methodology AND RESEARCH
PROTOCOL
\label{methodology-and-research-protocol}
A systematic literature review aims to report the state of the art of a
particular field of knowledge (Rowley and Slack, 2004). Along these
lines, it requires the use of systematic procedures for a higher data
reliability (Cook et al., 1997; Bereton et al., 2007),
which must follow well-defined protocols to locate existing studies,
select and evaluate the contributions, then analyze, synthesize the data
and present the main findings. This intend to obtain a clear and an
objective conclusion about ”what is” and ”what is not” known in a
particular sphere of knowledge (Tranfield et al., 2003; Cook, Mulrow and
Haynes, 1997). (Thomé et al., 2016) highlight that a systematic
literature review is an important research effort by itself and it is
not just a review of past publications.
In order to reach the appropriated results, (Tranfield et al., 2003)
point out a division of the systematic review in three phases: (1)
Planning; (2) Realization and (3) Communication and presentation.
According to (Oliveira et al., 2015a), the planning activity consists
of: (i) identifying the need for revision; (ii) elaborating the proposal
for revision and (iii) developing the protocol of the review. The review
activity itself (realization) should be divided into four stages: (i)
identifying, selection and inclusion of papers; (ii) evaluating the
selected papers; (iii) extracting data and information and (iv)
synthesizing data. Finally, the communication and presentation activity
is subdivided into: (1) preparing the reports and (ii) presenting the
results (Oliveira et al., 2015a). The present paper adopted the
procedure for systematic literature review proposed by (Oliveira et al.,
2015a), as illustrated in Figure 1.