The Literature Review Seminar - HWR-2025

	Information for participants
👨‍🏫 Instructor	Prof. Dr. Gerit Wagner
📅 Date	2025-06-20, 10.15 - 14.00
📍 Location	HWR Campus Schöneberg, Raum B 5.12
👥 Group	About 10-15 participants
✅ Register	Let’s meet

Summary

The Literature Review Seminar is designed to equip participants with the knowledge and skills to conduct rigorous and impactful standalone literature reviews. Through two in-person sessions, we will explore the diversity of literature review methodologies, key process steps, and the qualities that make high-quality review papers stand out.

Literature reviews play a crucial role in information systems research, serving as a foundation for theory development, empirical synthesis, and knowledge development. Many influential theories, such as Media Synchronicity Theory, the IT Business Value Model, and CARE Theory, have emerged from well-executed review and theory development papers. Similarly, meta-analyses, as a distinct form of review, allow researchers to systematically aggregate findings from multiple empirical studies, uncover biases, and provide evidence-based recommendations for both scholars and practitioners. Despite their importance, doctoral students often face challenges in crafting high-quality literature reviews—simplistic systematic reviews or Webster & Watson-style reviews are frequently rejected by top-tier journals due to a lack of clear contribution, fit, or methodological nuance. This seminar aims to address these challenges by equipping participants with a comprehensive understanding of literature review types, methodological rigor, and the expectations of leading IS journals. Drawing inspiration from Guy Paré’s Literature Review Seminar—a well-established course at HEC Montréal and McGill University—this seminar offers a structured approach to developing impactful review papers that contribute meaningfully to academic research.

The learning objectives of the seminar are to

Understand the methodological pluralism within the genre of literature reviews,
Plan, and adapt the process steps to the objectives of the review,
Discuss the quality of literature reviews across various dimensions, and
Select appropriate software for the implementation.

Part 1: Goals and Types of Reviews

The first part focuses on the types and goals of literature reviews, emphasizing methodological pluralism and the diverse purposes that reviews serve in research. It introduces different forms of literature reviews, such as standalone review papers, background sections in empirical studies, funding proposals, and Ph.D. theses, with a particular focus on standalone reviews as independent contributions to knowledge synthesis. The session distinguishes review goals—describing, understanding, explaining, and theory testing (Rowe, 2014)—and aligns them with different review types as classified by Paré et al. (2015). These include narrative, scoping, systematic, meta-analytic, and hybrid reviews, each serving distinct research needs. To differentiate review approaches, the seminar introduces Cooper’s (1988) taxonomy of review dimensions, such as focus, goals, organization, perspective, and audience, helping participants critically assess how reviews vary in their methodology and intended contribution. The session encourages participants to engage with these distinctions through classification exercises, refining their understanding of how different review types align with specific research objectives.

Part 2: Steps of the Review Process

The second part focuses on the steps of the literature review process, emphasizing key methodological choices at each stage. It introduces different frameworks for structuring a review, including the hermeneutic approach (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2014) and systematic guidelines (Okoli, 2015; Templier & Paré, 2018). The session outlines the generic steps of literature reviews, such as problem formulation, literature search, screening, quality assessment, data extraction, and data analysis, while highlighting that the sequence and nature of these steps vary depending on the review type. Participants explore different search strategies, including database searches, citation searches, and snowballing, and engage with search evaluation metrics (e.g., recall, precision). The seminar also covers screening protocols, inter-rater reliability, and reporting guidelines like PRISMA, providing a structured approach to selecting relevant literature. Finally, data analysis techniques, ranging from quantitative meta-analyses to qualitative coding approaches like the Gioia method, are introduced to help synthesize findings. Through interactive exercises, participants critically evaluate search strategies and data extraction methods, refining their ability to conduct systematic and transparent literature reviews.

Materials

Materials will be updated.

Session	HTML Slides	PDF Slides
Goals
Steps

About the Instructor

Gerit Wagner is an assistant professor at the University of Bamberg. Until 2023, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at HEC Montréal, working on various literature review topics with Guy Paré. During this time, Gerit served as a teaching assistant for the literature review seminar. The seminar is offered for Ph.D. students from HEC Montréal, McGill University, Concordia University, and Université de Montréal a Québec. It brings together students from Information Systems, Organizational Behavior, International Management, Marketing, Finance, and Operations Research. Several of the review projects initiated in these seminars were published in reputable journals and conferences. The goal is to draw inspiration from this example, and to offer a literature review seminar that serves as a springboard for high-quality review papers.

Gerit is an active researcher in the field of Information Systems, with a focus on literature reviews and methodology. He regularly contributes to the scientific discourse on literature reviews, and his work has been published in journals like the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, the Journal of Information Technology, Information & Management, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and The Lancet Digital Health. His work on the use of AI in the conduct of literature reviews was recently awarded with the JIT Best Paper Prize in 2023. Gerit has led the DFG-funded project named EPIQUALIS (Epistemological Advances Through Qualitative Literature Reviews in Information Systems Research), and currently serves as an associate editor for the Communications of the Association for Information Systems, and the International Conference on Information Systems (focusing on literature review methods). He is the lead developer for open-source literature review software such as CoLRev, BibDedupe, and SearchQuery.