How To Do Literature Reviews: Systematic, Bibliometric and LLM-based Approaches (2026 DSS)

About

This intensive doctoral course equips researchers with cutting-edge methodologies for conducting literature reviews in management studies. The course integrates four complementary approaches: systematic reviews, bibliometric analysis, topic modeling, and LLM-based methods. The course is delivered through a combination of lectures, discussions, and hands-on workshops.

Systematic Literature Reviews provide a structured, transparent framework for identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing research evidence. Participants will learn established protocols for conducting systematic reviews, including defining research questions, developing search strategies, applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, and synthesizing findings. This methodological foundation ensures reproducibility and minimizes bias in literature selection and interpretation.

Bibliometric Methods leverage citation patterns as measures of scholarly communication and intellectual influence. By aggregating and analyzing citation data from publications within specific fields, researchers can construct literature reviews grounded in the collective judgments of the scholarly community as expressed through citation practices. The course covers key bibliometric techniques including co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, citation context analysis and historiographic mapping. These quantitative approaches introduce empirical rigor and reveal the intellectual structure of research domains, identifying foundational works, emerging trends, and theoretical evolution.

Topic Modeling and LLM-Based Approaches harness advanced computational methods to analyze vast textual corpora that would be infeasible to process manually. Traditional topic modeling techniques (Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), STM, BERTopic) function analogously to principal component analysis for text data, extracting latent thematic structures from document collections. More recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for literature synthesis, enabling sophisticated coding, summarization, and information extraction across large bodies of scholarly work. These methods are valuable not only for literature reviews but also for analyzing diverse textual data including organizational documents, social media content, and media coverage. As these approaches remain relatively novel in management and economics research, mastering them provides scholars with a distinctive methodological advantage.

Participants will explore intermediate and innovative applications that extend beyond basic implementation of these methods. The course addresses critical issues including: integrating multiple methodological approaches within a coherent literature review framework; translating quantitative findings into theoretical contributions; navigating the publication process for reviews employing these methods; and evaluating the strengths, limitations, and appropriate contexts for each approach.

Course leader

Ivan Zupic, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom

Target group

The Doctoral Summer School online courses are aimed at doctoral students, post-docs, academics and professionals from different fields and from all over the world.

Fee info