The Literature Review Seminar (IDIS)

	Information for participants
👨‍🏫 Instructor	Prof. Dr. Gerit Wagner
📅 Date	May 16 and May 23 2025 (9.00 AM - 05.00 PM)
📍 Location	Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, WE5/05.005, Erba
👥 Group	About 10 participants from Bavarian universities
✅ Register	Send an e-mail to gerit.wagner@uni-bamberg.de by May 10
💻 Reminder	Remember to bring your laptop!

Summary

The Literature Review Seminar is designed to equip participants with the knowledge and skills to conduct rigorous and impactful standalone literature reviews. In two in-person sessions, we will explore the diversity of literature review methodologies, key steps of the process, and the qualities that make high-quality review papers stand out. Beyond the seminar, participants have the opportunity to apply their learning by developing a review protocol (3 ECTS) or a full literature review (6 ECTS) on a topic of their choice.

Literature reviews play a crucial role in Information Systems (IS) research, serving as a foundation for theory development, empirical synthesis, and knowledge development. A number of influential theories, such as Media Synchronicity Theory, the IT Business Value Model, and CARE Theory, have emerged from carefully crafted 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 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 specific learning objectives 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.

Day 1: Goals and Steps

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.

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 procedures, inter-rater reliability, and reporting guidelines like PRISMA flowcharts. 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 apply selected data extraction methods.

Day 2: Qualities and Tools

The third part explores the qualities of high-impact literature reviews, emphasizing key dimensions of quality and their relevance to different review types. The session begins with a warm-up exercise where participants identify essential factors for publishing in top-tier journals. Through exemplar studies and simulated review panels, participants analyze and evaluate review papers, identifying strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on empirical findings from Wagner et al. (2021), methodological transparency and developing a research agenda are highlighted as significantly enhancing a review’s scientific impact, while theoretical contributions remain difficult to measure systematically. The distinction between systematicity (sound execution) and transparency (explicit reporting) (Paré et al., 2016) is introduced alongside established reporting standards, such as the PRISMA checklist and Templier & Paré’s (2018) IS-specific guidelines. The session concludes with strategies for formulating a compelling research agenda, emphasizing how well-positioned, transparent, and forward-looking reviews contribute to knowledge development.

The fourth part explores different tooling approaches for literature reviews, comparing self-managed setups (reference managers, Excel, specialized tools), platform-based solutions (Covidence, LitStudy, BUHOS), and open-synthesis platforms like CoLRev, which emphasize transparency and extensibility. A live demo of CoLRev introduces its role in automating key review steps. The session also examines the potential and limitations of AI and generative AI (LLMs) in literature reviews, highlighting their usefulness in query formulation and screening while cautioning against hallucinations and inconsistent recall. The seminar concludes with guidance on assembling an effective toolkit, balancing flexibility, collaboration, and tool compatibility.

Development of the protocol or review paper

Information on the development of the protocol (3 ECTS) or review paper (6 ECTS) will be provided here.

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, Epistemological Advances Through Qualitative Literature Reviews in Information Systems Research (EPIQUALIS), and 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, including CoLRev, BibDedupe, and SearchQuery.