IS 6363: Digital Forensics - Systematic Literature Review (Choo)

Literature review is a comprehensive summary of previous research on a topic. Literature review may be included as part of a research article; or an entire article may be literature review of previously published research. Such articles typically include "review" or "survey" in the title.

This article provides a good overview of a literature review process applicable across disciplines.

Systematic (literature) review is an in-depth, structured literature review designed to answer a specific question. It originated in healthcare and medical evidence-based practice, but systematic reviews have been gaining popularity in other disciplines, including computer science.

Systematic reviews summarize and evaluate the research on a specific topic:

•   Identify relations, contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies
•   Compare studies in terms of assumptions about the research question, experimental method, data analysis, and any conclusions drawn           
•   Inform areas of future research and practice

This table is a derivative of a poster by Lynn Kysh developed for medical libraries:

• Formulate clearly defined question

  • Find existing reviews of your topic/domain to identify gaps and avoid repetition of previous work. You may add review, survey, "systematic review" to your topic search
  • Example: What current research techniques have emerged in regards to IoT applications and approaches in the last decade?

• Develop keywords

  • Example:  digital forensic investigations of internet of things applications
  • Example search: (application* OR software* OR “app” OR “apps”) AND (iot OR “internet of things”) AND (forensic* OR investigat* OR crime* OR criminal*) 

•  Identify appropriate databases

• Determine other inclusion/exclusion criteria
  • Include items based on date range, methods, topic, access, etc.
  • Exclude items based on language, study type (reviews, surveys, or non-peer-reviewed), or topic

• Run searches

  • Modify search to fit database 
  • Export results to a citation manager like EndNote or Zotero
  • Combine results using a tool like Rayyan 
  • Deduplicate

• Select studies for inclusion based on pre-defined criteria
  • First by title/abstract then full text (ctrl/cmnd+f is your friend)
  • Evaluate bias

• Present and summarize findings 
  • Including detailed search methods and selection criteria

REMINDER:  You may find examples of systematic review and literature review articles on Getting Started page.