Literature Review: Systematic Review

Systematic review is defined as a process for identifying literature according to search and inclusion criteria in a specific field of study (Newel and Burnard 2006; Fun et al. 2022). A systematic review is scientific research per se with the clear objective of determining the state of the art for a field of study, as a result of analysing work done by third parties (Glass 1976; Hunt 1997). It must, therefore, be constrained, follow a line for the inclusion and exclusion of primary sources and avoid preconceived biases (Rosenthal and DiMatteo 2001; Cooper 2016). Systematic review must be differentiated from literature review (‘an assessment of a research block centred on a research question’) and literature search (‘the methodical research of all published sources on a scientific or technological subject’) (Day 2007).