Please note: The content in this guide echoes and builds upon the resources and text shared in Systematic Reviews in Healthcare: An Introductory Guide. Thank you to that guide's creators, Christina Wissinger and Kathleen Phillips, for the opportunity to re-use and build upon their content.
A systematic review is a comprehensive analysis of all known evidence on a given subject. In the words of Siddaway, Wood, and Hedges (2019), systematic reviews are "methodical, comprehensive, transparent, and replicable." Conducted in a highly rigorous manner, sometimes for publication in scholarly venues, they are more involved than the literature searching that students usually conduct in preparation for writing course papers. In the social sciences, systematic reviews typically include the following elements:
Kogut, A., Foster, M., Ramirez, D., & Xiao, D. (2019). Critical Appraisal of Mathematics Education Systematic Review Search Methods: Implications for Social Sciences Librarians. College & Research Libraries, 80(7), 973–995. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.80.7.973