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.