Webster & Watson MISQ 2002
Summary
This is a instructional or how-to article aimed at MIS researchers aimed at showing them how to write literature reviews. The authors, editors of the journal MISQ Theory and Review (formerly MISQ Review), cite a lack of theoretical progress in MIS as at least partly due to the dearth of literature reviews: compared to other fields, MIS had produced too few literature reviews since its beginnings. Reviews are valuable because they collect research on a topic and analyze it as a group, making sense of it by building theoretical models and offering directions for future research. Reviews thus allow researchers who read them an easy way to understand what has already been done and where valuable research could yet be done.
The article describes what kind of authors should write reviews, and details the process of writing a review from selecting a topic (interestingly, they suggest the author contact the journal before beginning to ensure that other authors are not already working on the same topic), through looking for and selecting relevant articles and how to constructing a relevant conceptual model from them, to writing a conclusion and discussion. The authors are quite specific, especially in terms of how to structure the review, and what tone and tense to use.
Critique
This article is a condensation of what Booth, Colomb and Williams write in the first half of The Craft of Research but is much more specific by localizing it to MIS research (Booth, Colomb and Williams discuss general guidelines, but seem to focus more on the humanities when giving examples or situating guidelines), especially in terms of how to structure the review, and what tone and tense to use.
I have experienced the lack of reviews directly in my own research on e-mail -- it took me four months to find any comprehensive review of the field [1], and it was really only a subset of the full field: it covers e-mail as communication tool, personal information manager, and task manager, but does not cover classification (spam, especially), security, privacy, information overload, etc.. Nonetheless, it was extremely useful to find, but was one of the few that I did find in a literature which consists of tens of thousands of papers.
References
; ; "In search of coherence: a review of e-mail research", Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 20, No. 1-2 (2005) pp. 11-48.
