Source: Developed for this study
Extant guidelines for conducting literature reviews in various disciplines including business Snyder (2019), psychology (Baumeister & Leary, 1997), management (Tranfield, Denyer, & Smart, 2003), human resource (Torraco, 2005), medicine (Liberati et al., 2009; Wong, Greenhalgh, Westhorp, Buckingham, & Pawson, 2013), social sciences (Davis, Mengersen, Bennett, & Mazerolle, 2014), marketing (Palmatier, Houston, & Hulland, 2018), and (Onwuegbuzie & Frels, 2016). For IS, we found the works of Okoli and Schabram (2010), and Okoli (2015a). A phrase we consistently came across in literature was “comprehensive literature review”. Specifically, we were concerned about the term/concept “comprehensive”. This term seemed to be used interchangeably with “systematic”. However, they do not mean entirely the same. We perceive that in the context of narrative literature review, “comprehensive” may be the most appropriate terms whilst in systematic literature review, “exhaustive” may serve a better purpose. Unfortunately, majority of authors do not comprehensively search and synthesis extant literature, which effectively impact the generalizability of the findings of such studies. As one editor-in-chief asserts in response to a narrative review/conceptual paper we wrote: