A methodological quest for systematic literature mapping

Abstract

This article develops an approach to systematic literature mapping that can contribute to advancing housing knowledge and theory in three ways. At a basic level, it informs more systematic, balanced and transparent literature reviews than currently performed in housing studies. As a self-contained project, it unravels research gaps, highlights where rich evidence already exists, and indicates changing conceptual approaches. Lastly, as an opening stage to evidence reviews, it informs the review’s questions, directions and dimensions. Our approach to literature mapping systematically identifies and explores a comprehensive but non-exhaustive literature related to a broad academic or policy theme. We have adapted established methodological approaches from systematic reviews to our much broader aims and shorter timeframe. By reflecting on five projects, we detail the methodological process so that it could be replicated or adapted in future studies. Besides reflecting on the systematic and less biased retrieval of relevant literature – pertinent to any academic project – we present insights into synthesising its temporal, geographical, conceptual and thematic trends. We also reflect on some inevitable methodological challenges faced in this process of translation of aims into the narration of findings, which have a wider currency across the social sciences.

Keywords:

• Housing
• literature review
• mapping review
• systematic map
• methodology

Acknowledgement

We thank Chris Harkins (the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, University of Glasgow), Jenny Wood (Herriot-Watt University) and Peter Mackie (Cardiff University) for sharing with us the detailed methodological journeys of the evidence reviews they (co)authored; and the two peer reviewers for their supportive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Search performed on 5 December 2018, excluding patents and citations.

2 ‘Sustainable city’, ‘eco city’, ‘low carbon city’, ‘liveable city’, ‘green city’, ‘smart city’, ‘digital city’, ubiquitous city’, intelligent city’, ‘information city’, ‘knowledge city’ and ‘resilient city’.

3 For example, ‘slim city’, ‘creative city’, ‘transition town’ and ‘compact city’.

4 In ‘policy transfer’ where English restrictions were not used, searches returned a few non-English articles which were published with an English abstract.

5 Overlapping is search through the Boolean operator AND, e.g., (“policy transfer” AND “policy diffusion”) and exclusivity through the Boolean operators AND NOT, e.g., (“policy transfer” AND NOT “policy diffusion”).

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation [grant number ES/P008852/1].