Thoughts about systematic literature reviews

Some time ago, I had posted a two-piece item about systematic literature reviews.
Then came the following comment by sebastian:

... I think you are discussing here planning vs. intuition. Your way of approaching the literature review is intuition. Kai is planning. Personally, I think both ways will lead to success as long as you have some checks to make sure you are on the right way.

Yeah, I will have to agree on this one, since I have been doing literatire reviews for 18 months now. The only problem is that I still think that at least one single strong systematic literature review, which is carefully planned (i.e. choices of selected literature can be justified by more than intuition, relationship to other works, relevance for the tackled topic, celebrity of the working group, recency, impact factor, kind of publication, signification of results, et...) is necessary, at one stage or the other in a PhD. The reason for this is simple, it is easier from the researcher's perspective to make a clear map of the literature when usiny a systematic approach, the complexity can then be gradually increased. It can also help spare some analysis time, since comparison dimensions are known and well-understood. The intuition-based version, requires the ability of dealing with a huge amount of information, and still keeping a clear view on the massed of information, without loosing track of the real aim of the literature review. It is the hardest variant and I would say the most dangerous. In short, intuition is extremely important in research, and most often works best, every researcher will tell you this. Systematic literature review is a top down approach where the "publication population" for a certain topic is analyzed before publications are selected, and the more intuition based one is rather bottom-up, since the classification and analysis of the literature is done based on the already selected literature. The question is whether these two approaches always bring the same results? No way to tell this for sure. But we shouldn't forget that the real goal is to make good research, to reach new goals, not to make a perfectly written literature review.

Marwane El Kharbili

Finn by Jon Clinch

I bet most of today's generation have at least one common point with generations before them. The stories and adventures of Huckleberry Finn (in the same way as tom sawyer accompanied many hours of my life) have transcended years and the book is one of these master pieces that belong to human genius. Mark Twain seemed as if he could read my mind more than a hundred years before my birth. The anger, hardness, sometimes sweet sadness and invincible spirit of freedom that flows through a child's veins sitting in the garden of his parents' house in morocco, under this beautiful eternal sun and that soooo blue sky or my dear country, are transmitted to him by a man who lived long before in a country far to the west, far far away to a child's mind.

Well, have you ever wondered what is the story behind this dark and mysterious figure of Mr. Finn, Huckleberry's father? The name of this man used to awake deep rage and fear at the same time as I was a child. But I guess I have to thank this character because he certainly helped me get under the skin of Huckleberry and intensely live his adventures as if they were mine. Jon Clinch offers us one door into the soul of this unforgettable character, that is of Finn. Jon Clinch published a book, entitled "Finn" that tells the story of Huckleberry's father, grand-father, uncle, and Finn's mistress. Even the young Huck is depicted as a child in all its complexity, just opening up and facing a full-of-fear and ugly world.

This book transports the one who still have some small piece of Huckleberry Finn in themselves into the intrigues, violent and dangerous life stories taking place near an ever-present and silent Mississippi. The book is already on my book shelf, in my virtual shelfari library.

You can check the website for the book here. You will get much information about Huckleberry, Mark Twain, about the book itself and the author Jon Clich.

Marwane El Kharbili.