A systematic review aims to identify as much of the research relating to a specific research question. Explicit search methods are used to identify research. Originally, developed within the field of medical and health sciences, systematic reviews are increasingly being produced within the field of business and management.  The Cochrane Collaboration, a well-respected producer of systematic reviews within the field of medicine, provides a definition: 

"A systematic review attempts to collate all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria in order to answer a specific research question.  It  uses explicit, systematic methods that are selected with a view to minimizing bias, thus providing more reliable findings from which conclusions can be drawn and decisions made (Higgins et al., 2019: 4)."

• A clearly stated set of objectives with pre-defined eligibility criteria for studies;
• An explicit, reproducible methodology;
• A systematic search that attempts to identity all studies that meet the eligibility criteria;
• An assessment of the validity of the findings of the included studies, for example through the assessment of risk of bias; and
• A systematic presentation, and synthesis, of the characteristics and findings of the included studies.

It is worthwhile noting that these reviews “should be undertaken by a team” (Higgins et al., 2019: 5) and “the time required...is often more than two years” (Higgins et al., 2019:xxv). In business and management, you are likely to be completing a literature review as part of your undergraduate dissertation or postgraduate module and this literature review is likely to be undertaken in a systematic way rather than completing a systematic literature review.

Systematic and literature reviews are often confused. Though both provide provide a summary of the existing literature on a topic, there are significant differences between the two.  Grant and Booth (2009) provided a comparison of 14 review types, from systematic to narrative with variants on these in-between. Analysis of the literature published in the decade since 2009 (Sutton et al., 2019) has identified seven family types. The table below provides an overview of some of the differences between the systematic and traditional review families: