Systematic Reviews in the Engineering Literature: A Scoping Review

A systematic review is a specialized type of literature review used to collect and synthesize all the available evidence related to a research question. The methods for systematic reviews should be transparent and reproducible so that other researchers can use, replicate, and build upon the findings. Systematic reviews have been published for decades in medical literature where it is necessary to bring together all the studies related to a particular disease or condition for healthcare professionals to make evidence-based recommendations. Conducting systematic reviews has expanded to other disciplines, including education, business, and engineering. The authors of this study conducted a scoping review to investigate how prevalent systematic reviews are in engineering and to what extent engineering authors are following published reporting guidelines. To conduct this study, the authors searched the databases Compendex, Inspec, and ERIC and retrieved 11,588 records. After removing duplicates and applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 3,066 articles remained in the final data set. The authors then used a checklist of bibliographic and quality-related items to extract data from each of these studies. The findings show that systematic reviews are a popular and rapidly growing methodology in engineering, internationally, but the quality of the studies, in terms of how authors construct and report their methods, is often low, resulting in many studies that are irreproducible and may fall short of the goal of gathering all the available evidence on a topic. The authors include recommendations for engineering authors, higher education administrators, and publishers.