Should My Review Be Systematised? And What Is That, Anyway?
I came across an interesting example of a literature review the other day and thought it was worth sharing. The review was in a paper by Glowacki and colleagues (2020)*, who were reporting on a study to see if a series of grant writing workshops run with academic staff had actually increased the number of successful grant applications. What caught my eye was that the review was systematised . So what is that and why is it important if you are grappling with a literature review, or helping someone else grapple with one? To answer that, I need to back up a few steps and explain systematic review studies . If you are doing a qualitative systematic review study, or its quantitative counterpart, a meta-analysis, you are essentially doing a study of studies. That is, you have a research question you want to answer, but instead of interviewing people or running an experiment or analysing a corpus of newspaper articles (or social media posts or whatever), you locat...