Quality research is about building your own around the existing work of others. The literature review is a critically important chapter of your dissertation or thesis. It is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic and provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research.
There are several types of literature reviews which you can work with but they have to be relevant to your studies. One such literature review type is a Systematic Literature Review.
What is a Systematic Review?
A systematic review is a highly rigorous review of existing literature that addresses a formulated question. The review systematically searches, identifies, selects, appraises, and synthesises research evidence relevant to the question using a methodology that is explicit, reproducible, and leads to minimising bias. Systematic reviews are regarded as the best source of research evidence. Systematic reviews are crucial in the field of evidence-based medicine but are also highly valued in other fields.
A systematic review is more exhaustive than a literature review as it includes both published and unpublished literature, often called grey literature. Grey literature is a significant part of a systematic review and adds value to the review. This is because it includes more current than published literature and is likely to have less publication bias. It includes unpublished studies, reports, dissertations, conference papers and abstracts, governmental research and ongoing clinical trials.
Systematic Review vs. Literature Review
A literature review is a type of review that uses a less systematic and formal approach than a systematic review. Typically, an expert in a topic will qualitatively summarise and evaluate previous work, without using formal, explicit methods.
Systematic Review vs Scoping Review
A scoping review uses transparency and repeatable methods to minimise bias similar to a systematic review. However, it is not a type of systematic review. The most important difference between the two is the goal: a scoping review explores a topic instead of answering a specific question. Sometimes, scoping reviews are an exploratory preparation step for a systematic review and sometimes they are standalone projects.
When to Conduct a Systematic Review
You can use systematic review if you want to answer a question about the effectiveness of an intervention such as a medical treatment.
In order to conduct a systematic review one needs the following:
- A precise question, usually about the effectiveness of an intervention. The question needs to be about a topic that has previously been studied by multiple researchers.
- A team of at least three people
- Access to databases and journal archives
- Time. It is a time-consuming process and can take up to six months of full-time work.
- Bibliography, word-processing, spreadsheet and statistical software.
Pros and Cons of Systematic reviews
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Best Approach to Conducting a Systematic Review
The essence of a systematic review lies in being systematic. A systematic review involves a detailed analysis of a huge mass of literature. To ensure that you’re working is efficient and effective, you should follow a clear process:
Develop a research question
The research question is one of the most important components of a systematic review. You will get to know about the search strategy, screening criteria, data extraction protocol and the final report through a well-defined systematic review question. One of the great ways to define the research question is to use a framework like PICO and begin your research.
Screen
This is often the most time-consuming part of the systematic review process. Related studies are gathered and depending on the methods of the research team, they might start by screening level, researchers will decide whether the reference is relevant or if it is not relevant.
Full-Text Retrieval
In this stage of the systematic review protocol, researchers will gather the full-text documents identified in their title and abstract screening.
Data Extraction/Appraisal
The researcher captures repeating data sets in a reportable format in this step. This is also where the work is double-checked with some sort of quality assessment tools
Reporting
Researchers have to produce the reference lists, outcomes and summary table, PRISMA reports and meta-analyses where they are appropriate. This will also file for or submit an article for peer review.
Update the review as needed
This involves monitoring for new references on the topic and adjusting your research question if needed per the new information available.
