Table 2: Existing works on how to conduct SLR
Whilst these guides do provide straight-forward steps for conducting standard SLR, we believe they appear too general. Systematic literature review needs to be structured in the true sense of structure – specific and procedural in ways that allow for easy replication for similar outcomes/conclusion, which is the essence of evidence. For example, what are the pre-SLR preparations? What are the strategies that are used for searching the literature? Many more concerns need to be addressed/transparent and form part of methodological or studies given SLRs help in the systematic and exhaustive search for, collation/organization of relevant literature for analysis and dissemination of evidence?
In the IS discipline, gathering evidence has become paramount as data and information have increasingly become critical for every service improvement. SLRs aid the analysis and dissemination of evidence, using rigorous and transparent methods to generate empirically attained answers to focused research questions. Identifying all evidence relevant to the research questions whilst an essential component, is also a challenge of SLRs. Below, we present steps to follow when conducting SLR not limited to the discipline of IS.
Step 1: Pre-SLR preparations
3.1.1 Select belief and topic that align with your research interests.
To begin any literature research, researchers must first identify the need for such a research – topics and what problem(s) have been identified. In other words, researchers need to establish the purpose for such a research, thus, the summarising all extant information about a phenomenon to establish evidence capable of being generalized. Literature review is used to justify a need for research through A thorough identification of the need for the research sets the basis for step 2 below. In fact, it is the identification of research gaps that need to fill. To identify research gaps, a reasonable amount of reading is necessary to establish research gaps. When doing this reading, researchers tend to touch on wide range of extant literature, which enable them to narrow down to focused areas.
Conduct scoping reviews on published and unpublished (grey) literature
As the name suggests, scoping reviews are carried out to map out the extent of available literature on a chosen topic and their general overview, preparing grounds for SLRs without necessarily paying attention to quality and other specifics. Scoping reviews are focused on helping to answer the question: “What information has been presented on this topic in the literature?” and for gathering and assessing information prior to conducting a SLR (Munn et al., 2018). Thus, scoping review is used to derive specific questions to answer in SLR. Steps involved in conducting scoping review has been outlined by Munn et al. (2018).
Grey literature
Grey literature is literature or evidence not published in commercial publications or journals outlets. Among others, grey literature could range from theses and dissertations, academic materials, ongoing research, working papers, briefings, conference papers, discussion papers, government reports, and evaluations. There is debate among evidence-based researchers on the inclusion of grey literature when conducting SLR given their very nature – not peer-reviewed. We also need to be aware that more recently, Open Access journals are prone to publishing research that were rejected by non-open access journals for poor quality due to exorbitant article processing charges as they are increasingly doing so. We contend that the challenges of including grey literature in SLRs are not embedded in the quality of the materials, but rather in the search strategy. A carefully thought-out grey literature search strategy may be an invaluable component of a SLR by thusly reducing publication bias, increase reviews’ comprehensiveness and timeliness, and foster a balanced picture of available evidence (Paez, 2017). Grey literature is a key part of the evidence produced and used for public policy and practice as posit Lawrence, Houghton, Thomas, and Weldon (2014). The authors found that “the most important or very important resources that policy makers use are reports (81%), journal articles (75%), discussion papers (69%), briefings, reviews and guides (66%) and data sets (61%) demonstrating the relevance of grey literature in policy and practice. The findings of Lawrence and colleagues only intensifies the ongoing debate on whether to include grey literature or not in SLR. These said, the main challenges of including grey literature are how to search or locate them as with how they meet the methodological requirements of articles to be included. Whilst we do not necessarily subscribe to any camp of this debate, we believe a scoping review on grey literature will provide an invaluable insight into the broader evidence out there and help set some expectations in scoping review on published literature. The outcome from these reviews will inform a more relevant research question for the actual SLR.