Systematic Review – Interim Findings

The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is being conducted to the schema provided by the NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/report4.htm. The first stage of the review comprised establishing the review protocol, piloting search strategies, setting up an Access database for data extraction and analysis and an Endnote library to manage the references. The Access database includes fields for: characterising the literature, e.g. date, author sector type, country (author); weighting the quality of the items, i.e. resource type, approach/study type, reviewer evaluation; identifying the aspect covered, e.g. model for ERM, functional requirements; summary section for detailed input.

Searches have been carried out on computerised databases covering the information/records management (LISA) and business (EBSCO, ISI) literature, obtaining 795, 271 and 214 references respectively (after rejection of false hits (1,637) and duplicates (99)) - a total of 1,280 items. A sample of 50 items was reviewed independently by the three reviewers on the project team and demonstrated adequate consistency in selection and extraction. Continual discussion about interpretation and use of a criteria definition log maintains this consistency. To date ~35% (n=451) of the references have been reviewed, with a selection rate of ~50% for data extraction. At this rate data will be extracted from approx. 640 items (mostly journal articles). A later phase of the review will cover the grey literature.

Interim quantitative and qualitative analyses were presented to the Expert Panel meeting, and have been made publicly available on the project Website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/slr/?view=Standard. The quantitative analysis described the characteristics of the literature; the qualitative analysis looked at the critical success factors for the implementation of electronic records management systems (ERMS) in organisations.