3.9 Step 9: Discussion and conclusion
When aligning or relating discussion in IS research to that of medical
discipline as we are advocating for in this study, it implies the need
for not only a simple account of facts, but rather a logical
presentation of arguments of available facts (Jenicek, 2006). It implies
a thorough evaluation of extant literature from IS implementations or
cases. Remember, “no one has thought as long and as hard about your
study as you have” and that your discussion should start off with the
major findings of the study (Şanlı, Erdem, & Tefik, 2013, p.1239). The
fundamental function of the discussion for systematic literature review
is to lead readers in understanding the main findings from your review.
This emanates from the results and synthesis exercises above and
implications for practice theory, literature, and policy. Thus, your
discussion will seek to raise and answer questions that include but are
not limited to the extent to which your findings or evidence challenge
existing literature, theory, practice, and policy. When interpreting
your findings, ensure to situate and relate back to the overall results
of the study, how the findings agree, disagree and or complement with
existing body of knowledge or literature (Masic, 2018). Whilst highly
tempting, it is important that both the results and synthesis are not
repeated here. The focus of this section is to summarise the key
findings, highlighting the strength/weakness for each of the main
outcomes. Remember the results above only presented the characteristics
without detailing their implications for the study whilst considering
alliterative explanation of the findings. As such, at this stage,
authors now have the room to discuss in detail and describe the place of
their findings from the results and synthesis of literature and
demonstrate how the results build on existing evidence or body of
knowledge and suggestions on how to use/apply the results in the context
of specific use settings and generalization. In fact, when we relate
This section also discusses any identified limitations of study and how
that might impact/have impacted the findings of the study. These
sections also point out the implications as with suggestions for further
studies.
Conclusion
First, this paper advocated for and has demonstrated the need for
adapting IS research to that of medical/health research and echoed the
growing importance of evidence-based research influenced by increased
use of IS in the healthcare domain using SLR as the case. The paper did
this by looking at the commonalities between IS medical/health domains
in various contexts, which included the nature of the disciplines of IS
and medicine/health, research culture, research questions, interventions
and evaluations, research designs, theory and aims of policy, methods
literature review. Secondly, the paper emphasised and made a new call
for increased importance of literature review studies particularly SLR
studies as a gold standard for gathering evidence and for the purpose of
generalizability of findings. We then provided a step-by-step guide on
how to conduct systematic literature review including the use of grey
literature. To include grey literature in SLR, we suggested that a
scoping review on grey literature be conducted. The outcomes of scoping
literature review on grey literature provides the extent of evidence
available in non-published materials, which can be validated with
scoping review on mainstream literature.