Context
Literature reviews produce valuable insights by:
- describing a phenomenon (narrative review)
- understanding a phenomenon (scoping review)
- explaining a phenomenon (realist review)
- testing a theory (meta-analysis)
Approach
Qualitative analysis of papers related to philosophy of science
Results
Different concepts are crucial to understand if you want to build a good systematic literature review:
- systematicity: a disposition towards organized, methodical, and orderly inquiry that uses various methods and processes to search, screen, assess, analyze and interpret relevant information with a view to achieving a set of specific research goals
- transparency: the extend to which review process is made explicitly
- reproducibility: it has been defined as
- the ability to re-perform the methods of a research, but allowing different results
- the ability to duplicate the results of a research using the same methods or dataset
- replicability: a study is replicable if the results of a completely new and independent study that use different data and methods corroborate the results of the previous one
The element of a literature review that should be reproducible may vary from discipline to discipline
To solve the problem of having multiple definitions for reproducibility, the author propose to use repeatability to indicate the ability to re-perform the methods of a research. This is especially important in the IT field