Step 1: Problem formulation¶

Literature reviews begin with the problem formulation step in which reviewers specify the objective, the review type, and the plans for how the review team will conduct the review. This step may be informal and evolve throughout the review process, or be more formal.

Literature review guidelines emphasize the pluralism of review types and methods, suggesting that the objectives and the review types, as well as the subsequent choices, should be selected carefully to ensure methodological coherence. To accomplish this, it is recommended to familiarize with the different genres and types of reviews:

Genre of review	Review types
Describing	Descriptive review, Narrative review
Understanding	Scoping review, Critical review
Explaining	Theoretical review, Realist review
Testing	Qualitative systematic review, Meta-analysis, Umbrella review

Once the initial objectives and review type are specified, the CoLRev project can be initialized using the colrev init operation and shared with the team.

In most cases, activities related to the problem formulation step will continue after initializing the repository. The specification of plans for the review project may lead to the development of a review protocol. As a best practice recommendation, we suggest to keep notes on the review objective, review type etc. in the data/paper.md file. This document may also serve as the review protocol and evolve into the final review manuscript. Review protocols often involve the following:

Refining the review objectives and the characteristics of the review
Defining focal concepts of the review
Identifying prior (related) reviews to justify the need for a new review paper, inform methodological choices, such as the search terms and databases to be covered, and add their samples to the review project
Developing a search strategy and testing it
Specifying screening criteria
Anticipating extected results and potential limitations

Operations

colrev init