Improving Systematic Literature Review with Automation and Bibliometrics

The foundation of a good research paper is the literature review. But with the vast amount of research papers available today it has become more challenging to search and screen for appropriate papers to include in the review. This paper has analyzed different approaches to a literature review and explains the evolution from the traditional literature review to a more modern systematic literature review. The systematic literature review (SLR) can be classified into four key stages: Planning, Conducting, Analysis & Synthesis, and Reporting. The purpose of this paper is to propose a modified SLR process that includes automation and bibliometrics. Automation is a method that can operationalize the manual tasks of the SLR by using specific tools and computer systems. Bibliometrics is a method to analyze the bibliographic data of published literature to provide an overview of the body of knowledge for a given field of inquiry. The proposed modified SLR process improves the previous versions that rely only on manual search and extraction, by combining the strength of both methods and integrating them into the stages of the SLR process. This addition to the traditional SLR will facilitate the process to produce a faster and more effective Literature review.