Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Skills and Training

For postgraduate MSc. Logistics and Supply Chain Management students, searching skills are introduced as a practical activity in your Research Methods module, ENG7142

Example literature reviews are included in a special issue (48/8 from 2018) of the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management (IJPDLM). Hochrein et al. (2015) reviewed 121 literature reviews in supply chain management providing a list of lessons learned in Section 5 of the article.

Recent reviews in supply chain management (Liao et al., 2023; Rossini et al., 2023; Taj et al., 2023) adopt the processes of Tranfield et al. (2003) or Briner and Denyer (2012) in producing their literature reviews. Some systematic literature reviews in management have started to follow the advice in Sauer and Seurer (2023) who took the advice from 13 previous guidelines and synthesised this into six stages and 14 decisions.

Their six stages in the systematic literature review process are:

1. Defining the research question

• Specify the research gap and research question(s).
• Opt for a theoretical approach (inductive, abductive or deductive).
• Define the core theoretical framework and constructs.

2. Determine the required characteristics of primary studies

• Specify inclusion and exclusion criteria.

3. Retrieve a sample of potentially relevant literature

• Defining sources and databases used.
• Defining search terms and crafting a search string.

4. Select the pertinent literature

• Including and excluding studies for further analysis and synthesis.

5. Synthesizing the literature

• Select a data extraction tool.
• Coding against pre-defined constructs.
• Ensuring validity and reliability.

6. Reporting the results (as specified in the assignment brief)