Enriching Literature Reviews with Computer-Assisted Research Mining. Case: Profiling Group Support Systems Research

Johanna Bragge1, Sami Relander1, Anne Sunikka1 and Petri Mannonen2

1Helsinki School of Economics, 2Helsinki University of Technology

1firstname.lastname@hse.fi; 2firstname.lastname@soberit.hut.fi

1. Introduction

The literature review is a key concept within the scientific process of publishing academic research

articles. Here, we assume familiarity with the issue, which according to Hart [1, p. 13] is simply about

selecting “available documents on the topic written from a particular standpoint to fulfill certain aims or express certain views on the nature of the topic and how it is to be investigated, and the effective

evaluation of these documents in relation to the research being proposed.” In addition, to augment this

definition, Webster and Watson [2] state that a good, high-quality literature review is complete and focuses on concepts, not on authors. The literature review has many functions, perhaps the most notable of which is that it positions the study in question within an existing stream or body of

literature and demonstrates that the author is familiar with the most important prior works related to his or her field. Additionally, it shows that the author can synthesize and link existing works in a meaningful way to yield new insights and open research gaps. The literature review is thus a standard section in every research article, and its length is determined on the purpose of the article: from one chapter to whole stateof- the-art review articles with extended length. The former ones are by far the most common, especially in information systems research, which is a relatively young and multidisciplinary field, thus adding complexities to assembling thorough reviews.

With the advent of various online journal databases, the amount of literature at the fingertips of researchers has exploded. As a result, the classic literature review has had to adapt to accommodate these changes. No longer is the task about retrieving selected hard copies from the library, but more about mastering various search engines and indexes that categorize papers.

Recently, the literature review concept has received increased attention due to these technological changes and developments. Insightful text mining and information visualization tools are being developed to help the researcher in profiling, mapping and visualizing knowledge domains [3, 4]. Some of these tools are designed for fielded research abstracts imported from scientific databases, and some tools transform free form text into data that can be analyzed for information extraction [see e.g. 5 for a list].

Building on from the current state of affairs regarding the literature review and the issues it

presents, we have a twofold objective. Firstly, we seek to argue for an extension to the traditional notion of a literature review into the research profiling approach as initially presented by Porter and his colleagues [4]. This is an interesting new direction with potential to overcome at least some of the main challenges and pressures we face regarding the literature review and its place within research. The emphasis is not so much on a bibliometric perspective (statistics related to the production, distribution and usage of documents [6]), but more on the viewpoint of how to actively use

research profiling to uncover research gaps and/or new, emergent scientific domains by focusing on the content of prior articles. This should aid researchers to position the literature review away from a mere passive tool to an active means of generating and refining new ideas and concepts on which to conduct research.

Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07)

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