Critical Realist Guide to Developing Theory with Systematic Literature Reviews (Okoli 2012)
Okoli, Chitu, A Critical Realist Guide to Developing Theory with Systematic Literature Reviews (December 13, 2012). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2115818 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2115818
While there are numerous guides on how to conduct standalone literature reviews, none specifically describes how to develop a review explicitly focused on making a theoretical contribution from a social science perspective. This article adopts a critical realist approach, which attempts to discern the latent theoretical concepts underlying apparently disparate empirical investigations to synthesize diverse yet commensurable primary studies. We describe a rigorous methodology of eight steps to conducting a systematic review (also called a systematic literature review) with a specific goal of theory landscaping, theory building or theory testing. Based on a critical realist understanding of theory, we present the distillation of theory in eight steps: specifying the purpose of the review; writing the study protocol and training the reviewers; the practical screen; the literature search; data extraction; quality appraisal; synthesis of the included studies; and writing the discussion and conclusions. This methodology is particularly tailored for information systems research, but is sufficiently general to be valuable for a wide range of social sciences.Keywords: Theory development, theory building, theory testing, systematic reviews, literature reviews, critical realism, information systems research
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