we also encountered it and so will
[14]. Most research methods used in our field were
any other researcher doing even modestly
formulated in the Western, literate, developed world; the
interdisciplinary research.
evidence is growing that often they simply can’t work in a
In his study, the search terms proposed in the protocol
radically different context. So, if a study uses a radically
were “applied in two key electronic databases:
informal investigative tool or “data collection” format, it
IEEExplore4 and the ACM Portal.5. We found that the
might well be a mistake to leave it out of an “evidence-
search engines of the two databases are organised around
based” analysis.
completely different models. It is therefore impossible to
make direct use of the same set of search terms for both
Technical problems
engines.” He goes on to point out that “the ACMPortal
does not support complex logical combination, although it
Like many others who have adapted the systematic
is supported by IEEExplore.”
literature review to interdisciplinary research questions,
 When we encountered this problem, we addressed it
differently, by using search-engine features that could be
used across all our databases and normalizing our search
terms into forms stripped down to the minimal form that
would work with all the databases we wanted to use. As
we pointed out earlier, the trade-off was that we had to
process a large number of false positives. Brereton
decided to use different sets of search terms for each
database, “with each of the search terms being derived
from the terms originally proposed in the protocol.” He
concludes that “current software engineering search
engines are not designed to support systematic literature
reviews. Unlike medical researchers, software
engineering researchers need to perform resource-
dependent searches.”
The problem is exacerbated by a lack of agreed-upon
professional standards about the structure and content of
titles and abstracts. It is usually not possible to judge the
content of a study (and thus its relevance to the topic of
the search) from a review of the title and abstract alone.
This is a critical problem because the data-reduction
strategy almost universally used in systematic literature
reviews is the use of levels of analysis; a very early step
(if not the first step) is to screen titles and abstracts for the
keywords derived from the statement of the topic.
CONCLUSION
We conclude that the formal systematic literature
review can be very useful, but only for high-priority or
controversial topics because it is exacting and laborious to
execute properly. Although the method does not perform
as predictably in our field as it does in some others
(notably medicine, the discipline that created it), it
nevertheless can help us develop inclusive, robust,
replicable literature reviews for the purposes of surveying
the state of the art on a given topic, identifying gaps in the
literature, and proposing future research agendas.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Judith Ramey is professor and former chair of the
Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering
(formerly Technical Communication) at the University of
Washington, adjunct professor in Industrial and Systems
Engineering and the Information School, and Director of
the UW Laboratory for Usability Testing and Evaluation
(LUTE). She is a Fellow of the Society for Technical
Communication and recipient of that society’s Jay R.
Gould Award for excellence in teaching and Ken Rainey
Award for excellence in research. She is also the 2011
recipient of the IEEE PCS Ron Blicq Award for lifetime
contributions to technical communication education. Her
research interests include usability research methods, the
mobile user experience, and research practices and
epistemologies.
Priya Guruprakash Rao is a user experience designer at
Amazon.com. She holds an MS from the Department of
Human Centered Design and Engineering at the
University of Washington and an MS in Computer
Applications from University of Chennai, India. Priya is
passionate about simplifying interfaces and champions
frustration-free user experience. She has 9 years of
experience in the computer industry and has supported a
number of international clients. Priya has expertise in user
research, user centered design, and usability studies.