Business

A common procedure within the area of business management and accounting follows a systematic literature review approach together with a bibliometric analysis in order to identify the relevant papers and the most important themes in the field. (see, Bartolacci et al., 2020; Caputo et al., 2018; Kumar et al., 2019; Pizzi et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2018). 

Methodology adopted in the systematic literature review

The systematic review follows a rigorous, replicable method that minimises bias (Tranfield et al., 2003). This example adopts a systematic literature review based on the three steps outlined by Tranfield et al. (2003):

⁃Planning the review: establishing the research question and developing a review protocol

⁃Conducting a review: searching and selecting relevant papers using the inclusion and exclusion criteria

⁃Reporting and dissemination: data extraction and analysis

 

This approach is found in other systematic reviews (see,  Boiral et al., 2018a, Boiral et al., 2018b; Delbufalo, 2012; Klewitz and Hansen, 2014; Silva et al., 2019). The aim of the systematic literature review is to detect the main studies of the field of knowledge and identify the possible research gaps (Tranfield et al., 2003).

 

Refer to Denyer, D., & Tranfield, D. (2009). Producing a systematic review. In D. A. Buchanan & A. Bryman (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational research methods (pp. 671–689). Sage Publications Ltd.

 

Key research questions defined:

RQ1: Which are the main peer-reviewed publications within the current literature in this field?

RQ2: Who are the most influential authors and journals in this field?

RQ3: What is the intellectual structure of research in this field?

RQ4: Which are the main research themes in this field?

RQ5: How can the research move forward in this field?

Databases

List the databases appropriate to search for your research topic below.

• Your supervisor or another academic contact might recommend databases or journals.
• You should also contact your Faculty Librarian for recommendations.
• The Library Guides (available from the Library homepage) also suggest the best resources for your subject area.

Search terms

The first phase of the systematic review process is creating the most effective search string of terms. Read other SLR articles on how authors have crafted their most effective search keywords.  Here is an example from Grover, I., O’Reilly-Wapstra, J., Suitor, S., & Hatton MacDonald, D. (2023). Not seeing the accounts for the forest: A systematic literature review of ecosystem accounting for forest resource management purposes. Ecological Economics, 212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107922

Search string of terms: (“System of Environmental-Economic Accounting” OR “SEEA”) AND (“ecosystem accounts”) AND (“forest ecosystem” OR “forest estate” OR “forestry”) AND (“timber” OR “harvest”). Search string terms included both (“System of Environmental-Economic Accounting” and “SEEA”) to capture publications that may use full name or only the acronym in isolation. To focus on SEEA EA consistent applications in forest ecosystem contexts, the search had to return with one of the following: (“forest ecosystem” OR “forest estate” OR “forestry”) as “forest” is too broad a search term. The terms (“timber” OR “harvest”) were included to narrow the result field to publications that evaluated forest ecosystems where timber processing was occurring. 

Summarise your research topic in one or two sentences:

What are the main search terms you can identify in your research topic?:

What are synonyms, alternative spellings for those terms?

You can now start searching the databases you've listed using the search terms you've come up with. At this point you are just exploring the literature. When you find relevant articles look for any good search terms you might have missed, and add them to your list above. Then try adding those new terms to your searches. Keep going until you've identified all the relevant search terms, i.e. you're not coming across any new terms you haven't already identified.

If you're not sure about using the databases, or don't seem to be finding the results you were expecting, get in touch with your Faculty Librarian.

When you're finished your scoping searches you’ll have a complete list of terms to search on:
 

Database searches
Search strategy

You can now make a few simple modifications to your list of search terms to help improve the results you'll get from database searches.
 

Truncation

Allows you to use a symbol (such as an asterisk) so your search will pick up alternative word endings.
For example, searching on diet* will also find results which use the words diets, dietary, dietetics, and dietician.
 

Phrase searching
If you only want results which mention a particular phrase (i.e. the terms must appear together and in the right order) put double quotes around the phrase, e.g. "value based marketing".

Group the synonyms together

You'll notice that a lot of the search terms you've identified are alternative ways of saying the same thing, i.e. they're synonyms for the same concept. Group these using OR, and brackets:
 

Join it all together

Put AND between your concepts to join them together.
 

This is a good representation of your ideal search, that most databases will understand. This is called a ‘search strategy”.

Subject headings

Many databases have a standardised system of subject headings. Each paper that is about a particular concept will be tagged with the same subject heading, regardless of the terminology the author has used. Examples of databases which have a thesaurus feature are EBSCO Business Source Complete and Proquest. Searching the Business Source Complete thesaurus for 'value based marketing' reveals that the closest subject heading is 'value-based management'. If the database you're searching has a thesaurus, search it to find which of your search terms has a standardised subject heading, and incorporate these in your search.

Bibliometrix package in R is an open-source tool for quantitative research in scientometrics and bibliometric method analysis.  Bibliometrix package provides various routines for importing bibliographic data from SCOPUS, Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science, PubMed, Digital Science Dimensions and Cochrane databases, performing bibliometric analysis and building data matrices for co-citation, coupling, scientific collaboration analysis and co-word analysis. Developed by Massimo Aria and Corrado Cuccurullo.

Covidence - is a web-based software platform that streamlines the production of systematic reviews and other research reviews that require screening citations and full text, assessing risk of bias, or extracting study characteristics and outcomes.(via Bond Library - use Bond email for creating an account). Read: Systematic review automation tools improve efficiency but lack of knowledge impedes their adoption: a survey

VOSviewer - is a bibliometric software tool for constructing and visualizing networks. These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature. (Open Access)

As stated in Gutiérrez-Nieto et al., 2022, bibliometric studies perform statistical analyses of scientific publications (Pritchard, 1969) to obtain objective, impartial information on a specific field of research (Zupic and Čater, 2015). Moral-Muñoz et al. (2020) analyze different software tools for conducting bibliometric analysis: Bibexcel, Biblioshiny, BiblioMaps, CiteSpace, CitNetExplorer, SciMAT, Sci2 Tool and VOSviewer. The choice of the VOSviewer software was motivated by the quality and the visualization of the final rendering and by the variety of the supported format for the input and the output of data. VOSviewer is a tool for creating maps based on bibliographic databases and for visualizing and exploring these maps. It has been developed in Java programming language. It can be freely downloaded from www.vosviewer.com (Van Eck and Waltman, 2010).

Publish or Perish is a desktop application that analyzes academic citations using data from Google Scholar. It can also use a variety of data sources to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents a range of citation metrics, including the number of papers, total citations and the h-index.  Developed by Anne-Wil Harzing.

Jamovi - is a free and open-source graphical user interface for the R software that targets beginners looking to point-and-click their way through analyses. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and even ChromeOS.