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.