∎ A Guide to Conducting a Standalone Systematic Literature Review - Okoli - 2015 - Reading Session 202402071220

Published Aug 23, 1970

# Annotations from 𖠫 A Guide to Conducting a Standalone Systematic Literature Review - Okoli - 2015

Petticrew and Roberts (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006) explain that the systematic review is essentially a tool; hence, one needs to ask whether it is right for a given job. Before ever embarking on the task of conducting a SLR, they recommended first searching for any existing systematic reviews. In particular, they suggest that the review consider the current evolutionary state of the research field: a systematic review is not very valuable early on when limited studies might be available because they might not represent the best knowledge that more time might give.
A systematic review would be inappropriate if the research question is too vague or broad (which would yield hundreds of very different studies) but also if the question is too narrow (which would yield too few studies to be helpful).
For cases when a systematic review might be inappropriate or infeasible, they suggest numerous alternate kinds of less ambitious literature reviews, such as scoping reviews or “state-of-the-art” reviews.