Writing Qualitative IS Literature Reviews—Guidelines for Synthesis, Interpretation, and Guidance of Research

Abstract

The literature review is an established research genre in many academic disciplines, including the IS discipline. Although many scholars agree that systematic literature reviews should be rigorous, few instructional texts for compiling a solid literature review, at least with regard to the IS discipline, exist. In response to this shortage, in this tutorial, I provide practical guidance for both students and researchers in the IS community who want to methodologically conduct qualitative literature reviews. The tutorial differs from other instructional texts in two regards. First, in contrast to most textbooks, I cover not only searching and synthesizing the literature but also the challenging tasks of framing the literature review, interpreting research findings, and proposing research paths. Second, I draw on other texts that provide guidelines for writing literature reviews in the IS discipline but use many examples of published literature reviews. I use an integrated example of a literature review, which guides the reader through the overall process of compiling a literature review.

Research streams on digital transformation from a holistic business perspective: a systematic literature review and citation network analysis

“…The importance and potential of reviews have increased across all academic disciplines (Schryen 2015). To gain an overall understanding, a literature review in the sense of a state of the art has many benefits.…”

“…The different compositions of terms were searched in title, keywords or abstracts by using the field 'topic'. WoS is considered the most comprehensive database and is frequently used in management and IS research (Dahlander and Gann 2010;Schryen 2015;Mian et al 2016;Albort-Morant and Ribeiro-Soriano 2016). We conducted the search by November 2017 and decided to limit the search period to the last 20 years because DT as used for the purpose of this article (described in the theoretical foundation) emerged as a topic in the 2000's.…”

“…Scopus and EBSCO). However, WoS is considered the most comprehensive database and is thus frequently used in management and IS research (Schryen 2015). Another limitation lies in the definition of the research objectives and selection terms.…”

Agile Development of a Flipped Classroom Course

“…This model was then applied in a case study. The literature review and its phases search and assessment, interpretation, synthesis, guidance and conclusion [15] build the basis of our work. While the search and assessment process are explained below and outlined in Fig.…”

A text mining and topic modelling perspective of ethnic marketing research

“…Importantly, complementing text mining with a literature synthesis condenses the body of knowledge into a manageable format that enables critical interpretation. This makes it more suitable to drive a critical discussion on the summarized literature, and to unveil insights on the subject under study (Schryen, 2015).…”