Book Review: Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review

Book Review
Booth, A., Papaioannou, D.; and Sutton, A. Systematic
Approaches to a Successful Literature Review. London:
Sage Publications, 2012. ISBN: 9780857021359; 279 p.
Somsak Sriborisutsakul

As an advisor for Library and Information Science masters students, one of essential
tasks I have never forgotten is to suggest my advisees reviewing some relevant literature and
previous studies while managing their dissertation projects. This review process seems to be
iterative rather than linear in nature. There are at least four benefits we gain from conducting
such a literature review. They are as follows:
1) The relevant literature is compared to core information resources that students can
use them to find research gaps and generate sound research questions when developing
dissertation proposals.
2) The knowledge found from prior work helps the students reasonably create testable
hypotheses for quantitative research as well as theoretical frameworks for qualitative inquiry.
3) The previous studies guide the students to choose and design their suitable modes
of gathering data and methods of analysing evidence.
4) Some findings from the relevant literature can be used to confirm or contrast with
current research results obtained by the students.
Unfortunately, we cannot fully get the above-mentioned advantages if we still have
kept doing our review of literature without explaining readers how we find, select, and apply
these pieces of literature to our research. The conventional approach has been questioned in

Assistant professor at Department of Library Science, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

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relation to its quality of conduct and quality of reporting. In other words, undertaking a
traditional or narrative review may not be sufficient for making our work look transparent and
rigorous. Nowadays, we should urge our students to employ systematic approaches while
assessing their sought literature. Reviewing previous studies systematically, however, is not
easy in reality. Newly minted researchers need some helpful books that they can easily follow
steps-by-steps when doing an exhaustive literature review. One of the few books I want to
recommend for this purpose is Booth, Papaioannou, and Suttons work Systematic Approaches
to a Successful Literature Review published by Sage Publications. Andrew Booth, an author of
this book, just received the Scan Award 2012/13 winners from Library and Information Research
Group Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the United Kingdom
anyway.
In terms of the contents, this book is divided into 10 chapters and each chapter
consists of its learning objectives, key messages summarised in boxes, many word tables,
reflection points, applications of what readers have learnt, key learning points, suggestions for
further readings, and endnote references.
Chapter 1 - The Literature Review: Its Role within Research
Chapter 2 - Systematic Approaches to the Literature
Chapter 3 - Planning and Writing a Literature Review
Chapter 4 - Defining the Scope
Chapter 5 - Searching the Literature
Chapter 6 - Assessing the Evidence Base
Chapter 7 - Synthesising Included Studies
Chapter 8 - Analysing the Findings
Chapter 9 - Writing up and Presenting Data
Chapter 10 - Managing the Literature Project
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Book Review: Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review

At the end of Chapter 2- Chapter 10 offers exercises that the readers can use them to
test their self-understanding of learning points. The Sage Publications builds the books website
(www.sagepub.co.uk/booth) on which 15 page-solutions to these exercises can be found. There
is also a supplement to this book containing a webography, a glossary, and a subject index.
If we consider many systematic books published in the current market, some of them
always rely on Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions in Health Care
(2008). Sometimes they provide many complicated review techniques in connection with
evidence-based synthesis (see Petticrew & Roberts 2005), or meta-analysis (see Cooper 2010),
that can be seen as one of research methods. It must be experienced investigators who can
absorb such advanced knowledge and seriously follow standardised instructions.
Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review, in contrast, is appropriate
for beginners who want to transform the process of doing literature review into a clear-validtransparent way. The authors simply explain the process of doing 14 types of literature reviews,
e.g. critical review, scoping review, integrative review and mapping review. There are also
several systematic approaches useful for applying to the review process. Readers, therefore,
should decide from the outset what type of the literature review they really want to conduct.
After making this decision, they can choose some suitable approaches that enable them to
systematically search prior knowledge, assess empirical evidence, synthesise relevant work,
analyse previous results, and presenting data of their own literature projects. The following
examples are interesting exhaustive approaches in use.
Construct a review protocol as a framework to define the scope of the
literature project
Design a search strategy for searching information resources
Choose a quality assessment tool appropriate for evaluating the information
resources in hand
Apply either qualitative or quantitative or both strategies for synthesising the
chosen evidence
Produce a plan for analysing review findings
Consider a method for data presentation of the literature project

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According to the authors of this book, all literature reviews, in essence, can be
comprehensive by keeping a certain review question, describing methods of locating previous
studies, proposing explicit criteria for including and excluding relevant literature, and
evaluating the quality of the selected studies. We can add such values to every type of
literature reviews we are doing with systematic approaches even if our reviews are not called
Systematic Review.

-------------------------------------References
Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons,
2008.
Cooper, H. Research Synthesis and Meta-Analysis. 4th ed. Los Angeles: Sage Publications,
2010.
Petticrew, M. & Roberts, H. Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.

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