‘the primary purpose of the review should be to present information, rather than offer advice, the discussion and conclusions should be to help people to understand the implications of the evidence in relationship to practical decisions’.

Where consensus is considerable across the primary studies included, the review might provide relatively clear conclusions about what is known.  If, however the review identifies conflicting findings and research gaps any practical recommendations ought to be more circumspect.  

In Cochrane reviews, reviewers are encouraged to think about whether or not there is sufficient evidence to provide clear guidelines for practice by asking three questions:

• Will the practice improve outcomes?
• Should the practice be abandoned in light of the available evidence?
• Are there trade offs between known benefits and known adverse effects? 

If the review provides insufficient evidence to provide clear guidelines for practice three further questions are raised: 

• Is the practice promising but requires further evaluation?
• Does a practice that has been shown not to have the effects expected from it require further attention?
• Is there reasonable evidence that practice is not effective?

Reviewers in management and organisation studies may make similar claims.  However, since recommendations from reviews in our field are less likely to provide an estimate of the overall effect of interest it is essential that systematic review reports should provide considerable detail from the original studies so that any users of the review can, if necessary, interpret the results and judge for themselves the strength of the findings. 

The primary aim for conducting a systematic review for many researchers is to identify and justify a gap in the literature in order to position their own furture research.  Earlier we discussed the importance of positioning you research within a body of existing research in order to demonstrate that your empirical work extends the scientific knowledge base of the field of management and organisation studies. Systematic review findings can inform your future work in several ways, such as the development of theory, identification of appropriate methods, study designs, data analytic approaches, or identification of understudied and important content areas that require further literature reviewing. You should attempt to provide a specific agenda for future research based on thefindings of your review than general suggestions.

Reference