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Libraries and Learning Skills

Writing a Systematised Review in Social Sciences

 

Starting your systematised literature review can be a daunting task. The video below shows you how to approach choosing your research question and formulating inclusion and exclusion criteria. 

Choosing your research question.

To complete a successful review you will need to choose a appropriate question. As a general rule, your question needs to be closed and specific rather than general and open. In the business field, however, systematised questions are more open than some other disciplines. Your question should be:

  • Well-defined to successfully identify the appropriate literature.
  • Specific and have a clear focus

Too much or too little?

Students often think they have to think up an exact question before they consult literature, this can cause the following two problems:

  1. Finding no relevant literature on a topic: often a topic is so niche on student may struggle to embed their research into an existing field of literature. For example, if your question references Lincolnshire you are highly unlikely to find the research you need to complete a successful review.
  2. Finding too much literature: often a key question has been directly answered already. When this happens you may struggle to find an original angle or wording.

When this happens there is a tendency to panic!

Don’t panic: instead, the below exercises are a good way to start:

Exercise One

1. Pick a broad topic of interest — some examples might be “leadership”, “phonics” or “forest schools”

2. Start consulting literature by carrying out some scoping searches in Google Scholar or a subject specific database. Begin by reading broadly then focus in on specific areas; let the literature shape and form your question.

3. Start to refine a more specific question based on your scoping searches. Your question will be specific enough when you can identify a clear body of literature (not too much or too little) that fits the scope of your question.

Exercise Two

  1. Type your area of interest followed by “systematic review” into Google Scholar or a subject specific database.
  2. Browse the titles to get a feel for the questions that work for your chosen topic. You will not be able to copy these questions, but this exercise can be useful in gauging how other systematised reviews in your field have been approached and written.

Some of our most popular social science databases can be found below. A full list can be found in our A-Z databases page.

When you are choosing your question, you may like to use the PICO framework. Predominantly used in healthcare, PICO stands for: 

P     Population / Patient / Problem What population or patient group are the investigators working with? It can also refer to the problem being investigated

I

 Intervention What intervention is the intervention group receiving?

C             

 Comparison / Control Is there a control group, and if so, what intervention is the control group receiving?

O

Outcome

 What outcomes are being measured and how?

 

Taken from: How To Use The PICO Framework To Aid Critical Appraisal: https://casp-uk.net/pico-framework/

 

When you have formulated your question and done some scoping searches, you need to formulate your inclusion and exclusion criteria. This formally delineates the literature you will include and exclude in your review. This information needs to be presented in your write up (normally as a table).

The nature of your criteria will depend on your question (no two questions are the same), but some key variables to consider might be:

  • Geographic area (UK, European, or worldwide focus?)
  • Methodology (quantitative or qualitative?)
  • Date of publication (last five or ten years?)
  • Demographic (are you going to focus, for example, on a specific type of consumer?)
  • Quality of studies (are you going to focus or peer reviewed articles, or could you use grey literature?)

Here are two examples of inclusion and exclusion criteria from published reviews.

Taken from: Olsson, J., Hellström, D. and Pålsson, H. (2019) Framework of last mile logistics research: A systematic review of the literature. Sustainability, 11(24) 7131. Available from https://doi.org/10.3390/su11247131 [accessed 2nd February 2024].

 

Taken from: Viu-Roig, M. and Alvarez-Palau, E.J., (2020) The impact of E-Commerce-related last-mile logistics on cities: A systematic literature review. Sustainability, 12(16) 6492. Available from https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166492 [accessed 2nd February 2024]