Imperative of Systematic Literature Review in Academic Research: A Paradigm Shift

Abstract

Systematic literature review in contemporary academic research has come to define the significance of knowledge production and expansion within the framework of body of literature. Although review of literature has been a long existing intellectual enterprise, considering its imperatives in gaps identification for proper articulation of research problem, its modern methodology has been scarcely known to researchers. This is because only few literature focuses on the exposition of systematic review of literature. This results in difficulties of novice researchers to discover knowledge gaps and to embrace modern tools, methods and techniques in conducting literature review. Based on this therefore, this paper adds to the few existing literature of systematic review by looking at its imperative to academic research and the shift in paradigmatic approach. It is based on conceptually qualitative methodology using inclusion-exclusion strategy for literature searching and synthesis. The paper argues that systematic literature review marks a point of departure from the traditional or narrative literature review. Even though both the two approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, synthesising their strengths in systematic stages and steps is the focus of this paper.