Using Litmaps for Systematic Review
How Litmaps can – and maybe should – be a part of your systematic literature review process.
Foreword:
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We've been asked a few times recently about how Litmaps can be used within a systematic literature review. Our answer is a little complicated: you may not be allowed to, but we think it's absolutely essential that you do!
Today we'll unpack systematic reviews – what they are, their challenges, and how Litmaps fits into the literature collecting process.
TLDR
Litmaps Discover can be a critical part of your systematic literature review review
Use Litmaps as an initial paper collection tool; be sure to record your input metadata (seed, collection papers inputted, etc.)
Litmaps can be an invaluable final sense-check to see if anything was missing
Reproducibility issues are common in systematic review; consult recommended guidelines like AMSTAR
Systematic reviews tackle a specific research question using existing literature, and are careful to collect papers in a transparent and reproducible fashion. They’re critical in medicine where they help guide clinical decision makers. Although these reviews provide key insights by aggregating knowledge, they’re not without flaw.
Systematic reviews are prone to dozens of issues. They may fail to report search strategy for how the literature was collected, used irreproducible methods, or lack reasons why certain eligible studies were excluded. Guidelines for creating systematic reviews do exist (e.g. AMSTAR) but they don’t seem to be enough. In a recent review of systematic reviews (which is pretty meta, although not technically a meta-review), Dr. Lesley Uttley and her colleagues found critical issues in hundreds of systematic reviews.
One of these issues that Dr. Uttley found in systematic reviews is failure to report search strategy. That’s a serious issue – because the methodology behind the search is one of the key distinguishing factors of a systematic review. It’s what separates these reviews from other forms. Best practices entail recording all search metadata, like keywords and filters, and using large-scale databases directly.
However, relying only on direct lookup using targeted keywords isn’t always the best call. Searches based on references and connections between papers can help discover papers you wouldn’t otherwise find. That’s how Litmaps Discover works – although that doesn’t mean we recommend it outright for systematic reviews.
Using tools like Litmaps to aid in the literature search for systematic reviews is a balancing act. On the one hand is the need to make searches reproducible, like a set of keywords and filters on a given database. On the other hand is getting the most relevant papers for your search, especially those that may have slipped through the keyword gaps.
Check out our new guide on how to use Litmaps to support your systematic search, but not replace other means.
Resources
New guide! Systematic Reviews with Litmaps
New guide! Find Your Research Gaps in Minutes
The problems with systematic reviews: a living systematic review
From standard systematic reviews to living systematic reviews
Wonderful work! Next, please help with citation tracking and documenting the whole who-cites-who shebang. Relational databases vs. Spreadsheets? Ain't nobody got time for that.